I owe a run to two early successful wheels in a row, praise be RNGesus

It’s my main issue I have with the whole topic. Starting in 2017 or so, there were so many idiotic promises regarding space travel and all, this one included. Oh yeah and we’ll colonize Mars btw. Like what are you people on? And now SpaceX is even behind on the contractual obligations to NASA, Artemis will not bring astronauts into moon’s orbit this year. Now while do acknowledge that space travel is really hard, this was achieved almost 60 years ago already. What was promised does in no way match reality. Going to Mars was always unrealistic, but to me it feels like progress on ambitious yet achievable goals is worse than 60 years ago.

I guess? The comment I replied to said “tourist” though and Polaris is with a professional crew.

The mission was contracted for 2023, which already passed. I know SpaceX didn’t cancel it (why would they of they can just move the date into the future indefinitely) and that’s why I said they didn’t perform it. But the result is the same and the reaction of the client understandable. Any sane party will cancel a contract when they see that the other party is unable to fulfill their offer.

They avoided this by just not performing contracted missions

https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-dearmoon-crew-reacts-private-mission-canceled

Probably for the better

It’s not that far-fetched, PDFs in my opinion are closer to vector graphics than to document formats like odt and docx. They have no understanding of format if not using advanced features, like a table in a PDF is just spaced text with lines between them, and text is just independently placed letters. In fact the space symbol doesn’t exist in most PDFs, it’s just that two letters were spaced further apart. So they basically are multiple canvases that are being painted on with letters, lines, fill areas and even bitmap graphics.

Modern PDF actually does further in the direction of a document format by providing the content in a structured way, mostly for accessibility, but also for making the format suitable for automatic processing the contained data.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening. There’s no hard requirement for cat to read everything straight into memory. It can send data once it’s available, and the receiving process can read it as fast as it wants. There are cases where this might be more clear: Let’s say you have a big video file that you want to convert to something that only supports like y4m input and is not in ffmpeg. A common way is something like ffmpeg -i infile -f yuv4mpegpipe - | encoder --y4m outfile - I’m pretty sure ffmpeg won’t read the whole infile into memory, nor will it store the whole y4m representation in memory. Instead, it will decode infile as necessary and push into the pipe at the speed the encoder can handle.

But yeah, I remember something about tar using libraries for compression being more efficient that piping its output to a compressor. So it’s still the better route, but probably not as much better as you think.

Then those containers or virtual machines should add this or create the home as needed.

systemd has its own containers, so this is the implementation of that requirement; “virtual machines” might use this exact binary to create home, among other directories like srv and what not. Someone at one point probably said “we always need to create these when spinning up systems, maybe systems can provide a mechanism to do that for us?” and then it was implemented.

Having/home listed as a tmp file on regular systems is problematic by the nature of what tmpfiles claims it does.

systemd-tmpfiles claims the following:

systemd-tmpfiles creates, deletes, and cleans up files and directories, using the configuration file format and location specified in tmpfiles.d(5). Historically, it was designed to manage volatile and temporary files, as the name suggests, but it provides generic file management functionality and can be used to manage any kind of files.

I rather think having a purge command was the issue here, at the very least it should print a big fat warning at what it does, better even list all affected files and directories. There’s no reason a normal user needs this and with the name of the binary, it’s totally misleading, which is an issue in these situations.

E.g. for quick provisioning of containers or virtual machines, this is also to make sure the required directories always exist. In a normal distribution, /home already exists, so systemd-tmpfiles does nothing, but there are cases where you want to setup a standard directory structure and this is a declarative alternative to scripts with a lot of mkdir, chmod and chown.

The name systemd-tmpfiles is kind of historic at this point, but wasn’t changed due to backwards compatibility and all.

Not being able to Syu every 5 minutes and only being able to update once a day was the biggest challenge when I changed to NixOS