If one day old tankie account says that, it must be true.

Probably not what you’re asking for, but I have an impression, that your primary motivation is curiosity and just good feeling of using the open platform, so I figured I’ll mention it.

I’m using ESP32-C3 boards with some sensors and ESPHome to monitor air quality in my house. The board is RISC-V based and can be bought for real cheap. (single digit $ price generally) ESPHome is quite easy to work with and (If you’re realistic with your expectations around very low power device) also quite powerful.

Honestly the ESPHome itself is almost too good if you’re really curious as it abstracts the differences between various boards quite well. You’re just editing a yaml file to define your desired functionality.

Even if you’re hesitant to do some soldering, you can get pretty far if you buy board and sensors with pre-soldered pins and some jumper wires.

It’s similar for Slovakia for some names:

Erik Kalinak started as social media manager for SMER (the pro-russian party that got to power recently) and is now climbing the career ladder in SMER at amazing speed quite obviously being pushed as future prominent member of the party. His uncle is Robert Kalinak - one of the founding members of SMER.

Uhrik was elected a member of the European Parliament for the far-right neo-Nazi LSNS party. Later he founded his own party, the far-right and neo-fascist Republic. This was after the head of LSNS was sentenced to four years for propagating nazism - the Republic essentially is a continuation of LSNS. Uhrik is also very anti-Ukraine from the very beginning of russian invasion. You might remember him from 1st March 2022 when he completely ignored Zelensky’s speech in European Parlament browsing his phone.

The other two names are more surprising, but mostly because they are kind of irrelevant. If russia spent any money on these two, they could as well flush it down the toilet.

Miroslav Radacovsky is pretty much nobody. I still don’t quite understand how he got elected to European Parlament. The MEP elections are very much ignored in Slovakia. People aren’t interested in participating, so the results are kind of random sadly. Anyways you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Slovakia that would be able to tell you who Radacovsky is or to tell you single member of the Slovak PATRIOT party - AFAIK they didn’t even attempt to run for a seat in 2023 elections. As you can guess they are a bit far-right, but it’s hard to tell for sure.

Jan Carnogursky is no longer active in politics for over a decade AFAIK. FWIW he expressed some support for Putin recently, which is somewhat ironic, considering he was anti-communist in Czechoslovakia and was also imprisoned by the regime. but again, these days he’s not relevant at all.

We are all unfairly and relentlessly smeared as Putinists by increasingly unpopular globalist ‘elites’; their discredited lackeys in the lying, mainstream press; and Soros-funded NGOs.

It’s uncanny how all of these putinists use the exact same language and arguments. It’s always Soros and NGOs and lying mainstream press.

Removed by mod

It’s easier to manage/secure since it’s essentially just shell scripts

I love the fact that I can’t tell whether this is irony or not.

its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Perhaps I’m misremembering things, but I’m pretty sure the SysVinit didn’t run any “more restricted processes”. It ran a bunch of bash scripts as root. Said bash scripts were often absolutely terrible.

The default tier of AWS glacier uses tape, which is why data retrieval takes a few hours from when you submit the request to when you can actually download the data, and costs a lot.

AFAIK Glacier is unlikely to be tape based. A bunch of offline drives is more realistic scenario. But generally it’s not public knowledge unless you found some trustworthy source for the tape theory?

FWIW restic repository format already has two independent implementations. Restic (in Go) and Rustic (Rust), so the chances of both going unmaintained is hopefully pretty low.

Let me be more clear: devs are not required to release binaries at all. Bit they should, if they want their work to be widely used.

Yeah, but that’s not there reality of the situation. Docker images is what drives wide adoption. Docker is also great development tool if one needs to test stuff quickly, so the Dockerfile is there from the very beginning and thus providing image is almost for free.

Binaries are more involved because suddenly you have multiple OSes, libc, musl,… it’s not always easy to build statically linked binary (and it’s also often bad idea) So it’s much less likely to happen. If you tried just running statically linked binary on NixOS, you probably know it’s not as simple as chmod a+x.

I also fully agree with you that curl+pipe+bash random stuff should be banned as awful practice and that is much worse than containers in general. But posting instructions on forums and websites is not per se dangerous or a bad practice. Following them blindly is, but there is still people not wearing seatbelts in cars or helmets on bikes, so…

Exactly what I’m saying. People will do stupid stuff and containers have nothing to do with it.

Chmod 777 should be banned in any case, but that steams from containers usage (due to wrongly built images) more than anything else, so I guess you are biting your own cookie here.

Most of the time it’s not necessary at all. People just have “allow everything, because I have no idea where the problem could be”. Containers frequently run as root, so I’d say the chmod is not necessary.

In a world where containers are the only proposed solution, I believe something will be taken from us all.

I think you mean images not containers? I don’t think anything will be taken, image is just easy to provide, if there is no binary provided, there would likely be no binary even without docker.

In fact IIRC this practice of providing binaries is relatively new trend. (Popularized by Go I think) Back in the days you got source code and perhaps Makefile. If you were lucky a debian/src directory with code to build your package. And there was no lack of freedom.

On one hand you complain about docker images making people dumb on another you complain about absence of pre-compiled binary instead of learning how to build stuff you run. A bit of a double standard.

I don’t agree with the premise of your comment about containers. I think most of the downsides you listed are misplaced.

First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing.

I’d argue, that actually using containers properly requires very solid Linux skills. If someone indeed blindly “compose pull & up” their stuff, this is no different than blind curl | sudo bash which is still very common. People are going to muddle through the installation copy pasting stuff no matter what. I don’t see why containers and compose files would be any different than pipe to bash or random reddit comment with “step by step instructions”. Look at any forum where end users aren’t technically strong and you’ll see the same (emulation forums, raspberry pi based stuff, home automation,…) - random shell scripts, rm -rf this ; chmod 777 that

Containers are just another piece of software that someone can and will run blindly. But I don’t see why you’d single them out here.

Second, there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice

As a developer I can’t agree here. The docker images (not “containers” to be precise) are not there replacing deb packages. They are there because it’s easy to provide image. It’s much harder to release a set of debs, rpms and whatnot for distribution the developer isn’t even using. The other options wouldn’t even be there in the first place, because there’s only so many hours in a day and my open source work is not paying my bills most of the time. (patches and continued maintenance is of course welcome) So the alternative would be just the source code, which you still get. No one is limiting your options there. If anything the Dockerfile at least shows exactly how you can build the software yourself even without using docker. It’s just bash script with extra isolation.

I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution.

Yeah please don’t do that. It’s probably not a good idea. Just build the binary or whatever you’re trying to use yourself. The binaries in image often depend on libraries inside said image which can be different from your system.

Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so.

It might be easier (effort-wise) but you’re certainly not forced. At the very least you can clone the repo and just edit the Dockerfile to your liking. With compose file it’s the same story, just edit the thing. Or don’t use it at all. I frequently use compose file just for reference/documentation and run software as a set of systemd units in Nix. You do you. You don’t have to follow a path that someone paved if you don’t like the destination. Remember that it’s often someone’s free time that paid for this path, they are not obliged to provide perfect solution for you. They are not taking anything away from you by providing solution that someone else can use.

I’m huge fan of Nix, but for someone wondering if they should “learn docker” Nix is absolutely brutal.

Also IMO while there’s some overlap, one is not a complete replacement for the other. I use both in combination frequently.

There’s also Rustic. It uses the same repository format as restic. It already has some pretty neat features and since latest release a ton of built-in backends.

Depending how inflation goes €3k limit will soon be in the territory of regular smartphone price or any slightly more expensive household purchase. AFAIK €1k 3 decades ago would be about €3k now.

That is assuming no one tries to push the limits lower, which is almost guaranteed to happen.

Might be a bit late for that. We had annexation of the Sudetenland Crimea/Donbas a decade ago. There was invasion of Poland 2 years ago.

Perhaps they are talking about Molotov bread baskets.

Patriot is billion dollar system, but that’s entire system with the destroyed launcher being the cheaper part. (IIRC there are 6 launchers in single system)

The main issue is that there’s limited amount of the mobile launchers available as Patriot was built primarily as static AA defense.

At this stage Medvedev is using nuclear threats to separate paragraphs in his speeches.

They also mention Foreman. I like Ansible, but anything in combination with Foreman was terrible experience, so perhaps it’s that.

Also you can do terrible Ansible configuration that’s then nightmare to maintain.

Everything has its quirks. It’s quite hard to manage secrets in Nix without dropping them to nix store. Sops-nix is probably closest to ansible-vault, but I’ve yet to see some good solution for short lived secrets. (For example secrets that are only needed to deploy something but not to run it)