Dan Mack

sys-admin, prototyper, skydiver, SCUBA adventurer and skateboarder, army veteran

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@techknight2 One of my first pentium boards would also spew post /diags out the serial port and you could also interact with bios over serial. Mine one an ASUS I think

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@davidcrawshaw Kata and firecracker are sometimes referred to as microvms

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@willmcgugan As an emacs user I am happy I can use the same cursor navigation keys in shells any many text widgets even after all these years 😀

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@ibuildthecloud What do you mean? Like a hosted fork that you treat as upstream and then you add some other features onto?

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

It’s kinda funny. I’ve been using emacs since the 80s when I had to teach it and vi to students on old Unix computers (sun, apollo, encore multi max, etc) and it even worked on Minix. Now I still use it and with AI I don’t really need all the extra packages anymore. It’s like wordstar was to framemaker or Microsoft word - a blank slate to type text into. I have thought of having AI start with QEmacs and add a few features while also keeping it super small. I will probably do that soon for fun.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@dhh @Dell Get crowdstrike to support a sensor for the Dell/Omarchy combo and get it into corporate IT

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@ibuildthecloud And as we have seen with the recent Trivy exploit, even your “sandboxed ephemeral build environments” are at risk when the security software itself can and probably will again exfiltrate your credentials used to marshal in assets for a build.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

It’s not just for “agent in a sandbox”, *ALL* software development should be sandboxed away from your primary user’s environment - period. Most people are pulling in and executing other people’s code, with or without agentic programming, and have been for years. It’s unsafe and stupid. On MacBooks, you should probably use separate non-privileged users instead of the one that is associated with your AppleID and other identities for any coding.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@ibuildthecloud MacOS now has a thing called “container”. I thought there was a native Window “sandbox” as well? https://t.co/4fce8HSyAx

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@lauriewired Wings, parachute canopies, good hand tool saws/planes

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

the nice thing about git is that it you don't have to use them. last few jobs I do a bare clone of the main repo to my local machine, I use it as my "local upstream" , do all my dev work commit-ing from it instead of the "prod" repo using my own made up rules for me and switch back later when I need to share some code in whatever system the job wants

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@bealyread I’m still hoping that some day I can just access all BIOS over a serial line and a decent cli. I miss the boot roms on early UNIX systems.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

Despite many attempts I’ve not been able to photograph another great blue heron in almost a year at this same lake. Didn’t know how lucky I was at the time. Such majestic water birds

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@HSVSphere @ibuildthecloud I agree in principle but I’m too old to be convinced / gaslit into believing it’s useful like the shells I’ve been using since the 80s. It probably just needed a different name without the “shell”. PowerscriptLang## or similar.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

@mitchellh Congrats!

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

Upgrading Linux laptop at 33000 feet, and it is a big one 6.19 to 7.0 😀 what a time to be alive

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

I didn’t really move from Windows but I have a couple Windows systems for games, keeping current on system admin, and to test my toolchain’s ability to generate code targeting windows. But even Linux distros using gnome are noisy eventually so I’ve just used sway/alpine and I explicitly start what I need instead of getting the whole D-BUS/app integration crap. I do find it awesome that my current desktop needs are still very similar to what I used in 1996 on my SPARC station or SGI Octane. Simple window manager, terminals, emacs or vi, and a web browser.

[Dan Mack @macktronics]

I use two workstations. One has been alpine edge and the other has been arch. In both environments I keep them as my “front end” for development and never my development environment (except for the display server:window manager editor and the Linux distribution userland. Obviously alpine with its MUSL libc will flush out gnulibc only incompatibilities but barring one grub related upgrade footgun I have had only one outage in about 5 years of continuous use upgrades. Only depending on sway, emacs and podman to do builds works for me