I make things: electronics and software and music and stories and all sorts of other things.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is why I really want to make my own open-source console platform.

    Indie developers can target it, it can have some kind of cartridges (probably flash based) which people can sell directly, and complete open-source and hackable (but with simple ways to customize, so people can buy accesssories instead of making them, if they’re not maker inclined).

    If enough people could use this console, then even AAA devs might consider it.

    But the problem is it has to be decently powerful while staying affordable. Traditionally consoles lose money (recouped when people buy first party titles). It’s a failed business model as evident by all these major studios moving away from it. First SEGA leaving the console market, then Nintendo making Game Key Cards, and now Sony removing physical all together.

    I mean tbh, people could simply target the Raspberry Pi 3B as a standard platform for gaming. Those still go for $35, unlike the Pi 4 and Pi 5, and are capable of 2D games and limited 3D games (perfectly fine for Indie). It runs Linux which is easy enough to develop for both in direct code and from game engines (except Unreal which is annoying about it). Add some sort of “card hat” like those readers a few people have made, and it could be great for that world at least. Wrap it up into a product for like $50 with a controller and it could be something

    But idk, the AAA world is gonna continue to shift from these models. At least PC is a bit better with its digital storefronts, but it’s not perfect either, and you still don’t “own” anything.





  • Are they using any original GNU coreutils code as reference? My understanding is nothing is 1:1. They’re trying to build, from the ground up, a totally new codebase that has the same user-facing functionality but under the hood is idomatic Rust code (so nothing like the GNU C code)

    They are recreating something that matches behavior not using licensed GPL code. Which is the same way the GNU coreutils were a recreation of the proprietary Unix tools in an effort to provide open source alternatives.

    Like you wouldn’t say “An appropriate amount of work to slap a GPL license on somebody else’s work” in reference to GNU recreating the Unix tools, so why say it here?







  • I have this idea. It’s taken from the Android world. In Android, apps all get their own user, and can only access their own filesystem. They are then added to groups like Sound or Files or whatever to gain access to other things. This is simplifying but gave me an idea.

    So my idea is two parts:

    1. We add more groups to our Unix and Unix-like codebases. Piecemeal access to different folders like a fs-docs group for access to /home/<whoever>/Documents
    2. Each app, when installed, gets a user and a folder (maybe /opt/<pkgname> or /apps/<pkgname> and a group called app-<pkgname>). It requests during install (or maybe runtime via a permissions management application) access to specific groups for its user. Launching an app then becomes sudo -u app-<name> /opt/<pkgname>/<binname>.

    You login as a user with access to limited permissions and then run the application. Thus you run it sandboxed but without special software like Flatpak or AppImage - just standard Unix groups.

    Claude code I believe has its own sandboxing system, but with this system it would be the system itself restricting claude, not the claude code app, truly limiting accidental outreach.

    I built a demo package manager using this concept a while back called ‘bokspm,’ though I kept it private (and now, my current job will not let me open source it)