Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Cake day: 2023年10月4日

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  • The issues run deeper, Kaas Elias explained, than just these most recent cuts. “Unfortunately, the federal government has taken a step backward when it comes to public transport,” he said. For example, the Deutschlandticket for regional public transport across the country has transformed from a €9 a month COVID-19 era mega-success to €63 a month as of January 2026.

    If I remember correctly back when that was announced, and there was some discussion on Reddit about it, that was intended from the beginning to be a temporary program.

    searches

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket

    The Deutschlandticket (Deutschlandticket, lit. ‘Germany ticket’), also known as the D-Ticket, is a monthly subscription for local and regional public transport valid throughout Germany. It was introduced in May 2023 by the Scholz cabinet as the successor to the temporary 9-Euro-Ticket offered in summer 2022.

    WP says it was temporary too.


  • But will the proprietary license(s) update correctly?

    shrugs

    I couldn’t say. If licenses are tied to the computer, there are a number of ways that they could have done that.

    Unless you’re sure that they are tied to the hardware, though, may not be an issue. Like, they may phone home to some authentication server and just check for concurrent copies running with the same key or whatever.




  • I’ve never used the software package in question.

    If you already own the software, and if the hardware it uses to talk to the microcontroller is on a serial port or USB-attached serial port, then you can most-likely just run it under WINE. This isn’t a VM, but a Windows compatibility layer — you don’t need to run a copy of Windows in a VM and all that. It’d be my first shot. That way, you can just use it like any other Linux program, don’t need to blow extra memory or overhead on running Windows in a VM.

    So, say the program in question has an installer, picbasic-installer.exe.

    So you’re going to want to install WINE. I don’t use Arch, so I’ll leave that up to you, but I believe that the Arch package manager is pacman. They may have some graphical frontend that you prefer to use.

    Then go ahead and, in a virtual terminal program, invoke picbasic-installer.exe — assuming that that’s what the installer is called — under WINE:

    $ wine picbasic-installer.exe
    

    That’ll run the installer.

    Now, my guess is that that much won’t have problems. And that WINE will run the thing. And it’ll probably let you compile BASIC programs.

    You can go ahead and fire up your PICBASIC PRO program. I don’t know how you launch Windows programs in your Arch environment. In general, WINE installers will drop a .desktop file under ~/.local/share/applications, and that can be started the way any other application can. I use a launcher program, tofi, to start programs like that under sway using tofi-drun, but you probably have a completely different environment set up. My guess is that your desktop environment on Arch probably has some kind of system menu of applications or something like that that will include WINE programs with a desktop file in it. Or maybe you have some program that shows a searchable list of programs and can launch from that. KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, etc will probably all have their own routes, but I don’t use those, so I can’t tell you what they do. I’ll leave that up to you.

    What you’re likely to run into problems with is that if the PICBASIC PRO program wants to talk to that microcontroller programmer via a serial port (which on Windows would probably be COM0 or COM1 or whatever), it’s going to need to talk to /dev/ttyS0 or /dev/ttyS1 or whatever on Linux, or if it’s a USB-attached, /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, etc. Ordinary users probably don’t have permission to write directly to them, by default.

    There are a couple ways to grant permission, but one of the most-straightforward ways is to add your user to a group that has permission.

    The basic Unix file permission system has each file — including device files, like /dev/ttyS0 — owned by one user and one group.

    On my Debian trixie system:

    $ ls -l /dev/ttyS0
    crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Jan 15 20:46 /dev/ttyS0
    $
    

    So that serial port device file is owned by the user root, which has read and write privileges (the first “rw”) and the group dialout, which has read and write privileges (the second “rw”). Any user that belongs to that group will be able to write to the serial ports.

    On my system, my user doesn’t belong to the “dialout” group:

    $  groups
    tal cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev users render netdev bluetooth lpadmin scanner docker libvirt ollama systemd-journal
    $
    

    So I’m going to want to add my user to that group:

    $ sudo usermod -aG dialout tal
    $
    

    Group permissions get assigned to processes when you log in (that is, usermod just sets what groups the process started when you log in as has, and then all its child processes). Technically, you don’t have to log out to do this — you could run sg dialout at this point, and then from that shell, run wine and see if it works — but I’d probably log out and then back in again, to keep things simplest. After you do that, you should see that you’re in the “dialout” group:

    $ groups
    night_petal <list of groups> dialout
    $
    

    After that, you should be able to use the program and write code to the microcontroller.



  • Are Motorola ok?

    Depends on what you value in a phone. Like, I like a vanilla OS, a lot of memory, large battery, and a SIM slot. I don’t care much about the camera quality and don’t care at all about size and weight (in fact, if someone made a tablet-sized phone, I’d probably switch to that). That’s almost certainly not the mix that some other people want.

    There’s some phone comparison website I was using a while back that has a big database of phones and lets you compare and search based on specification.

    goes looking

    This one:

    https://www.phonearena.com/phones



  • I don’t think that memory manufacturers are in some plot to promote SaaS. It’s just that they can make a ton of money off the demand right now for AI buildout, and they’re trying to make as much money as they can in the limited window that they have. All kind of industries are going to be collateral damage for a while. Doesn’t require a more complicated explanation.

    Michael Crichton had some way of putting “it’s not about you” it in Sphere that I remember liking.

    searches

    “I’m afraid that’s true,” Norman said. “The sphere was built to test whatever intelligent life might pick it up, and we simply failed that test.”

    “Is that what you think the sphere was made for?” Harry said. “I don’t.”

    “Then what?” Norman said.

    “Well,” Harry said, “look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let’s explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you. And your last thought would be: This alien device was obviously made to test bacterial intelligence and to kill us if we make a false step.

    “Now, that would be correct from the standpoint of the dying bacterium. But that wouldn’t be correct at all from the standpoint of the beings who made the satellite. From our point of view, the communications satellite has nothing to do with intelligent bacteria. We don’t even know that there are intelligent bacteria out there. We’re just trying to communicate, and we’ve made what we consider a quite ordinary device to do it.”

    Like, two years back, there was a glut of memory in the market. Samsung was losing a lot of money. They weren’t losing money back then because they were trying to promote personal computer ownership any more than they’re trying to deter personal computer ownership in 2026. It’s just that demand can gyrate more-rapidly than production capacity can adjust.





  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30869297/difference-between-memfree-and-memavailable

    Rik van Riel’s comments when adding MemAvailable to /proc/meminfo:

    /proc/meminfo: MemAvailable: provide estimated available memory

    Many load balancing and workload placing programs check /proc/meminfo to estimate how much free memory is available. They generally do this by adding up “free” and “cached”, which was fine ten years ago, but is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong today.

    It is wrong because Cached includes memory that is not freeable as page cache, for example shared memory segments, tmpfs, and ramfs, and it does not include reclaimable slab memory, which can take up a large fraction of system memory on mostly idle systems with lots of files.

    Currently, the amount of memory that is available for a new workload, without pushing the system into swap, can be estimated from MemFree, Active(file), Inactive(file), and SReclaimable, as well as the “low” watermarks from /proc/zoneinfo.

    However, this may change in the future, and user space really should not be expected to know kernel internals to come up with an estimate for the amount of free memory.

    It is more convenient to provide such an estimate in /proc/meminfo. If things change in the future, we only have to change it in one place.

    Looking at the htop source:

    https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/blob/main/MemoryMeter.c

       /* we actually want to show "used + shared + compressed" */
       double used = this->values[MEMORY_METER_USED];
       if (isPositive(this->values[MEMORY_METER_SHARED]))
          used += this->values[MEMORY_METER_SHARED];
       if (isPositive(this->values[MEMORY_METER_COMPRESSED]))
          used += this->values[MEMORY_METER_COMPRESSED];
    
       written = Meter_humanUnit(buffer, used, size);
    

    It’s adding used, shared, and compressed memory, to get the amount actually tied up, but disregarding cached memory, which, based on the above comment, is problematic, since some of that may not actually be available for use.

    top, on the other hand, is using the kernel’s MemAvailable directly.

    https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/blob/master/src/free.c

    	printf(" %11s", scale_size(MEMINFO_GET(mem_info, MEMINFO_MEM_AVAILABLE, ul_int), args.exponent, flags & FREE_SI, flags & FREE_HUMANREADABLE));
    

    In short: You probably want to trust /proc/meminfo’s MemAvailable, (which is what top will show), and htop is probably giving a misleadingly-low number.