Posts by Liam Proven

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

> Seriously?

The specific example I had in mind is here:

https://www.pdos.org/

One of the reasons I haven't tried it and don't want to is the author's attitude towards FOSS. He goes by "KerrAvon", and search this page for "communist" for examples:

https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/mix_entry.php?id=18880

«

I'm no more obsessed with Stallman than I am with communist or other dictators creating a definition of "free" to mean "not free".

»

«

Copyrighted code is not "freedom" any more than slaves under a communist dictator were "free" as their dictators insisted.

»

You can find many more -- for a time he was a very active participant in fora all around the web.

Re: "Asbestos is a tool, just like any other."

> I feel like lead would be a better analogy for AI

1. Not my analogy, so not a useful place for the comment, really.

2. I think you're wrong anyway, and the key point is that we still smelt and use lead today in roofing. It is possible to handle lead safely and it's perfectly safe to live in a house with lead on its roof.

Asbestos is very different and I think is not used at all in modern buildings. It is banned in about 75 countries worldwide:

https://ibasecretariat.org/alpha_ban_list.php

*These things are not the same.*

Re: privacy is in enough trouble as it is without gratuitous sh*t-stirring

> Mr Proven has over-simplified matters somewhat

You have not even bothered to read my article about it, clearly, and so are judging based on a position of zero knowledge or understanding.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/21/some-mullvad-vpn-customers-tunnel-for-exit-after-co-founder-donates-millions-to-populist-party/5275012

Re: AI is not a single thing.

> It is not the next stage of tech or human evolution.

True.

> It's just a natural language interface strapped on to a search engine.

False, and dangerously so.

> The money will run out and everyone will move on to the next con.

True... unless it precipitates global economic collapse and war just as we accelerate into global climate collapse, as looks quite likely.

Re: Where's the beef?

> I feel it is important to understand that the anti-AI bloc consists of many disparate groups.

1. This is obvious; so obvious, I don't think it needs to be pointed out at all, TBH, let alone being important.

2. This is a common problem. Example: https://www.snp.org/

> I don't necessarily oppose the use of AI.

So, you are not a member of this group, then... and yet, you feel it is important to try to describe a group even though you are not part of it.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Tell me, do you see yourself in this picture?

Hint: focus on the 4th frame.

Re: Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

I don't write the headlines, only the copy.

But since you didn't bother with that, I won't bother explaining.

Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything

Re: Why stop at tabs?

*a _bit_ further

Sign out and sign back in again?

Re: I'm curious to see

> I'm a strange beast

You are not kidding! :-o

You are a QA tester's dream user.

Re: Why stop at tabs?

Read a not further down the first link. :-)

He's describing his home built alternative to LXC. They are full VMs with full isolation.

Re: Why stop at tabs?

> Qubes OS.

Very clever, but looks very inefficient in its approach to me.

I would prefer microVMs:

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/06/18/1845

And that they were diskless:

https://github.com/Technohacker/central-diskless-boot

https://github.com/lispydev/diskless-kvm

Re: I'm curious to see

> the bug that insists on dating all my email arrival times USA style

"Works on my machine."

Seriously. All of them, macOS, Linux and Windows.

I think your locale settings are wrong or broken.

Re: Thunderbird 153 changes

> Try the release notes ...

I did. I included them in the article. They are linked in this sentence:

«

MZLA's Thunderbird messaging client also has a new version, itself an ESR: Thunderbird 153.

»

It's the first one of the section on Thunderbird. I thought that would make it hard to miss.

24H later, I note that neither the FAQ not the "what's new" pages have been fixed.

GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions

Re: Not my cuppa tea

> I think I could emulate a Windows like DE close enough in XFCE, if I were so inclined.

You absolutely can.

Take a look at this:

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/INSTALL.md

> I prefer as a user that I make the design choices, instead of the developers.

Me too.

A small side-project is trying to shape Xfce into something close to Ubuntu Unity, since Unity is not seeing much development any more. I have it _nearly_ there but not quite.

Several have tried making it more Mac-like, but as is often the case, they focus on the form and not the function. I don't want stolen Apple icons: I want a working dock, a working global menu, and so on.

Igor had a go:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/xfce-dock-global-menu.html

This is how desktops should be, IMHO.

Currently, the best "like GNOME but customisable" desktop is COSMIC. I do not daily-drive it, and it is not pretty, but it works and it's fast.

> Gnome needs to out of the box have a Windows theme and MacOs theme.

The _whole point_ of the GNOME 3 total redesign was that it was _unlike Windows_ so RH wouldn't get sued.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2013/06/03/how-microsoft-shattered-gnomes-unity-with-windows-95/547999

(The formatting has gone weird; try Readability mode.)

Re: So many look-alikes

> Are we quite sure this is the blocker we should be working on?

To quote that noted open source luminary Tonto when he and the Lone Ranger found themselves surrounded by angry Comanche:

"What you mean 'we', white man?"

Re: It's in the middle?!?

> On my (only) W11 machine, the task bar is firmly aligned to the left!

I should have pointed out: this _is_ an option in the Simple-Taskbar extension -- and DashToPanel/ArcMenu, and AnduinOS.

Re: It's in the middle?!?

> It absolutely makes sense that if a DE is going to emulate W11 it'd be Gnome which would do it.

That is cruel, mean, and really rather funny. Well played.

> No thank you.

Well, me too, but I can see a "sales" pitch:

1. Company has "old" computers with "old" Windows

2. Manager sees shiny new computers with Win11. Centred buttons are one of the few visible features.

3. Friendly neighbourhood neckbeard offers Linux instead – and shows this desktop that looks the same.

4. Sold!

Re: It's in the middle?!?

> It's in the middle?!?

Standard for Win11.

As people pointed out back when OS X moved the wastebin into a dynamically-self-resizing Dock, this destroys the ability to form muscle memory. When the Start button was always bottom left, you can just whack the mouse to bottom left and click, and it _will work_. This is an application of what's called "Fitt's Law" -- a target that does not require you to aim is effecitively infinitely large. Classic MacOS's old Apple Menu was the same: aim up and left and you _will_ hit it, _without aiming_.

Put the target in something that moves and you must aim. This requires skilful pointer control. Not a problem on touchscreens, so long as you _have_ fingers and your nervous systems work. If you have Parkinson's: well, doesn't matter if we screw you, you were already screwed.

This affect Windows' in-window menu bars. Windows users deny this, but it is not subjective, it's a fact. It is objectively, measurably, demonstrably, ergonomically inferior.

They were only put there because Apple sued DR over GEM having the menu bar at the top of the screen, same as MacOS.

AmigaOS put them at the top too -- but they were invisible because you need to right click for them to appear. Looking different in screenshots is enough: that's all lawyers and judges see.

My impression is that these days, UI engineering is done by looking at screenshots and making things that look different from before, without considering functional rules like this.

Well, it was: soon, it'll be vomited by an LLM bot. Scribble a UI in some crappy web-based drawing tool that needs a gig of SSD to run, and bots will make something that looks similar and sort of runs... needing a gig for a plain text editor.

Valve's Steam Frame pushes Arch Linux toward official Arm64 support

> I hope it means their emulation work will find its way to the Pi

FEX already works on the Pi, if you want it. But bear in mind it's a very low-end device. As I have written before, the 16GB Pi 5 is nearly £300.

https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=53972414431617

You would be _much_ better off with an older PC for gaming than any Pi.

For instance, buy an old "thin client":

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

This used to be a good price comparison site:

https://www.lowcostminipcs.com/

... But it looks like the RAM famine has done it in.

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Re: Sad but not surprising

> There seems to be a sickness in techbros.

Highly relevant:

https://old.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1v2fwu7/the_billionaire/

PDF version:

https://www.patreon.com/thisecommercelife/posts/billionaire-164115406

Re: Sad but not surprising

> I'm not sure I'd call it a "far right" party,

Agreed. I spent some time reading up on Swedish politics before writing this.

> more associated with the far left

Yup. They say of themselves that they don't fit on the L/R axis. OTOH that sort of thing is a common enough excuse.

> I think "populist" is a better description

That's why I used it. ;-)

> along with "unrealistic" and "naïve".

Nicely put. ;-)

NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD

Re: FreeBSD Userland ...

> I do not have anything against NextBSD - but that *'bringing elements of Apple's userland to FreeBSD's very solid kernel'* term sounds as stupid as it can - knowing that Apple pulled FreeBSD userland as part of creating Mac OS X :D

It's a lot more complicated than that.

When Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple, he founded NeXT to make a high-end workstation computer which would be more capable than his former project, the Apple Macintosh.

The Mac had some shared design with the Lisa but a lot was cut: no expansion slots, no RAM expansion, no hard disk only floppies, no fast I/O, a small monochrome screen, no multitasking, no networking.

NeXT aimed to be a sort of anti-Mac: a high end expensive no-compromise machine.

To do this in reasonable time he adopted a lot of existing technology: a state of the art Unix microkernel, called Mach; a state of the art GUI system, Display Postscript; and a whole new programming language, using the trendy new Object Oriented Programming System (OOPS) but brought to the basis of C.

The original Carnegie-Mellon Mach was only the skeleton of a kernel. It was designed to be somewhat Unix-compatible. The plan was to have Unix-like facilities in user space, keeping the kernel small.

The original NeXT had a 25MHz 68030 and 8MB of RAM. To make it perform well enough, the Unix functions were brought right into the kernel. The team took part of the code from 4.3BSD.

When Apple bought NeXT, a team including Jordan Hubbard modernised the BSD parts. Hubbard was a FreeBSD cofounder, so that was his source.

But with Apple money, a lot of modernisation was done to Mac OS X in the early years. A whole new modern `init`, a whole new configuration management tool (replacing almost everything in `/etc`), a whole new device-driver management framework (IOkit), and a lot more. It's BSD based but it's not FreeBSD any more.

The text-mode Unix core of macOS is called Darwin.

Darwin is more different from any of the BSDs than the BSDs are different from one another: NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are all forks of the same project. Even modern Linux is much, *much* closer to the BSDs: they are quite similar in design and share many components.

Darwin is not, at all. It has shared roots but they are some 40 years ago.

Just as Dutch and English are partly based on Germanic dialects but they very much are not German.

Apple mainly sells end-user desktops, laptops, and pocket devices, which must run without maintenance. Its OSes are optimised for that role, on purpose-built hardware.

FreeBSD mainly runs on servers, built for Windows, and carefully maintained by experts.

They are very different OSes.

MacOS is _very_ much not "FreeBSD with a fancy GUI".

Darwin is less similar to FreeBSD than FreeBSD is similar to Linux.

> if rc.conf isn't a part of the NextBSD administration and config stuff

I think you misunderstand the idea here.

If I understand it correctly:

rc.d does not exist, the FreeBSD init is gone and so are all tools around it.

The init is Apple launchd.

Re: beginner question about GUI apps

> Is the MacOS desktop similar to X?

What is "X"? Do you mean X11? No, not even slightly.

The macOS desktop displays using Quartz. Quartz is a descendant of Display Postscript; it is essentially "Display PDF."

Apps tend to be written in Objective C or Swift.

> What is involved in porting apps between Xfce and Wayland and MacOS?

There's little in common, but there are toolkits that do both and you can port apps.

Also, there is XQuartz, a free, FOSS, X11 server for macOS. I installed it recently, for the first time in 20Y: works a treat and let Gtk3 Netsurf run.

> I wonder what becomes of things like rc.conf, service and sysrc, the forthcoming rcd service daemon, etc.

Disclaimer: *not* expert knowledge. I have next to none.

rc.conf -- gone

service and sysrc -- don't know them; suspect, gone

rcd daemon -- this was Joe's stated reason why he thinks FreeBSD won't be interested in picking up any of this and moving it upstreaming it.

My very humble opinion: in terms of upstreaming, this seems more relevant to DragonflyBSD to me.

Re: Sweet, like Bramley

> Big thanks for the article, it's an excellent overview.

Oh, thank you!

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: Making Kernels is fun

> it has a single instruction

You might enjoy my story on this year's IOCCC:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/07/05/c-programmers-commit-fresh-crimes-against-readability/5265981

The first entry I describe is a ~300-character implementation of a OISC called Subleq.

https://techtinkering.com/articles/subleq-a-one-instruction-set-computer/

Re: Never mind the quality, feel the width

> Oops. I meant the other AI rewrite this week, the Bun rewrite from Zig to Rust.

OIC!

Not one of mine -- and while I do read some of my colleagues' stuff, I DGAF about Javascript (or AI, TBH) and didn't see that one.

What's Bun got to do with X, though? I thought you said X AI rewrite...

Re: Fuck "AI"

> There is no AI. Not in the proper definition of Intelligence.

100% bang on. Have one of these -->

Re: Never mind the quality, feel the width

> Not 200x smaller. One 200th of the size.

You are quite right.

At the weekends, you must expect a degraded service. Sometimes, beer is involved, too. ;-)

Re: ...we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun...

> Often followed by "Oh dear...."

I have considered writing a couple of "On Call" stories about my own youthful exploits...

> One of them created an entire ecosystem

Hang on -- what?

Re: Never mind the quality, feel the width

> The C to assembly X11 LLM rewrite doubled the source code size from 500,000 to 1,000,000 lines

I do not understand this comment.

"X11 LLM rewrite" -- you mean Frame, which I wrote about here?

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/14/frame-a-new-x11-server-implemented-directly-in-assembly/5270498

It got _smaller._ Isene said:

<<

X11 is 4 million lines of code

[...]

It [Frame] clocks in at some 20 thousand lines, and it already runs my whole desktop

>>

So, no, not even close.

4000000÷20000 = 200

200x smaller.

Re: Inquiring Minds Want To Know...

> On what hardware is this being tested?

It is right there in the Github README. You did get that far, right?

The VERY FIRST LINE says:

"A modern Rust rewrite of the Linux 0.11 kernel — boots on i386 in QEMU, runs a self-hosted Unix-style userland."

> It IS being tested, right?

It's a toy. It does not matter if it works past booting in a VM.

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Re: Waterfox

> Pity there's no Debian package for it

https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=home%3Ahawkeye116477%3Awaterfox&package=waterfox

Source:

https://github.com/hawkeye116477/waterfox-deb-rpm-arch-AppImage

Re: a 2-week release schedule

> twice weekly!

That's every half a week, so it's semiweekly.

Re: Looking forward to the new ESR

> The AI stuff should never have been there.

Agreed.

> If people want AI they can use Google or DDG AI search.

Hang on, WTAF? That is not even a straw man.

In-browser LLMs are Not The Same Thing.

Mozilla is using it for translation (100% valid), tab group titling (frippery, waste of resources), summaries (bullshit, doesn't work, don't trust it), chat sidebar (only for the mentally disabled, do not trust anyone who uses this for actual decision making).

None of this applies to search engines.

Sounds like *you* might need it, though!

How to teach an old Intel Mac new tricks with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

Re: Interesting

Do it.

(Long comment eaten by Firefox. Not retyping it all.)

Re: OCLP is awesome!

> I have a Mac Mini 2011 'server' that is still in service driving streaming videos to a 1080p plasma TV.

Me too, as it happens. Mine is the basic Core i5 model and has just 8GB of RAM. It does Youtube, iPlayer, and local $WHATEVER-FORMAT files from Bittorrent in VLC just fine.

It was my main desktop 2015-2017 and it's a little trouper. I have replaced 1 DIMM and both disks: it now has a hand-built Fusion Drive of a circa 120GB SSD and a 512GB hard disk, and as that's a very big SSD for a Fusion Drive setup it's blisteringly fast.

When we've watched films or series, I dump them on to an external 1TB USB2 HDD in case we want to watch it again.

(The drive inside a caddy was a leftover after upgrading a friend's kid's laptop. It slightly boggles my mind that a _terabyte_ is a leftover. Even with HD video, a terabyte is _a lot_ and it's nowhere near full.)

> the browsers stopped supporting High Sierra.

Nope. Firefox 115 ESR still works. So does VLC. I can't update Transmission Bittorrent, that's all. _But_ I don't have any paid streaming accounts.

> I will be good on this hardware with OCLP until the same thing happens with browsers & Sequoia.

My advice: stay on the final Firefox ESR. Do not track Firefox $CURRENT on older OSes.

> I've found that simply installing ElementaryOS

I miss having a menu bar, and the dock is not customisable enough for me.

It's very pretty, though.

I tried it as a daily-driver for a while, and it worked, but I had to do a lot of extra work to install all the stuff I wanted using `apt` in a shell and generally tweaking, and at the end, there wasn't a lot of Elementary OS left.

> I'd like to do this on a couple of Mac Pro's, circa 2009 and 2012

Seems doable. Both models are supported:

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.html#mac-pro

If you're not willing to upgrade the GPU, apparently, keep the 2009 on macOS 11 "Big Sur".

The 2012 should run macOS 13 "Ventura". That is one newer than I was on last month, and it's still able to run the latest Raspberry Pi Imager -- so, you know, critical stuff ;-) -- and I believe Google Chrome 151 and above.

Re: Wish this was around years ago

> Got a MBP 2010 and it happily runs Ventura using OpenCore.

I have a similar machine. I bought some additional RAM and hacked Catalina onto it for this article:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/09/13/5-ways-to-refresh-the-os-and-browser-on-an-elderly-mac/727985

It works pretty well, but now, I am thinking of trying a newer OS.

Re: "We've done our time, served our sentence, and we don't want to go back."

> Whatever he did, it must have been bad.

Modesty forbids me revealing.

But I used my salary to buy a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310. I suffered no envy at all of Amiga and ST owning friends.

Then, I bought a Suzuki GSX 250...

> Yep - "no Tahoe" isn't a caveat, it's a selling point.

I'd already blocked Tahoe on the one machine I have that's capable of running it. So as a matter of principle, I can't disagree with your point.

However, it is and will remain an important goal for OCLP: macOS 26 is the last macOS that will run on x86 -- and that means that after a while, any projects that still support macOS on x86 will at some stage require the latest version – i.e. Tahoe.

MacOS 27 "Golden Gate" will still include Rosetta 2, so even if it can't run on x86, it will be able to run x86 apps. So the future timeline for x86 macOS theoretically extends out to the end of support of macOS 27, circa 2030.

Firefox 115 ESR still supports macOS 13, released in 2017, and that Firefox is still getting updates. (That probably ends this year.) Extrapolating from that, if its performance is still acceptable, the useful life of an Intel Mac _as a Mac_ extends for about a decade after the last official OS it can run. So, circa 2036 or so?

And of course, after that last macOS is no longer supported by new apps, the machines will still run Linux.

MacOS is actually pretty quick. I put 10.13 on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro about 5 years or so ago and it worked surprisingly well: quicker than I'd expect say Ubuntu with GNOME to be on a C2D, and up around Alpine Linux levels of snappiness.

Linux might not be _faster_ as it is on Windows boxes, but still usable.

Resolute Raccoon on this beast was pretty snappy. It would still be useful without its Thunderbolt Display -- I could just use the Thunderbolt 1 socket with a Mini-Displayport cable and an ordinary DP or HDMI screen, and use a USB 3 hub for a few more nice fast expansion ports.

A moment of silence, please, for the final release of Debian on x86-32

> FreeBSD 14.4 on an old x86-32 PC

This is something of a small opportunity for NetBSD, which is now the closest thing to a mainstream OS which fully supports x86-32.

OpenBSD is more modern and the hardware it supports, it supports better. You get current or near-current GNOME, KDE Plasma, etc., faster Wifi, lots of CPU cores, all that sort of thing.

NetBSD is a bit less extreme, though. You could run it on a Core Solo or Core Duo Mac -- the handful of 32-bit models -- and use your Apple Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, maybe headphones. Not with OpenBSD.

Re: Dunno…

> 2Gb should be plenty to run Linux. Maybe there’s a problem somewhere.

I strongly concur.

My favourite Debian derivative a few years ago was Raspberry Pi Desktop and it was usable in 2024 or so on a Core 2 Duo in 2GB RAM. You could surf the web, send and receive email, do basic office productivity stuff -- it came with LibreOffice. All the core uses of a PC were still doable without saintly patience.

Sure, I'd use faster if I had it, but it wasn't unpleasant to use.

I fear that setting a minimum baseline of a 64-bit machine with say 8GB of RAM is going to lead to spectacular levels of code bloat -- just as RAM prices return to the levels of 15 years ago or something

> Well, goodbye 32-bit.

Hardly.

The kernel still supports it, although now it wants something like Pentium Pro or later. A bunch of distros still support it, including Slackware, Alpine Linux, and Mageia.

x86-64 code _can_ be a bit faster because it has more registers, but x86-32 code is more compact. Given the same source compiled to both x86 and AMD64, the x86 code will be noticeably smaller.

But Debian bills itself as "the universal OS" and that's definitely fading.

Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

Re: Windows Shell - directly in assembly

> Windows Shell - directly in assembly

Just asking... how is this connected with the article in any way?