Random tiny thoughts that don't merit their own full-sized posts.
author: @siiky@siiky.srht.site
license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
TIL:
One of the challenges of digital preservation is the evaluation of data formats. It is important to choose well-designed data formats for general use. This article explains the reasons why the xz compressed data format is inadequate for most uses, including long-term archiving, data sharing, and free software distribution. The relevant weaknesses and design errors in the xz format are analyzed and, where applicable, compared with the corresponding behavior of the bzip2, gzip, and lzip formats. Key findings include: (1) safe interoperability between xz implementations is not guaranteed; (2) xz is vulnerable to unprotected flags and length fields; (3) LZMA2 is unsafe and less efficient than the original LZMA; (4) xz's extensibility is unreasonable and problematic; (5) xz includes useless features that increase the number of false positives for corruption; (6) xz shows inconsistent behavior with respect to trailing data; (7) error detection in xz is less accurate than in bzip2, gzip, and lzip.
(...)
There are several reasons why the xz compressed data format is inadequate for general use. To begin with, xz is a complex container format that is not even fully documented and is inadequate for long-term archiving, especially of valuable data. Using a complex format for long-term archiving would be a bad idea even if the format were well-designed, which xz is not. In general, the more complex the format, the less probable that it can be decoded in the future by a digital archaeologist. For long-term archiving, simple is robust.
Just installed Proxmox to try it out. The repositories (by default the paid enterprise ones) have to be changed:
Then it's possible to update/upgrade the system. It will still nag occasionally that there's no subscription, though it's safe to ignore (AFAICT).
It grinds my gears when people use "AKA" incorrectly, AKA like this.
Today I learned of the Willow protocol. From it I found the P2P Basel event.
This year's page has at the bottom the following book in its bibliography: Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, Luís Rodrigues, "Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming"
I searched the usual places -- first log into Springer through my uni, no luck; then some archive of Anya, yes luck! Then I remembered The Wikipedia Library too, and yes luck again!
The official PDF from Springer is md5:5280dc2e54606741c8cd7e87859837c7, if you'd like to know (though there's a slightly smaller one with better PDF index also available; haven't compared otherwise).
Built Transmission v4.1.0 following the same steps as previous builds, but the resulting binary crashes with an "Illegal Instruction" signal... :(
The culprit is the newly introduced CRC32 library. Tried building+installing CRC32 according to the instructions of the PR I linked in the issue, but the Pi hanged... :( Waiting for it to come back to life.
And because I have an SSHFS mount to it, now my desktop is sluggish too doggammit! At least GUI file dialogs etc.
As with neoliberal economics, I'm always suspicious of people who claim that the answer to the damage their self serving behavior is causing is actually more of that behavior. I don't see much evidence that either of these outcomes are likely.
We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.
This website is dedicated to archiving and exposing atrocities of ICE.