Just some Internet guy

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • They’re just examples of things you could pipe curl into, but no not really. If the download fails you end up with an incomplete file in your tmpfs anyway, and have to retry. Another use I have is curl | mysql to restore a database backup.

    If the server supports resuming, I guess that can be better than the pipe, but that still needs temporary disk space, and downloads rarely fail. You can’t corrupt downloads over HTTPS either as the encryption layer would notice it and kill the connection, so it’s safe to assume if it downloaded in full, it’s correct.

    With downloads being IO bound these days, it’s nice to not have to read it all back and write the extracted files to disk afterwards. Only writes the final files once.

    That’s far from the weirdest thing I’ve done with pipes though, I’ve installed Windows 11 on a friend’s PC across the ocean with a curl | zstd | pv | dd, and it worked. We tried like 5 different USBs and different ISOs and I gave up, I just installed it in a VM and shipped the image.


  • I’ve had to use that flag.

    --silent is useful when you don’t want the progress bar or you’re piping curl into something else. I like to do curl | tar -zxv to download and decompress at the same time, I’ve even tar -zc | curl to upload a backup taking no disk space to do so.

    The problem however is it’s really silent: if it fails, it exits with a non-zero code and that’s it. Great when you don’t want debug info to interfere, annoying when you need to debug it.

    So you can opt-in to print some errors when in silent mode, but otherwise be silent.




  • No way. iPhones don’t exactly allow bootloader unlocking to begin with, but even if you could, it would be in no better state than Asahi on the M1 Apple computers. Every driver would have to be written from scratch.

    Pixels are a good platform for custom ROMs because until the recent drama, you could literally just build AOSP as-is and use it. So the GrapheneOS team only really need to focus on their changes to the OS and their apps and none of the drivers and modem interface and all that. That’s also why GrapheneOS runs so well on it: Google provided everything, it just works.

    iPhones would be the absolute worst phone to develop for: zero support from Apple, no drivers no documentation, no nothing. Not even a Linux kernel! At least for Android, the Linux license forces manufacturers to publish the source code, so at minimum you start with something that should boot and contain all the stuff to talk to the hardware already, just need to wire it in with userspace drivers. CPU manufacturers like Qualcomm also provide a fair chunk of the userspace drivers open-source too, so you can just pull that and have audio and video working.

    Not impossible, but definitely really hard and impractical.


  • It’ll tolerate a few hours no problem, mine’s been down for a bit over 24h and caught up fine.

    I think it marks instances as down after 2-3 days, but I’m not sure if it’ll resume once it comes back up at this point. I think if your instance reaches out it might start pushing events again but it could also result in dropping the previous days.









  • Aside from the other answers, no you can’t offload computations to memory. Memory stores data, it doesn’t compute.

    The only way having more memory can possibly improve performance, is by having a cached copy of files so they don’t have to be fetched from disk, and applications potentially caching the results of heavy but reusable computations. (Unless you run out of memory and starts spilling over to disk, then more memory will make it fast again by avoiding swapping).

    I mean I guess technically yes you could transcode into H264 into a tmpfs mount, and then play the H264, but you’re still not doing it faster and certainly not fast enough to watch in real time, you’re just decoding the AV1 well in advance before actually watching it.




  • That’s bullshit. ARM is an architecture and by itself does not specify secure boot any more than x86 does. Raspberry Pis don’t have secure boot. You can unlock the bootloader on a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and relock the bootloader just fine. Several other manufacturers allow bootloader unlocks no problem. The main reason you can’t on some popular phones is US carriers, even international Samsungs you can unlock the bootloader and flash whatever you want on it.

    I’m literally typing this comment on a phone running a custom OS (LineageOS on a OnePlus 8T). I’m literally 2 versions of Android ahead of the latest supported version. I also have a Galaxy S7 running Android 15, a phone that officially tops out at Android 8 and launched with Android 6. Both you literally just toggle the bootloader unlock option in the settings, no hacks no craziness, it’s literally a feature.

    At this point you’re just straight up making shit up.


  • That’s the whole point of enrolling your own keys in the firmware. You can even wipe the Microsoft keys if you want. You do that from the firmware setup, or within any OS while secure boot is off (such as sbctl on Linux).

    That’s a feature that is explicitly part of the spec. The expectation is you password protect the BIOS to make sure unauthorized users can’t just wipe your keys. But also most importantly that’s all measured by the TPM so the OS knows the boot chain is bad and can bail, and the TPM also won’t unwrap BitLocker/LUKS keys either.

    Secure boot is to prevent unauthorized tampering of the boot chain. It doesn’t enforce that the computer will only ever boot Microsoft-approved software, that’s a massive liability for an antitrust lawsuit.


  • As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong. I didn’t use secure boot then though so I don’t know if it would have still booted Windows. But I imagine it would.

    That said, I’ve always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don’t depend on Microsoft’s keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.