• 0 Posts
  • 970 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 16th, 2023

help-circle






  • It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.

    Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.

    Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.

    The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.

    Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.

    And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.






  • It may be that they are picking geographically close mirrors that are massively slower. The difference between connecting to a very remote mirror can be up to a couple hundred milliseconds latency and a few percent in bandwidth due to “the Internet” itself.

    But the mirrors themselves can vary massively in performance. First, it may be older hardware that gets more easily overwhelmed. But it may also be on a connection with far less bandwidth. If that outgoing bandwidth is being shared across many users, you may not be getting much of it.


  • I am fortunate enough that the speed of the package manager itself would make a bigger difference.

    But connecting to a slow mirror can be a killer so, If that was a frequent problem for me, it would absolutely factor into my decision.

    I guess the other factor is how often you are updating. For a rolling distro, it would be essential.

    On Debian Stable, I would care a lot less. Just let it update overnight once in a while.


  • As somebody with a dozen workstations running MUSL, I disagree. But you are going to want to use a performant allocator.

    The issue with C libraries is that you will have problems using pre-compiled binaries that are dynamically linked against a different C library.

    If I gave you a binary dynamically linked against MUSL, it would not work with Glibc either. It is not some kind of MUSL deficiency.

    The issue of course is that most pre-built proprietary software was built against Glibc. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are a good example. But all the in-tree GPU drivers are fine.

    There is gcompat which pretends to be Glibc and forwards calls to MUSL from software that is trying to call Glibc. That may be enough to make things work sometimes.

    So there are two answers to “what works with MUSL?”.

    The first answer is that, if the software is linked with MUSL when it is built, almost everything works. A musl based distro could have a huge package library.

    The second answer is that, if you are trying to run software that was dynamically linked against a different C library when it was compiled, then basically nothing works. This is no different than missing any other dependency. Gcompat is a hack that makes programs use MUSL when they try to call Glibc, and that will work some of the time.

    As an aside, MUSL allows you to statically compile programs which means they include the C library in their binary. This allows these programs to run regardless of what C library is available on the local system. For this reason, MUSL is often used to create static binaries even on systems that use Glibc. Pacman on Arch is a good example.