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#26 Off-topic » A small step for a new Display server » 2026-05-25 07:53:03

chomwitt
Replies: 0

I am happy to hear about XLibre and Phoenix.

I also have some ideas  for a new display server. The main diff is moving away from pixels and away from windows. A visual-haptic-audio representation of a process's output should be 'porous'

I'll call it GipesCompProcessPorousCovers (GsCPPC). . Cover since its the superficial aspect of a process. GsCPPC could easily adapt it's data ui representations for accesibility. . GsCPPP will have pixel's as a visual representation choice but not as priority. Can a pixel transform easily into accessibilty compatible types? Dont think so.

As for security i will rephrase it into different semantics of isolation of something happening .Like dont wont to be distrurbed but lets not keep sharing out. An importand core semantics swift.

So if you want to become more adventurous and have time to kill please take a look on my thoughts and let's see how a display server could evolve towards some novel ideas.

->How X started.

->Copy paste... a hard problem ?

-> Should a display server contain a drawing API ?

->What is X ?   // As you'll read X is what 'you' want it to be. The needs change. For 80s MIT's Athena project X meant distributed computing and collaboration . Today for gaming industry X or Wayland means impressive addictive graphics to make money. (not necessarily interesting games) .   (like Angèle is implying in her song What You Want -- X is what YOU want... :-)  )

->To X or not to X ?

-> The need for cooperation as central motivation in Unix and GNUproject

well.. it's scary. to look back into history and see that X is .. not what programmer want but what the programmers were told to do in a certain society's context. For example there is ample evidence that Xfree86 (X port to x86) was driven from gaming gpu money.

Thats the small history lesson. If in a society the top priority was seamless (as far as possible) integration of people with disabilities and improving distributed computing then you would end in an entirely different display server and an top of that you should think hard about the transformative - adaptivity - sharingefficiency  of your interface-'cover' primitives and that would land you in a strange lands of ... semiokinetics,ethics and math.

Unfortunately (for some) in the driving seat of X's evolution is fancy consumer desktop and gaming industry money (it's not incidental that in the hands of the current maintainer's of X it stagnated and died  ) .Have anyone tested accessibility installation of Windows or Linux lately ? Well , in the attention harvesting economy you want to grab the client from his/her eyeballs!!.. Well who would have thought that to be blind in our era would be the best bullshit firewall  for a human brain.

I wonder it the upcoming pc market - pc gaming decline that started ,due to the ultrahyped AI related comp resource hoarding ,@   will shift the money dynamics.  .

#27 Re: Off-topic » An exploration on Devuan-Release semantics » 2026-05-21 18:22:33

@Idle i am happy if you find it usefull. I hope to act as a usefull seed of discussion and become better, I'd like to add your line but i cannot edit it anymore. I dont know why.

#28 Off-topic » Breaking the AI hype.(AI or Die..?) » 2026-05-21 17:32:28

chomwitt
Replies: 4

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"TL/DR: short  30sec recap: @ LLM NeuralNetwork tech's benefits overshadowed by massive hoarding of computation resources and unethical and aggresive data appropriation that spreads disincentives to the creative soul of the internet and kill the pc market. All pathalogical aspects accelerating due to big state support. Although LLM represents a small fraction of AI research it's  ultra-hyped-posing as AI to further accelerate funding and support through FOMO and psyops. The large scale of resources needed to sustain its usefullness highlight how inefficient it is.
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Alt titles

How to get a good education for your Digital LLM driven Neural Network for Free?
Welcome to The magnificent Era of the Ultra-hype engines and the comp-resource hoarders and data stealers  ...

Analogies

In a dead poet society Sam wants to become a member. Sam comes to meeting fully equiped with recording tech to secretly train his LLM-NN to produce the best poems. Do you keep him into your society? What if ALL members had the same equipement and goal ? But wasnt that the goal from the start? To train your brain to the best poems ? But now a member wants to train ALSO his digital NN ? Is that bad ? Even it he doesnt do it secretly ?

You train your cyberpet (with LLMNN module) when you take walk with it at places with crowds . (as you would do with your kid) . Is that bad ? Illegal ? You train a swarm of cyberpets (all owned by you) again in public spaces . Is that bad ? Illegal ?  Again you are in a public sphere ? What significance it has if you train one cyberpet from training a thousand or a million ? Maybe the imbalance of control that YOU can aquire and exert on you enviroment ?

Bad news

I read increasingly reports-complaints of websites creators and maintainters on the negative consequences (mainly less traffic and mass scraping that create also stability issues) of aggresive AI crawlers and search engines moving away from the links list mode to an AI-centric UI. (and of course the most important -a wave of layoffs in various tech related sectors).
What signifies as aggresive behavior on cyberspace ? Can a crawler misbehave ? Is there justice on the cybersphere or a way to fight power imbalances ?

Neo Luddites ?

One natural question : So hasnt that happen before?  New tech creating new jobs , replacing old ones? Opposing AI means to be a new version of Luddites ?
Wont AI offers us a new brighter future so lets not allow petty complaints to hold us back ? Shouldnt we play along and make our sites more AI access friendly ? Or maybe become youtube content creators-workers ?   Wasnt web build from CERN scientist to interlink-interelate all accessible to internet knowledge .

Concentration of comp power ?

I will argue in favor of a position that the biggest change that is happening in our lifes in not a new-tech transformation but a significant era of comp-related resources hoarding of the powerfull amidst what seems to be a prelude to a world war. A society transformation to less liberal forms . A 'transfomation' that kills the soul of the truly biggest tech of  2000s , thaf of the internet. A transfomation that opposes creative spirits and upholds control as the highest value.That transfomation (a hoarding accelaration) is possibly because it stands on the shoulders of already pathological wealth and power concentration that had been created in prior time . And surely the current data stealing is facilitated from the eco-hostile smartphones!!! The smartphone era is the prelude to the current era. Massive personal data is comming from the smarfphones. Without smartphones all data centers would die. LLM is a tool to access more easily all the huge data . BUT you need ram to access it and store it and gpu's to process it. And another creek leading to the 'AI' river is the cloud era. OSes like windows, ads trackers , and many programs collect vast data and 'telemetry' that needs to be stored and processed. So we have an explosion of digital data creation.

Can it match a billion years biological evolution ?

So i dont buy the ultra-hyped LLM tech as fundamentally AI innovation .
It's a complex LLM that for the moment  needs access to vast comp resources as ram and gpus and ofcourse data in order to create a usefull service.
And for me that exposes it's weakness of the digital computing. It's doesnt align well with complexity. It drains resources .
I think a single cell of a bee is computational way more capable  and utilizes resources many orders of mangitute more efficiently than al l the LLM data centers. Is that an hallucination of me? wishfull thinking?  I think AI hype works better as the world becomes more dump and enumerated. But i think it's not a peer to the biological world that has millions of evolution on it's back . Billionaires surf on a media concetraded world that acts as an ego echo-chamber and hides the wrong doing of their actions. See for example climate instability  not to mention playing global war with nuke threats!!

Is it just another episode of lust for power ?

I see pure peaked greed and immoral content appropriation-stealing . Look the perpetrators. Multi billionaires with the ethical flexibility of saluting like nazis to attract media attentions, fantasizing replacing the workforce of their companies with indians, posing happily near trump and near dictators constantly promoting their ideas thought controlled appearances where they parrot in front of friends or employees how great they are...  (put them in a room for a real - uncontrolled discussion with a philosopher like Slavoj Žižek and see the tech feudokings's ideological hollowness..). So are these people the AI innovators? The nvidia gpu gaming guy who ripped off for decades family budgets and now poses as a tech lord ?  really ?

The hyped AI bandwagon ...

That is no news ofcourse. Remember github and copilot getting in bed with microsoft? They big corps always are after our data. I think the difference now it that big govs are fully onboard the AI train  because i think they believe that it's a matter of state survival and a way to hide many of their ineffeciencies under the new hype tech word..  A gov with the bigger AI survives and wins. Without government money i dont think a company could buy mem - gpu production for the next years or build easily data genters.  So there is a AI ultra hype train that is moving fast and attracts on board  stateactors , aggresive companies and people who see a window of opportunity to tap on water and energy with more ease. That train hoard comp resources and public data very fast - cancer like fast- and nothing stops it. I believe that a crucial fuel of that train is the big hype engiges (that ofcourse belong to the same persons that drive the AI train.. how convenient and illegal and unethical...) . Those engines with constant hype-flows keep the train going full speed attracting resource hoarders . AI or die!! (i hope you see that most propably those on the AI-hyped train wont die... not because they are more AI-smart but because they will have stole massive water , energy , hoard all memory and gpu under the sun.., and ofcourse have access to gov public money and support.)  (any free market funs left ???) (do the free world turns into north korea? or we are in the middle of WW3?)

The state-sponsored hoarding and datacenters expansion that destroyed the pc consumer marked highlights that argument.
Without vast memory and gpu , and energy and water that powers the datacenters   LLM is would be a search engine language driven interface.
(speaking of AI_LLM capabilities.. have they learned to count in images yet?). 

It's the data that train an LLM and makes a 'AI' agent usefull. If an 'AI' is asked tips about living in Berlig it will ultimately have to had be trained on a good reliable blog. Otherwise it'll recite in perfect english just crap.  An LLM agent can write perfect prose but say crap. So the ethical would be ? To buy the data to train your model  . Or to allow third party to use LLM to offer an language driven UI on their work.  Now we see fast movers tapping unethically to data and sell it AS if their agent is smart !! Isnt this an AI parody salespitch of conman sales(wo)man ?

Breaking the AI hype cycle

So for me the solution it to break the AI hype cycle. Expose the crucial element of greed,and data stealing and resource tapping. Expose the superficial hype-building claims of AI (when for example the hard problem of consciousness is out of reach). But that hype is supported by the great hype engines of our time . (facebook,twitter, etc). Breaking the hype ofcourse means engaging in a civilised discourse in public spheres not controlled by the AI-train hoarders. So in the end it boils down for me in a matter of how societies and political systems work. I fear that in our days states tend to align more with a china-concentrated model keeping elections as a thin vale constantly vanishing.

In eras of power concentration in public spheres what should be our response ?
  • is encryption combatible with public-open spaces?

  • Should we silently keep offering our source code to the cyberpets of Sam and Elon or China's superstate ?

  • Should we practice  @ abstinence from the digital public sphere while is infensted ?

  • Should we practice partial abstinence from the digital public sphere while is infensted and increase presence in  physical public spheres that build stronger semantic networks that are resistant to automated crawerls ? (physical public spheres can add flavors to languages unknown to crawlers)

  • Should we try to avoid feeding some cyberpet swarms ?

  • Are there digital content not digestable from automated crawlers?

  • A data type-format being less machine-searchable is a non-digestable-crawler data trait.Podcast vs text vs image vs video

  • Should we protect content behind authentication ?

  • Can we devise processes as @ sentinel species (like the dogs in the Terminator movies that detected infitrator units?)

  • Should we inject older tech like phone conversation (like BladeRunner's Voight-Kampff) tests during authentication  to our digital realms ?

  • Should we rethink the internet's architecture in order to allow public sub-spheres-spaces to have a way to protect themselfes from centers of accelerating (out of normal pace - cyberflows homeostatis braken) data appropriation ? Or the internet's architecture is fine and we can find solutions inside it?

  • Can you create honey pots of garbage and lure a crawler to get that and bypass what is truly significant to a website owners

  • Combine non-automated - undigestable to ai-bots authentication , data flow rate , data types ? How can you make authentication really bitchy to automated cyber bots .What would piss of a ultra-greedy webcrawler? How would you treat such a kid in your famliy ? Keep less food(data) in the fridge ? Selling more content in physical format ? Or again .. through telephone conversation ? 

  • Should communities engage more in live voice-teleconference conversation using encrypted channels?

  • Should we communicate with audio files messages ?

  • Elevate the prestige and access rights associated with a physical presence in a community gathering (layered open community)

  • Attach valuable data on matter? Reducing its mobility but increasing its control ?

  • Should we ask @ William Gibson ? Either for advice or apologies for making us believe that cyberspace was our world when in fact we are the aliens in it!!

  • Embrace community's idiosyncrasies @

  • Enhance non automated workflows (for example filter account creation through human conversation channels

  • Enhance communities help availability

Please dont phone me to tell you my prefered solution.

There was an era when Sierra made money from hot-phone lines selling tips how to help LarryLaffer unzip his pants and selling physical copies of hintbooks .

Refs

@The New Era of Sensory Augmentation
“We have only the most shallow understanding of basic questions like what physical properties give rise to conscious experience, what makes an experience perceptual, and how we come to feel ownership over a sensory stream.” <--- interesting.. how do you make an information flow that is foreign to automated crawlers ? (or is it US that we stepped into the ai-llm's crawlers digital realm and IT can detect US as aliens? )Can we make info tele-flow more organic ? To feel that we own it ? Make data that is not @ fungible ? How would that help discern foreign-unwanted tapping onto a data stream from a friendly data tap ?
@Regain control of AI crawlers

#29 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » (HW compatibility test) Wifi usb adaptor Techno'sN150 » 2026-05-07 19:05:01

I found various posts about various issues about AR9271 droping connections.. but in monitor mode. I will try in another devuan pc.

#30 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » (HW compatibility test) Wifi usb adaptor Techno'sN150 » 2026-05-07 16:45:06

Unfortunately the TechnoN150 exhibits some strange behavior.
The network manager icon in the xfce notification area shows good signal. The ifconfig shows i got ip but some webpages wont load!

Could it be that due to low memory and specs TN150 drops connections with low latency?

#31 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » (HW compatibility test) Wifi usb adaptor Techno'sN150 » 2026-05-05 12:03:56

@Altoid  I didnt questioned if the dongle comes from TE . But whether it would work ok in my system.

Anyway i checked more carefully the enclosure:
It has one the one side a TechnoEthical sticker and on the other side :
N14939 DNUA-93F
FCC ID: NKR-VRWL25

#32 Hardware & System Configuration » (HW compatibility test) Wifi usb adaptor Techno'sN150 » 2026-05-05 09:47:22

chomwitt
Replies: 4

pc: devuan 6
wm : xfce
network manager: (to be filled)

Product name : @Tehnoetic TET-N150 . Which seems basically a simply rebranding of 2010 Taiwan or Chinese  @ Sharp VR-WL2 or @ Wistron NeWeb/ DNUA-93F . (The DNUA-93F is on the sticker but the FCC-ID corresponds to Sharp VR-WL25) .. But it seem from thils list @ that various     AR9271 based wifidongles report to linux the same Ven:Dev ID. So i wonder if all that name jungling has any meaning...

Related product : @ Penguin Wireless N USB Adapter for GNU / Linux (TPE-N150USB), with a nice manual: @

@  (2014) FSF-certification announcement

I tested : Technoethical's N150 mini wifi@
For many years i have in my home turned towards using wired networking . The reasons  being :
1) having in many years tried various adaptors that have problems making the work reliably (even if most of them claimed also linux support).
2) being afraid of the emf pollution .
Anyway i had in my radar for many years technoethical and so i decided to buy and try Techno's N150 that claims a

It works with the free driver ath9k_htc (GNU GPL v2) and the free firmware for ath9k_htc (Clear BSD).

As for the open firmware i found:

  • @ open-ath9k-htc-firmware.

  • @ Announcement of the release in the @ ath9k_htc_fw emailing list.

  • @ A nov/2011 datasheet of AR9271.

From little i've read it seems credit goes mainly to : Adrian Chadd and Luis R. Rodriguez (@ (2008)Atheros hires ath5k developer)
In the Announcement email they thank management of QCA and even Tensilica .
Here @ (a page orf AR9271 specs) it says:
SoC Architecture: RISC - Tensilica core (Xtensa LX2.1.0). So i guess Tensilica is the microprocessor that executes the firmware.

The T'sN150 page claims:

Using the latest versions of the kernel (3.0 or later), the adapter works out of the box when plugging it on USB, and you don't have to manually install the firmware anymore.

Well that doesnt hold in Devuan 6 's 6.12.74 kernel.

Initially plugging in various usb3 ports of my Devuan 6 PC  i didnt see any syslog messages (nothing!).
Plugging it in a usb2 port i show a $ lsusb entry :
Bus 003 Device 006: ID 0cf3:9271 Qualcomm Atheros Communications AR9271 802.11n

But after:
# apt-get install firmware-ath9k-htc firmware-atheros 
it works ok in either usb3 (blue) and usb2 (black) ports.

Also i dont know why but my adaptor came not with the fancy logo filled small sticker but with a simpler one with made in china and some small stuff that i  dont remember.

Also according to @ the product name of my dongle is  Wistron NeWeb DNUA-93F and it contains also a usb chipset: Atheros AR9002U . ( The FCC ID on the dongle matches @  Sharp VR-WL25.  .

ps:
I am very curious how that happened. I mean what conditions and efforts allowed a company to accept to license openly a product's firmware.
Also i wonder it the firmware contain blobs.

#33 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Managing language support in a console only installation. » 2026-04-14 22:37:59

@Lujoomen my setup is console only .  setxkbmap is in the x11-xkb-utils.
Anyway.. i gave it a try since x11-xkb-utils doesnt pull all X .. but setxkbmap compaints that it cannot open the display.

#34 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Managing language support in a console only installation. » 2026-04-14 01:50:20

1. setxkbmap is part of X so i guess it affects X clients.

2. i created a new user and set gr locale as default but i cant write or see greek system messages.

i tried also :
$ sudo apt-get install console-data
$ sudo loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/gr.kmap.gz
cant open 'linux-with-alt-and-altgr' because kbdfile already opened ../include/linux-with-alt-and-altgr.inc.gz
syntax error unexpected error

#35 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Managing language support in a console only installation. » 2026-04-13 17:26:47

Strangely that itsfoss article ends with :

And that’s all! Now you’re able to change your default language as many times you want directly from the terminal.

But how do you do that ?

#36 Hardware & System Configuration » Managing language support in a console only installation. » 2026-04-13 13:11:18

chomwitt
Replies: 8

I want to be able to write other languages (in addition to english).
I tried with no help ;
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

what should i do ?

#37 Re: Off-topic » XFCE is building a new WM and compositor for Wayland » 2026-02-13 11:24:03

I wonder if the Devuan installer could mirror our concerns and offer more options during install.
Also when a fork is done , like MATE->CAFE it would help to know the reason and the projects intention. Was it license issues , roadmap differences etc.
I use a personally  curated desktop :  StumpWM + xfe + emacs + qutebrowser + weechat and xfce in my kid's computer.

#38 Re: Off-topic » Happy New Year to all you Devuaners » 2026-01-02 08:52:28

Happy new Year !!
Ευτυχισμένος ο καινούργιος χρόνος.

#39 Off-topic » An exploration on Devuan-Release semantics » 2025-12-12 09:33:52

chomwitt
Replies: 3

Hi to all Devuan community.

I'll make an effort to explore what it means (for me)  when we speak of a Devuan Release.
What is means to speak of Devuan and a Release of it .

Something is released, meaning it's becoming public - making it available to more interested people.

The 'Release' event stresses a time point meaning that a commitment of resources to create and support a stable version .Other distros dont have releases.And of course that is a significant aspect of the team's filter policy since between stable releases you effectively ban (or make it more time consuming) further functionality updates in thousand of software. That seems harsh in our era of the ultra-hype networks where fomo and ultrahype attention devouring cycles have been ingrained in users deepest inclination .
More specificaly we make certain version of Devuan available to the public.So that is a special case of making software publicly accessible. 

In the 70s,80s,90s software release meant making copies of certain software in a certain info-storage medium , packaging it and either transfering copies to brick-shops (visible in cities where people aggregate) or letting people know from mass media and giving instruction to facilitate brick-mail service. So there are public-space-time places where people's attention aggregates and focus. In ancient greek it was called agora. Are there in our times (2020s) digital public places functioning like agora ? (i would dare to say that an internet search engine in a sense substitutes a trait that a cyber-agore should have).

From 2000s, 2010s, 2020s information and thus software can be made available via the internet. Using a computer connected to the internet a user can access information and thus software.

In our case a Devuan version is made available via the internet.  But since we speak of a Devuan version released to the public we speak about a Devuan Release. (but it may be wise to social unstable times for a distro to has official brick release channels in each country-cost-security-support wise.). (narrowing the release relation throught a cable misses formost a human support element since a distro must be installed on hardware which could less easy that it is said)

The Devuan team and broadly the Devuan community  creates and maintains what we call a Devuan distro release.

Devuan is a GNU+@Linux distribution . Thus @LinuxKerne; + @GNUSoftware + third party software .

GNU software would currently broadly refer to software created and maintained by people either affiliated at some point in time to the GNU project . But also the GNU project historically due to its foundational pioneer work in establishing libre software and its central role in aiding in Linux kernel development (via accessible necessary tool like gcc compiler and glibc among others) is mentioned not only from a practical standpoint (how many packages are in a linux distro) but from a honorable standpoint. Read Richard Stallman's argument regarding the naming aspect .@Linux and the GNU System.

But i think naming a Devuan Release  a distribution hides many procedural semantics and highlights an 'inert' view as a set of packaged software.
Devuan Release includes:

  • an Installer

  • repositories of the releases (from where it customary users to update and install software) . Those repos are the result of complex processes that maintain a constant flow of properly packaged binary software. That i guess means automated compilation, packaging,testing . Keep in mind here that Devuan support many architerctures.

  • package manager of certain type (apt in our case)

  • a set of software packages rules - policies , community intentions-goals to which packaging and selection of packages should-must align. In a way the DevuanTeam-Community acts as a filter. So in a sense for someone to choose a distro she/he should among other learn the team's goals-intention to check for alignment to his/her intentions.
    Interestingly that is not software but could we speak of a 'distribution without naming the 'filter' used?  And ofcourse is not random that that is reflected to the www.devuan.org welcome definition where the team's intention is central .

  • @->see Devuan Infrastructure

The basic difference of of the software included in Devuan from other PC software "distros-bundles' is the libre licence terms.  Although the term distro is not used in @proprietary software when a user installed e.g windows essentially installs a windows kernel plus basic user software.

A basic question from a user standpoint , not familiar with linux distros, would be : What software is included ?
and perhaps What hardware is supported? . And WHY should someone access software through a distribution ?
(a filter between software developers and the user? a middleman .) Interestingly that question is linked also to the current dram price rally (as of late 2025). The middleman could enforce widely use libraries that are share by most of what her distro offers. That could decrease pressure on memory . Compare with the late info surfacing in social about windows apps levering web stack drain memory as godzilla's pet would strain a family's food supply.

So Devuan is made available via the internet.
That means that Devuan (as software) is located in one computer that is connected to the internet. That means a computer thats follows some comm protocols in order to be accessible (like having a publicly usable address -url-) .

So it seem that one basic information to 'get' the Devuan Release is a related URL or

Here is an internet url  : https://files.devuan.org/ (Devuan release archive)                           
That is an internet url that can be used in any computer 'connected to internet' to 'download'  Devuan installation images

  • *_netinstall.iso

  • *_server.iso

  • *_desktop.iso

  • devuan_excalibur_6.0.0_amd64_desktop-live.iso

Devuan installer that will boot-strap a Devuan installation process

Here is another internet url that i like : http://deb.devuan.org/ that contains the packages of all devuan releases (released devuan versions)

---------------------
What we call distribution is a kernel,some user programs,a package manager,and a mirror or a repo.
Offering an installer. Installing a set of programs we need to start using a computer.
Family - semiotic - resemblances : a distro as a certain type of library.
Synonyms : Software libraries. A set of book, tagged and placed following a certain system of rules guiding storing and retrieval. debtags was also modeled from principles (facets) originating as a certain conceptual organization of libraries.

---------------------
@ DevuanWiki / Devuan Releases

#40 Re: DIY » ALSA-only purists: Question, new GUI app for the mixer and EQ? » 2025-11-29 12:26:31

Hi . I have only ALSA installed.

$ aplay --list-devices
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
...

card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 10: HDMI 4 [VA3456-WQHD]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
...

When i do a test :
$ aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav 
i hear the  sound from my headphones connected to my pc cases 3.5mm jack.
My monitor has speakers and i would like to make my programs use that as 'audio sink'.
How do i do that ?

Changing the card (with F6) in alsamixer i see a list of s/pdif rectangles but i dont know what they represent and also the display only 00.

#41 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-30 12:08:38

It would be interesting to learn the touch-typing skill of programmers and hackers that are wellknown. For example Dennis Ritchie ,Ken Thompson , Torvald , Stallman  etc.. Also i think in the pdp era you would call that skill possibly @(4.25)touch-flipping since you had to constantly flip switches to enter a program to the memory.

Speaking of Stallman is documented the impact that hacking had in his hands and his general health. On the other hand Torvald seems he avoided serious health issues (although i remember a video of his room showing him coding standing). Maybe he was more aware of the negative consequences of such skills?

In the batch processing punchedcard era knowing that in case of error you would have to create (type) your program from start wouldnt make you very cautious and thus touchtyping would be considered maybe not so helpfull ?

The RSI argument should also be taken in consideration . There are many angles. From a personal angle i want to be able to type (assuming other input tech are not inhand) until late age. An objective like that surely would lower the ceiling of what would be acceptable touch-typing performance (from my view) .Assuming that keeping a highly touch-typing performance stresses my neuron more . On the other hand if i want to type only in my job until 60s then i could increase that performance thinking that damaged hand neurons is not a top priority..

#42 Re: Off-topic » The need for cooperation as central motivation in Unix and GNUproject » 2025-07-29 09:18:39

I cant edit my initial post so i add here a link to a video on Unix history where at 3.33 we hear Dennis M. Ritchie again stress the need for an enviroment that encourages communication and the creation of a community. I think it's obvious that Ritchie is reading his words from the paper i quoted at the start.

@UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use -- AT&T Archives film from 1982,

Anyway digging into timesharing , Multics, DTSS etc one finds that some novel ideas 'attributed' to Unix like the filesystem or even pipes where ideas originated in earlier systems.

So for example in the same video (13.20) Brian W. Kernighan says that the most importand Unix contribution was pipelines . But according to Communication Files: Interprocess IO before Pipes M. Douglas McIlroy:

Communication files significantly antedated Unix pipes.Evidence from design docu-
ments puts the origin of the concept sometime in 1967, between the writing of an outline
of features for the Phase II DTSS system dated March, which doesn’t mention communi-
cation files, and a summary of executive services dated 29 August, which does.

#43 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-29 08:58:49

Some comments from the J.Atwood post that offer contrary insights:

typing speed is only relevant if it obstructs your flow of thinking.

With modern IDE typing code is more like playing game, than like typing full words. You are constantly using shortcuts, choosing things from menus, and copying stuff. Also tabulation is completely different (and more important) in code, than in English (or any other language).

i’ve found that I’m more productive, when I type slower, and stops often to think about what I want to type next

So I don’t think fast typing is required for programmer. It’s rather the other way around - when somebody can’t write fast he is less probably a good programmer, because that means he probably hasn’t been programming a lot.

A good programmer won’t need to type fast since their code will be succinct and compact. it doesn’t matter if you type half as fast if your program is 4 times smaller than the fast typist’s…

In College, a professor said don’t learn to type. His reasoning was that you need you hands for your whole career and typing fast will bring on rsi, secondly by typing fast you will avoid coming up short cuts for doing repetitive tasks and being more creative.

I think you are wrong. What you are basically saying is: An artist, how can’t paint a wall very fast, will never produce nice paintings. How can this be right? Of course if the artist is exceptionally slow, he will never finish his painting - but ultimately mechanical speed is of less matter…

Code contains relatively large numbers of non-alphabet characters, which are not as easy to type.

Teaching someone to type is a lot easier than teaching someone to program effectively. What you are trying to do is to equate the entire profession to the easiest part of it. It degrades and lessens the profession to say that we are just typists.

In favor of touch-typing :

Non-typists won’t get this: typists write, while non-typists type and write. Typists don’t know they’re typing.
Would you ride with a driver who had to look at his hands every few seconds to find the wheel?

The root of it is that typing is an abstraction layer for what we’re really doing. The less barrier we have between our real task, and our conscious mind, the better.

#44 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-28 15:28:36

Strange i keep finding relevant info :
@ Bad Keyboard Advice from Programers by xahlee.info
@ To touch or not to touch-type , pros and cons by Xeh Lee.

Do not listen to programers for typing advice
If you are a programer, you probably have seen programers talk about keyboard, or how to press the control key.
It's all WRONG!
If you want good advice for healthy and efficient typing, ask professional data-entry clerks, not programers.

So encouraging touch-typing and bigger speeds without taking into account ergonomics could be a mistake. Meaning health considerations should atleast put a maximum time frame in which a programmer should exercise his/her touch-typing skills.
But interstingly Xeh Lee thinks that for a programmer of a blogger contrary to jobs as dataclerks it happens this :

Your whole day's keystrokes probably can be done in less than 30 minutes if you just type continuously

#45 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-28 12:43:41

Another argument again the importance of touch typing is that assuming the programming is a form of communication surely there is programming analogous to the blather (as to 'talk rapidly without making much sense').I've heard the argument that human (especially women) when socializing talk too much for various topics but that non-sensical talk acts as a socia-glue and it's very important (but in the social context not communicating with machinces!)

But again.. i've read stories of RMS being in nirvana codding state hacking teco and other programs in his mit ailab eden back in the 1970s where he seemingly was programming like talking to the machine.

And i think (sorry if i repeated that argument) that the idea-image of a programmer touch-typing-programming it has manager-wetdreams vibes. As a manager i would like to see my payed workforce sweat and be productive. And maybe that is the easies but perhaps the most erroneous way to judge programming productivity by expecting your programmers to touch-typing constantly like crazies.

#46 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-27 22:02:31

Links to related blogposts:

  • @ Coding: It’s Just Writing by  Jeff Atwood (2008)

  • @  We Are Typists First, Programmers Second  by  Jeff Atwood(2008)

  • @ Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by Steve Yegge (2008)

  • @ Bad Keyboard Advice from Programers by  Xah Lee (2011)

  • @ To touch or not to touch-type , pros and cons by Xeh Lee.(2022)

#47 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-27 21:22:29

golinux thanks for correcting my misplaced forum post .

As for your latest response. if you refer to the spiritual side i think you are right for the need of a spiritual awakening.

#48 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-27 14:10:24

golinux  . Arent we humans tool-makers and thus by extension machine-makers? Isnt that the part of our nature that elevated us above dinosaurs and thus making us capable of protecting earth from meteorites and other life-extiction events? Your logic gives me Dr. Stephen Falken vibes from the film WarGames.

#49 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-27 13:53:52

stargate thanks for the links. I found some interesting.

I think i've made a mistake .I should have posted this post in Offtopic. Can be transferred there?. Sorry.

Anyway i think the elevation of the touchtyping skill to a necessity (especially the way it was presented by it's original author) misses entirely the ergonomics and health issues side. The hands needs protection. And i forgot to mention that touch-typing could become obselete not by LLM-AI but by LLM-powered-speech assistant

I think programmers should support and try that tech . I imagine my self dictating code by voice to my computer even when my hands's nerves would become too fragile.

I propose a separate subforum for ergonomics and health issues of Devuan admins - users- programmers. The subforum would cover also accessability aspects of devuan. (elderly,disabilities etc).

#50 Re: Off-topic » A programmer should be a touch typist ? » 2025-07-26 22:10:31

I think it sould be fair to mention that i got the blog post about touch typing from another blogpost @ that was about palm pressing control key!! A minor skill that i wasnt aware that existed.

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