Cached version, while Cloudflare is down: https://archive.is/20251024040409/https://jyu.dev/blog/why-dev-null-is-an-acid-compliant-database/

Interesting topic, but the random usage of “AI” to do things because they did not want to x, followed by them doing x anyways a paragraph down was weird. Also all the xitter LinkedIn style posts and pages of slop code made it awful to read…

Maybe its also a ship of theseus type situation. If you have to copy /etc/ from somewhere else, is it still the same installation?

I know this is the wrong place to say this, but I really like the Windows Explorer. Dolphin is a good replacement, but it would be one of the few things I’d like to keep on Linux.

It definitely is/was. Most user facing software these days is a web app, or native application using JS anyways. The event loop and async programming is also ubiquitous nowadays in most languages, especially server side.

The true turing test

I’m not that deep into it and as you noticed information on the issue is sparse. My understanding is that it is not possible to get power management working for these cards (see https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html). May not seem like a big deal, but as far as I understand this means the cards are stuck in the lowest power setting i.e. perform as well as an iGPU.

And from my understanding this is forced by Nvidia because power management is disabled when loading unsigned firmware.

That is my understanding of the situation. Due to this the devs basically gave up on those cards as it is unfixable.

I am aware. Nouveau works okish with cards from the 800 series and older. It does only barely work with 900 and 1000 series cards, because of the firmware signing issue. You can check their page for compatibility information. And the new “open-source” driver only supports the RTX cards.

Nope, 900 and 1000 series have little hope of being properly supported. They require signed firmware which seems to be problem and are not new enough for the “open-source” solution from Nvidia for new cards.

I guess currently it’s a chicken and egg situation for OEMs. They can’t consider RISC-V based boards/laptops because there is no or minimal software for it. Also, porting to RISC-V can’t be that expensive of an endeavor. Most unix software is already portable.

Full disk encryption is non standard and a PITA without a secure boot chain where the disk can be unlocked by the OS itself. If you have fun tinkering with your OS go nuts, but I want something that works every time even if install it for my mom. The current distro offerings aren’t that.

No. You can edit the Kernel command line directly from GRUB before booting into anything else. That is the default behavior (with Debian).

Yes, it is more aimed towards “casual” users that want something that just works. But auto-updating policy is not really the point of the blog. Every distro is deciding that by themselves and will always be able to.

The default GRUB setup basically provides no security, even with UEFI secure boot enabled. On my default Debian install I can just edit the Kernel command line and get root without any password required. But beyond that, check out design goal 2 in this article https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html

Depends firstly what you are building. For a Node backend, it of course matters a lot. For a JS frontend you always only ship a fraction of the dependency code, so the meme doesn’t really apply. Modern JS frameworks are alright as long as you know what you are doing 🙂

Frankly, the only respectable way to do it!