i’m guessing a few things somehow consume /etc/hosts mappings without going through nss /shrug

it modifies /etc/hostname for you, but doesn’t seem to touch /etc/hosts

i still prefer hostnamectl, but i’m now unsure of what benefit it offers over editing /etc/hostname directly

no, you might have misunderstood

/etc/hosts is not where the hostname is configured

/etc/hostname for the actual hostname, and a mapping in /etc/hosts pointing it at a 127.x.x.x address

seems like a pretty common practice across Linux distributions

/etc/hostname for the actual hostname, and a mapping in /etc/hosts pointing it at a 127.x.x.x address

yep, I used that command to modify the hostname, rather than edit /etc/hostname directly

I think it should be a punishable offence to share Python scripts that depend on third-party packages without any ready-to-go bundling/isolation :)

goes for any interpretted language where dependencies inevitably creep into the global namespace via distribution packagers that should know better :P

https://xkcd.com/1987/

i wonder if rootless podman would have the same permissions problem … something to try out

interesting, i wasn’t prompted or anything, from the documentation there’s the ollama/ollama:latest image and the ollama/ollama:rocm image but either way ollama will do its own detection and silently fallback to CPU if anything even smells wrong, haha

i’ve noticed a few people are not using the official ollama images 🤷

you think that’s bad? wait until you find out all the places where electron has been installed … :P

I couldn’t understand Microsoft’s motivation here at all, until this reminder (from the linked article):

This development doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, who saw the company miss the platform shift to mobile devices and tablets and desperately wants to avoid chalking up another failure in yet another momentous platform shift.

it makes so much sense to me now

emphasis on “desperately” for sure

it’s a shame because there’s legitimately good technology for blocking advertising in Brave, there’s just so much else that is questionable/indefensible

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/ :)

it’s a good point about pessimism, I should try harder to not spread it

you’ve put together a pretty useful table there!

RE voting with our wallets, I was mostly referring to this: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-13-consumption-choices-marginal-benefits-66edd5d9a82e

there’s the lockdown or similar feature at the phone level in Android and iOS

if you’re in a situation where you don’t want someone to access Bitwarden, then you probably also want to stop them from using your browser with all the cookies and logins it currently has

so temporarily block all biometric access on your phone in such cases, and merrily enjoy biometric access when you’re physically safe again

on Android, it’s Power + Volume-Up, then Lockdown

Use one service for one thing, so that when it gets disabled, only that one thing is affected.

https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2025/06/11/stop_uploading_your_data_to_google/

oh, sorry, now I understand the question

yes, devices available in CrowdSupply tend to philosophically align with my values: owner is in charge, no subscriptions, cloud connectivity is not a thing or completely optional, schematics are open, drivers are open, etc

so they aren’t usually interfered with at a functionality or technological level

but they’re popularity and availability are subject to interference: we’ve already had multiple governments ban or consider banning the Flipper Zero for various reasons

and we have various media codec patents and DRM requirements that prevent truly open devices from being able to be used for popular purposes like streaming video content which pretty much guarantees that only industry-approved devices will ever gain wide distribution and popularity

I don’t think it’s too tin-foil hat to suggest that if a truly open device did gain popularity somehow, that we’d see IP lawsuits or import restrictions or mandatory modifications (e.g. countries attempting to mandate a government-operated surveillance app preinstalled on over smartphone)

seems good?

I bought my Precursor on CrowdSupply :)

I’ll probably buy more stuff in future there

and I’m also a big fan of https://mntre.com/ although I’m waiting for the next model that’s currently in development

what’s frustrating is that we can’t really vote with our wallets, and any right-to-repair or consumer-is-in-charge movement is going to be limited by intelligence agencies, corporations like John Deere, Apple, and the entire entertainment industry

really, unless it’s a Precursor-style open chip and able to be verified by the consumer that it hasn’t been tampered with, then we’re already putting an awful lot of faith in the primary CPUs in our systems, anyway

• https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
• https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-xous-a-pure-rust-rethink-of-the-embedded-operating-system

there’s also so much mistrust of TPMs that every verified damage wrought by them ought to be very well documented by now

TPMs are certainly worthy of our vigilance, but it seems like we should be spending more energy pestering CPU and GPU vendors for better behaviour