621: The Sunday Secret Sauce

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boys. Let's see what we have, right? And this first one was, I think, a story we started noticing about 21 weeks ago. It was the first signs that we might be seeing trouble within the Graphene OS project.

Careful. But, you know, the extreme headline is I'm a little concerned about the future of my Pixel lifestyle. I've been really enjoying the Pixel 7 and drafting OS. It's been working really well. But we have two, I think, headwinds that are worth putting out there. Google has announced a round two of voluntary exits for employees in the platform and devices group, which includes people in the Pixel hardware and Android operating system group.

This is the second round so there's just that I don't know what that signals but it's just noteworthy it could be redundancy, yeah well I guess last year they merged Pixel team and Android team so you might have some I don't know reallocation of folks who just wanted to work on hardware just software now have cross duties or something, yeah I uh it's just Pixel is just on the verge of competitive right now and so I'm just worried anything that reduces its competitive edge I uh,

The iPhone 13 and 14 are still better than the Pixel 7, right? And then they just, now they have, what are they on, the 15 or 16? I don't know. Anyways, but I think that's just like in the background. The broader concern that I have is the seemingly wider and wider use of the Play Integrity API.

And Graphene OS does have an OS release coming that tries to enable Google's credential service via a sandbox Google Play, to make sign-in with Google at least work because sign-in with Google started breaking on Graphene OS devices because a subset of apps require it now to work in a certain way. But I think the bigger problem is we've heard about the Revolt app, WhatsApp, you saw this app, you saw it with DoorDash, Wes.

Yeah, I think Lyft as well this morning. So far nothing's not worked for me. I know Revolut isn't working I think, but... And the warning is that, hey.

There's like a Play Integrity API issue here yeah so in the one of the latest releases now it'll you could turn this off but it will ping you with a little notification that says hey by the way this app use the play integrity services so you can get notifications or you can even block it from having access to it so so far i did i did try that with doordash and it didn't complain about having a block so it's clearly not and using it in any strict way but you have had

this problem in a more strict way with the cash yeah yeah this is something we've seen it's not new it just may be getting worse well and if you look uh the graphene folks do a good job of this but revoluted in particular you know it's like you could understand back in the day and like oh yeah okay you clearly have a rooted phone that means yeah you shouldn't trust the client anyway for whatever reason but you could almost understand the logic

right but like this is an unrooted phone that specifically takes steps to enable as much or more of the security that SOC does. And then, as Graffin points out, it's clearly not a real security commitment because it's not like they're stopping known insecure, unupdated Android versions, right? They're just, you didn't fall into the default implementation of this policy that we wanted to have as a checkbox and sorry. Right, and Graffin OS writes on X, Google Play completely works on Graffin OS

from a technical perspective. It's banning using Graffin OS with the Play Integrity API. The same applies to some other banking and financial apps, there isn't a way for us to deal with this which won't be easy for them to block from working. So there's not a lot they can do.

But isn't that exactly what google wants man this is i mean for me it's this is like a, like the whole family uses the cash app and the reason why i got the whole family on the cash app is because i needed to get them off of apple pay right and then if it stopped working, there's no saving face i just have i would have to use stock android or an iphone right, it's also where i i worry about and i think cash app it's made harder by this like a lot of their competing services

at least these days i know venmo for instance has a web platform yeah cash app doesn't right and i know there are still some plenty of apps that i see i'm even calling them apps plenty of services that that's the they assume that's how you're going to interface with them yeah and i have not really ever gone down like the you know run way droid or whatever you know, to like have a backup of Android to do those kinds of things, I don't really want to.

But also, I don't know, Brent, doesn't this feel like a move by Google to kind of just tighten down the controls a bit? Because they could change this to work in a way where Graphene OS was allowed. Graphene OS can technically be allowed. They're essentially doing the web version of checking for your browser agent and then telling you the web page doesn't work. Well, I don't think Google really has any incentive to make this work.

Or to keep it working, or to support it? Well, they would if they understood that it was keeping some amount of users interested in Pixels, I think. Right. This is what's keeping us buying the Pixel hardware. I mean, that's one part, right? Their Android part maybe doesn't make it. And buying and using Android apps. Yeah, true. So we're all, do you have the Play Store installed? Reluctantly, yes. So we all three installed the Play Store. Only recently, like within the last month.

I'm just saying, like, we are consuming Google hardware. We are using Google services. Yeah. And you know what else? If I didn't use my Pixel, I would cancel my Google Fi. Yeah, I probably would too. So there's multiple ways as a Graphene OS user, I am earning them ongoing revenue. There was also this whole thing, right? Where, I mean, this may not be, are there any of the same execs left? Who knows?

But like, they sort of made a push with Android for all of the faults and all the stuff that they've now just put under the Play API instead of being an Android. They did specifically intentionally launch a platform that lets you install other firmware on phones.

I do wonder how much is google's obviously like the larger push and like making these apis and maybe even promoting developers using them but uh the graphing folks do point out that at least some of this at least for specific cases like revolute may have to do less with google and maybe even less with the individual app and more with like the layers of plumbing and third-party libraries in between where these are the things google's providing information and hooks and then

it's these various sort of security policies or layers that are opting like in particular this Like Revolut is just implementing something. Yeah. Right. Like it would let you do it if you, it won't let you use it if you've relocked your firmware with a custom key. But if you just don't lock your firmware at all, that's not a problem for it.

So like it doesn't really make sense. Oh. And it doesn't really seem like if it was actual intentionality from the people looking out of these options in like a fully configured way that you would do that. But if it's something that you inherited through the various API layers and things that you're building on top of, it's a little more difficult. Or you didn't even have the choice necessarily. Which is the way it usually works in corporate development.

Huh. That's doubly bad. Actually, that's worse. I don't know where this goes. Other than we're just going to keep an eye on it. Right. I mean, unfortunately, it feels like that's... By picking a niche where we try to put ideals into it, you always get to suffer. Would you go to Lineage OS?

I'd try it. i've been there i mean i moved from lineage to graphene and it had some great features to it sure but uh i think the selling point of graphene is much much stronger yeah i agree i i think because of the weight of the family pole i think i would go back to iphone if it makes sense yeah. But tied to next so well and you are already right you there are macs in your life you have the watch like you already know and like and know how to manipulate

that ecosystem yeah yeah yeah Well, the whole family is on iMessage. Right. Versus like I would have to, if I was going to do that, I would just have the one and then I would start buying more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the calculation they're probably making here is like the pixels weren't necessarily meant for only us, right? They wanted them to sell big time. I know. I'm using it more like a Nexus. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly the same. So they need major numbers to make this work out.

And I'm not convinced our little niche is enough, unfortunately. Yeah, I agree. I just don't understand why not support Graphene OS, because there is a growing market of these hardened phones, and there is a growing market of privacy, and there is sort of this like... We can do something iPhone can't aspect of it. It's almost worth just keeping alive for that. I don't know. But then aren't they admitting that their version of Android isn't the most hardened?

Maybe. Would you go back to stock? Would you ever go back to stock? Only if I was forced. Before you went to iPhone, you'd go to stock? Honestly, I trust the stock iOS more than I trust stock Android. Jeez. Yeah, I think I would change how I use my phone. Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I would probably go stock just because I could use the same device.

And then i would see how much i hated it like there are things that i liked right like i don't love google assistant but it works okay yeah uh having i don't i did specifically reinstall the google app partially to play with their new ai story summary but also their feed is pretty decent for finding stuff for the show sometimes so like having that back on the side of the thing wouldn't be the worst i don't like the i don't think it's

there now even oh is it not i don't think so i might actually do a linux phone oh yeah i could see you doing that yeah i choose suffering usually yeah yeah but then because it's like if if it was like stock android or apple i think actually i would take the third option linux phone yeah and it would be rough i yeah you guys are gonna have to support me we could just get you a mi-fi and like a smaller think pad right, leg strapped i'd like it strapped to my leg please um yeah just because i think

we're with graphene in a really nice place where we can trust the software a little bit more at least I feel like I can and have the control to install pretty much whatever you want. And yet also at least up to this point fit into the normie apps and get those working in a way that feels okay, right but if that goes away then you know that golden age is gone I'm not sure it would ever come back really.

Of particular point of contention, brought up by several kernel developers, including eventually Linus Torvalds himself, is that Hector Martin, the primary developer of Asahi Linux, used social media to voice his concerns and try to influence the situation on multiple occasions.

This approach was criticized by Linus Torvalds, who stated that social media is not a solution for kernel development issues, and that social media brigading made him not want to have anything to do with Hector Martin's approach. Dave Arlisle also stated the community does not need grandstanding, brigading, or, quote, streamer drama creation.

Ouch. Yeah, and so I was telling Brent, like, this is where I would love some sort of maybe LLM-powered tool where we could go back across the members' pre-show and play each time. We've gently brought up the fact that Hector seems to be kind of starting fights with kernel maintainers on social media, and I don't think this is going to go well, because I think we've done it probably three or four times over the years. And I'm kind of almost surprised it took this long for it really to blow up.

And it's unfortunate. And so Hector's position is this is sort of a tool in order to bring attention to an issue that we have had very little progress on. And the kernel team's position is that it's not really improving the process. It's not affecting change, but it is creating drama and strife. Right. And it's not just, I mean, you know, it's not like a ban on talking about Colonel things on social media. A lot of this is the, Hector is, I think, justifiably to some extent,

upset about the lack of progress and the fights around Rust and the Colonel. But... When you have a big platform, you get a lot of people who aren't related to the kernel discussion now hearing and seeing Hector's side and commenting in and starting a whole discussion. It's really quite separate from what was happening in the kernel. And it strikes me, I was just thinking, we've talked about some of the strife between Kent Overstreet and the BcacheFS developer and the kernel.

So when he had the Code of Contact stuff, that was fighting about, he wanted changes to the VFS layer. Yeah. Because he noticed that there was a functionality in that that could cause problems for advanced file systems like bcachefs. I'd like to learn more about if Butter was affected. I haven't looked into it. Good question. But he was arguing like this will cause bugs. If we don't fix it, future file systems could have used this the wrong way and run into these issues.

So it was like a correctness and data loss thing that affected his project that he was working on. And obviously, Hector has a lot of reason to care very much about Rust for Linux. But maybe he wanted this particular DMA abstraction or would eventually need it.

I don't know but like he was not otherwise involved in this thread thank you for i did not make that clear thank you yeah it wasn't hector's rust patches right and so it's sort of like i get being frustrated but you instead of sort of letting that thread continue to play out and you know maybe let let the people involved kind of push and be like yeah for clarity which was slowly happening again maybe not as fast as any of us want right but

there was some you know greg chimed in at one point and there was some back and forth and then the whole thing now linus is expending his energy not trying to set tone about Rust, he's fighting with Hector. Right, and I think one of the things that kind of pushed this into sort of the boiling point was.

Hector deleted the post on Mastodon but he started he claims to be kidding in retrospect, but I don't actually know if that's true or not in my opinion, but he wanted to create a kernel contributor hall of shame, for all of the maintainers and contributors that they have problem with, that they could then publicly shame on this list and I think that's kind of what pushed this over and yeah it's it stinks because there

is probably truth that you have somewhat I guess what you could call rogue maintainers who are not necessarily accountable to actually deliver on something that part of the other kernel team is committed to and so they can slow things down, It's interesting, though, to see, depending on the information you know about this and the background you know about the people involved, it's interesting to see different interpretations.

Some people are saying this as Hector is fighting a good fight here, and some people see it as social media and streamer drama getting drawn into the kernel development process. And the mailing list is pretty exciting. I read through the whole thing. I mean, Hector really goes after everything, from how the kernel developers make their money to the tools they use to the fact that they have to use email. He really goes after everything about developing the kernel.

And you can see why Linus came back with it seems like our process works at least okay kind of comment. I think it's fair to question is it working okay in the case of Rust for Linux? But clearly they continue to ship kernels. We report on them. We keep upgrading. It's not like the kernel. There's questions about what do we do and how do we improve it and how do we get young people involved and maybe email's not helping.

But yeah, when you have one post that lumps all these things together, again, now we're having a big giant fight that's not going to have any kind of local resolution here, right? Like, I do think, right, both with Kent and with Hector, there are things to bring up about, like, how do we make changes in the kernel? How do we balance, you know, moving fast and breaking things with the stability that the kernel needs?

I do think the Rust thing is tricky, though, too, because, like, yes, there's a high-level intention of we were going to do Rust in the kernel.

But and it's a lot more important for asahi you know they've chosen to use it and i think for very good reasons if they've as they've talked about the advantages but you know until we're at the point where it's really in and we're relying on it i can understand too from a lot of other maintainers who we all know have very busy and a lot of responsibility like it's not necessarily a priority right the priority is getting the next kernel release

with the features that companies are expecting or users are expecting or the bug fixes that are needed and moving to rust is a goal but i can see why people are frustrated in the short term but i can also see from like a broader kernel perspective being like right we've never done this before yeah preempts took a decade nothing in production is actually using this right now so like what is the actual expectation for how fast it should move right and and

then if you just narrow that's a great point just in rust in general in the kernel but then if you were to narrow it even further to asahi how many asahi linux users are there maybe under 500 000 maybe under 400 000 300 000 right maybe under 200 000 even so yeah Yeah, you're right, as far as kernel priorities go. It's on there, but it's not probably even in the top 10. Right. That's rough.

we had another big Asahi update.

When configuring a macho boot object, we now get dropped into an environment where Apple's SPTM is running on GL2 and we're supposed to talk to it from EL2 with an MMU already enabled to set up page tables. So this neither works now for Linux nor for running ZNU under our hypervisor, which was what they used to reverse engineer the new hardware.

So their little trick for, well, not little, but their ingenious trick to reverse engineer the hardware is gone and they need to come up with a new way to figure that out m3 is looking pretty bad m4 is even further out well we always knew this was a possibility it's kind of part of how it works right i do think in my interview with hector martin and linux action news i specifically asked him about this and he was hopeful at the time that the platform changes would be iterative between m1

m2 m3 m4 and that they would be minor changes for them to keep up with them. I don't think that's the case necessarily. I also don't think they're necessarily down and out. And when it comes to Linux, I still, it would be nice to have, you know, a MacBook where you could do a boot macOS and Asahi and under Linux, it was very capable and yada, yada, yada. Obviously, that's the ideal case, right? And it's pretty close on my M1. It's pretty close.

Especially now that I have sound, you know, I'm pretty happy. Once Wi-Fi and sound and 3D started working. Then it feels like a laptop. Yeah. But I still think the ideal use case is a headless M1 Mac Mini or M2 Mac Mini or if they have an M2. But, you know, like that class of machine, something in the corner, low power, you're using as a home lab.

And we always knew, right, one segment of use cases for this was going to be the used sort of aftermarket of like, well, M1s are still totally fine if you don't expect and need the latest and greatest. Yeah. And things are still rolling out. Like Linux 6.15 seems to be landing support for the touch bar. So even, I don't even know what Macs have touch bars, but yeah, the touch bar is going to be working in 6.15. I don't know. I like the idea of controlling apt from a touch bar for some reason.

Yeah, or at least getting like a progress, a visual indicator of progress for packages. D-package telling you why your system is irreparably broken. But right there in your touch bar. I'd just like B-top there all the time. Yeah. Or a ping. You know, you could do a few things. I was just thinking ping immediately. That would be way more useful for us. A single line of journal output. Yeah. Linux users would have taken more. I think the Mac users were always very hard on the touch bar.

I think Linux users could have had a few good ideas in there. Yeah right especially plasma desktop users that's another one of those things it's like it's not a bad idea but if you had some something even remotely like an open spec or any chance anyone else in the ecosystem would have adopted anything similar you know where they went wrong they shouldn't have got rid of the f keys maybe they fix that later on yeah but on the early models no f keys oh just chris you would do like a bitcoin

ticker tape totally yeah you can have a little yeah oh smash that buy button right right on the touch bar oh that's dangerous oh that's so dangerous.

of unified memory. That's a key thing here. This is low-power DDR5X memory that is unified, which means it's baked in, it's built in. But the idea is this specifically is designed for AI workloads where unified memory does seem to make a difference. They're saying it's a modular desktop, but you can't really replace things like RAM or CPU. But it does actually have a couple of the module slots, at least on the front, for the accessories that you can use with the framework laptop today.

So if you've already invested in some of those USB-C-based modules, you can actually slot them into the front of this thing. And it's tiny. It starts at $1,099 for 8-core version with 32 gigs of RAM. Now, you cannot upgrade that RAM. The top tier, with a Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 with 128 gigabytes of RAM, comes in around $2,000 US dollars. They say it makes local AI processing much more affordable than a traditional GPU-based system, which is true.

You know, I mean, the video card alone would cost more than this. They call it a fully modular design with standard PC components and an expansion card system. And then it has swappable panels on the front, RGB options, and more. Windows 11, Ubuntu, Fedora, and gaming OS options like Bazite will be available. Interesting to see Bazite incorporated. What is your reaction, boys, to a framework desktop that you can't swap out the CPU or the RAM?

If you want more memory, if you want a new CPU, you got to get an entire new MOBO. What do you think, Brent, as a framework user? I hesitate a little. I understand they're trying to hit a different market, perhaps. But this moves them away from their core principles that got them a bunch of attention. I mean, they had a lot of success with that original model of being super user-friendly, repairable, upgradable, etc., etc. So this feels like a departure.

You know Brent, right? Maybe they're just not aiming at me. He wants to be able to trade it down immediately.

I was hoping everybody forgot i did that because now i slightly regret it but, yeah i mean okay all right but does it make you feel better, if they do the thing they do with the laptops where every generation or two new mobo you can swap the mob well isn't that true every desktop that's where it doesn't feel that much worse to me because i don't i feel like yes you like you can swap cpus in desktops but depending on exactly the generation and the type.

You probably have to swap RAM. You're probably going to need a different socket. Like there's going to be a lot of changes. And if you're reasonably happy with your build, you're probably going to run it until you're going to want to swap out a bunch of stuff anyway, or at least I tend to. Yeah, that is more my use case. Back in the day, I swapped components more, you know, or I'd pop more RAM in. I'd buy, I'd make sure I'd buy it with some open RAM slots. Right.

You know, I'd do it maybe, you know, every other GPU generation, which is just totally unreasonable now. Yeah, every fifth one now. I mean, if you think about it from, You know, you want a system that does local AI work. That's the part I'm excited to see, right? Is like having more things that aren't. Just spend 5K on a NVIDIA card targeting this in a way that can be a little more competitive with what Apple's doing.

It's slightly larger height wise than a banana. That's how small this thing is. Now, it's not super cheap, but also it's not unreasonable if you consider it's a pretty powerful GPU-CPU combo. Mine, as configured with a 2-terabyte NVMe and then a 1-terabyte for home storage, would be $1,926. If I was working at a shop where we were doing a bunch of this stuff for the day-to-day, you know, actual workload, I would for sure be pressuring my boss to buy me one of these for my next rig.

Yeah, it'd be a good little desktop work machine. I could also see this being, assuming it's not too loud, and they let you pick quiet CPU fans, so, you know, there's a shot. Could be a good little OBS machine, production machine, Reaper machine. Oh, true, yeah. Again, where we just kind of set it and don't touch it for a long time. But I would be inclined to at least want to go with 64 gigs of RAM.

So it's not super cheap either. So if you go with the base, 32 gigs of RAM, it's $500 to go to 64 gigs. And then if you want to go to 128 and you may want to max it out since you can never upgrade it again and if you are legitimately doing AI workloads you want to go to 128 gigs of RAM then you get the max plus 395 so you get a better CPU too but it's $900.

And you're in batch 7 which ships in Q3 this is interesting they went small too I will be very very very closely watching the early reviews to see what people think, This gets me thinking about the Thaleo Mega that they came out with recently. It says right here, Thaleo Megas is the world's smallest, well, not anymore, and quietest workstation for deep learning and scientific computing. But that's like 6K USD. I mean, it's US manufactured and all that open source hardware stuff.

I wonder if the performance difference, because, you know, that's going to be desktop hardware, right? Where this thing is a little bit closer to a laptop. I mean, it's, you know, a little bit more like, it's like an iMac without the screen, in a way. Or maybe like the Mac Studio, but, you know, the AMD side of it. Okay, so you're saying we take this thing, we put it in a backpack, we load it up with batteries, and this is Brent's new remote rig. Yeah, man.

Way better than I have. That way it can do on-the-fly transcriptions of the interviewers.

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new dock as part of that price. So why a Thunderbolt dock at all? I kind of rejiggered some of my office setup. This is going to be summer. I wanted something in my living room, which is a little more bright and airy of a space, and I haven't been using it as much as I could. And so I redid some monitors, and then I had a setup where I wanted to have the laptop and two monitors going. And by default, there is an HDMI port on this ThinkPad, and so it can power two, but it can't power all three.

Right. Even with a USB-C adapter, but with Thunderbolt, you can. So I just wanted to pick up something I could have and then make it a little easier to dock and untuck. So with Thunderbolt 3 off that thing, you can run the internal screen and two external monitors simultaneously? Yep. And the video card keeps up? Yeah.

Huh. That's nice. So far, I'm actually, because I need to get some DisplayPort cables, right now I have it set up so that it's using the HDMI port on the laptop itself for one of the screens, and then just one fed from the display board, but you can do it whatever way. It might be better. It's like, remind me of the generation of that video card, though. It's not great. No. I mean, that's why I'm surprised. I mean, I guess I'm not shocked. I know. Yeah.

It's surprisingly been capable. I think so. I don't know. Amazing. Absolutely great. So, and did you have to go in on Plasma or I7? I7-8650. It's the CBO. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I know, right? Did you have to, like, authorize any security stuff for Thunderbolt or anything like that? No. Did you have to turn on anything in Nix? I didn't do a thing. I mean, I probably can. I've used Bolt CTL and D and stuff before, especially because there's a Thunderbolt doc here at the studio.

I've used Thunderbolt at work, you know. But, no, I don't know if I enabled that in my Nix config. I actually haven't checked thoroughly, but it just plugged it in. Yeah. And Plasma is doing great with the monitors. Like, there's no issues with it being wonky with ordering or, like, some of them not waking up or anything it's all just been working do you remember which dell dock it is.

W19 something because you could pick them up used for a great price and yeah some of these things are like 300 bucks originally i almost got the lenovo one that was sort of like paired with this which i could also get for like 60 to 100 bucks used but and it probably turns out maybe it doesn't matter but, The internet was suggesting that one wasn't Flopty compatible, and the Dell one is.

So the ports were a little better on the Lenovo, but I was like, you know, for under $100, like, yeah, Flopty just seems great. I'll probably be buying a second dock at some point anyway. Somewhere, somewhere, I think, in this tomb of old technology of a studio, I have a Lenovo dock that has an NVIDIA graphics card in it. So it's a Thunderbolt dock with an eGPU built into it. I remember you. Yeah. It was cool. Although the problem is, why would you want something like that? To game.

And guess what happens? It overheats and significantly thermal throttles. So, yeah. But one of my favorite Thunderbolt docks I ever built was actually just an eGPU that had a bunch of other ports on it as well. Here we go. WD19TB. There you go. That's the dock. You told me 19S yesterday. I was looking at the wrong thing. Oh, man. Way to go. Jeez. Well, I don't know. You should let me take apart that dock with the GPU, see if I can make it not thermal tunnel.

Yeah, if we can find it, I'll set it aside. I think that would be great, because it still works. And I think it's like a 10 series GTX. It's an old, old one, but you know, it might be fun to see if it works. Who knows? It can't hurt. Well, it can hurt, but... Wes, I sneaky heard you say that you're thinking of getting a framework.

Oh, I don't know. I mean, at some point it'll be new laptop time and the framework is probably the number one contender pending something, you know, some other consideration at time of purchase. Yeah. So there's kind of always like a background framework that's not in the cart, but it's like in the cart before the cart. In the wishlist. Yeah. I'm always thinking like, what if my main machine died? What would I do? I'm always kind of toying with that idea.

I think maybe a framework would be a big contender, or maybe the AI desktop. Yeah, that would be tempting, too. I don't know. I am just going to wait. Just going to wait and see what we get towards the end of the year, see what all the different vendors have. That's where I'm at, too. You've been waiting. You've been saying this for, like, at least a year now, Chris. Yeah, longer. Yeah, I know. But I'm still getting by. I've heard good things come to those who wait.

Pretty much ever since you gave your Dev1 away. Yeah, that's true. Which was a couple years ago, I think. That was two years ago. I know. Yeah. It is what it is. You're getting close to the point where you've lost or given away more laptops than you've bought. I know. It's wild. It's wild. You know, the cost of things and whatnot for the last few years, I haven't really gotten, you know, like I'm on older phones and all this kind of stuff.

And I realized I used to have this sort of trickle down cycle where different generations of devices would go to kids. But now now that i don't have any devices to pass down but they need device upgrades like wait so i'm not getting myself a device but i'm buying them new devices like what's going on here i've messed something up hand me down soon and that's what i realized i had established a natural rhythm and i should have just stuck with it.

into the bootleg from time to time. And I do have a soft spot for the fact that the Starlink network uses Linux. And so from time to time, I like to track that.

There's some unencrypted components like the boot chain, the kernel, and some parts of the file system. And then they set up sort of a basic QMU emulation environment to do the debugging to sort of get the system to try to cooperate. That's so cool. They have a, when the system boots, it has a runtime that unpacks into slash SX local slash runtime, which contains a statically linked C++ executable and Go-based software for user communication. All right.

I thought this was interesting, and I want to know what you guys think of this. It seems that the system mainly relies on a C++-based program to bypass the kernel for handling network packets. The Linux kernel is mostly used just to provide basic hardware drivers and process management, and then user packets for communication on the network are handled by a user-space processor. That's cool.

That's interesting. There's a lot of facilities built for that, because a lot of these, if you're trying to do Linux for your device, especially on the control plane, but then you like maybe the data plane, kernel stuff, because the kernel network stack is really flexible at the cost of not necessarily optimal performance for just doing basic network, moving packets around.

So there's a bunch of hooks built in that let you, at various degrees of structure, things like EBVF, but there's networking specific things that let you hand off control to a user space so they can implement a faster stack that just makes fewer decisions or the custom decisions. Yeah, we've heard the tail scale guys talk about this a little bit. Yeah, yeah, true. It'd be very interesting to know what things, like, was it just performance?

Or, you know, are there, like, particular, like, network manipulations or changes or issues they had with the kernel? Like, what motivated different pieces of implementing that? I'd be very curious to know. Yeah, I don't like to talk about this kind of stuff. Okay, so they, through this analysis, they thought they came across something a little freaky. Yeah. They found a program labeled Ethernet Data Recorder. Ooh.

I mean, it just sounds like a backdoor. Yeah. Right? It just sounds like a backdoor. So based on other clues in the firmware, it seems that it's an application related to capturing satellite telemetry. All the traffic captured is also encrypted using the hardware keys that are fused into the SOC.

It does not appear to collect any user privacy data. so it must be like for support getting diagnostics on the that would make sense yeah okay so this is also surprising not surprising in other words your ISP knows what you send on the internet. The core software includes the functionalities that seemingly would work for the satellites or the ground relays or obviously the user terminal. And then as the system boots, it figures out what it is based on the type of

hardware that is on the system and the peripherals. Oh, fun. And then loads the corresponding logic, as they put it. That's crazy. Which you could almost wonder if there's a way somehow to get access to this thing, if you could make it think it's a satellite or a ground station. And then we can make like a bottle rocket. Yeah, Brent, that's right. Yes. I do think it's interesting, right?

Even on the whole platform they control, they've gone this route of like, we build our own static world and we ship generic stuff that just sort of, I mean, totally reasonable. Here's the other thing. So once it identifies, okay, I'm a user terminal, I'm the dishy, it then initializes a script that writes 41 SSH keys into slash root.ssh authorized keys. And then it opens up port 22 to the satellite network, I guess. So who do you email to get your key added?

Right, right. I mean, I wonder if that's like diagnostics. What would that be for? You know, because when you open up the app... Or is that like raw remote updates checked though? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, diagnostics would make sensor support. It's a lot of keys though. It seems like that'd be one or two or three keys, not 22 keys, but 41 keys. But I would hate to think what it would actually be like on a Comcast router or modem or something like that. It could be, it could be that one,

even if it was one key, it could be used by tens of thousands of people. So who knows? Maybe a good case for when you do the like certificate version or other, where you can issue, you know, like, Oh, we want to get access. So we signed a temporary key that'll work just for a day for your technician or whatever. We got pretty lucky on our road trip for internet. We didn't have any serious demands. And when we needed to do the show, PJ hooked us up with ethernet.

He took that ethernet like out of his wall through the wall. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Like the things you do for us. Yeah. That was a lifesaver. I guess at some point he has to put it back in the wall. Can we just have PJ set up Ethernet everywhere we do a live show? He shows up a day or two ahead. I mean, we'll be there too to play support, obviously. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah.

Microsoft clarified that the inetpub folder is linked to a security patch and should not be deleted despite looking unnecessary. And then the error code that people are getting is linked to a win RE update. Microsoft says updates typically succeed after a system restart, even if an error appears. Users are urged not to reattempt install or troubleshoot the error, as it should resolve itself.

The blue screens of death for Windows 11 users, which are becoming more common when they're getting things like secure kernel error, Microsoft suggests users rely on its known issue rollback fix, which takes up to 24 hours to apply. What? Meanwhile, Windows Hello facial recognition was broken in the recent update for some users. Although Microsoft says it's just an edge case. And then Microsoft accidentally, around the same time, pushed a Windows 11 upgrade to ineligible Windows 10 PCs.

So now they won't boot, but Microsoft is working on a fix. And all of this is happening as Windows 10 is reaching end of life on October 14th, along with Office 2016 and 2019. These systems will not receive updates post-October. And, you know, that's going to be probably millions of Windows PCs. Running Linux and, or that could run Linux, but are running Windows 10 and old versions of Office.

This is a lot of bad to hit at once. We don't normally talk about Windows stuff in the show, obviously, but. This is a lot. We have the Windows 11 blue screens of death, Windows Hello being broken, that weird inetpub folder, which if you delete causes problems, which as far as I know is related to IIS, but maybe something different in this case. There is an update error that's giving you an error message, but you're supposed to just ignore it and wait for it to fix itself.

And if you really bork things, you can use the rollback kit, but it could take 24 hours to apply the fix.

That's just embarrassing. bad embarrassing how can they be okay with that is it because it affects such a small percentage of their users that it doesn't like affect their bottom line or something like what what's going on maybe they're i know because even when you're talking a small percentage you're still talking hundreds of thousands if not millions of users right fair but like they took down the world uh six seven months ago right well yeah they still have all these

customers and stuff so So are they feeling invincible and they just, you know, they don't have to care? I don't know, man.

Additionally, if you have mismatched disks, Unraid will help you manage all of that. They have some of the best virtualization support out there, making it easy to pass through hardware or share graphics cards amongst multiple virtual machines. And if you're getting into ZFS or you've already got ZFS, well, Unraid has something for you. And they really kicked things up recently in Unraid 7.1, if you haven't taken a look.

They make it possible now to support and import the existing pools on your Ubuntu system or maybe your Proxmox box or a FreeNAS box. You know, you want to step it up to something a little classier and more powerful. You can now just import it, boom, right into Unraid. It's such an awesome move and feature. But beyond that, they've also just taken

the ZFS level support all the way there. They've got a bunch of file system support, but very impressed to see how they've completed that circle in Unraid 7.1.

Also in there now is wireless networking support. So if you're like me at home, I can't run Ethernet. So everything has to be on Wi-Fi or I suppose ZigBee or Z-Wave or something. So having out of the box Wi-Fi support makes that a lot nicer. Also, I've been playing around with reusable VM templates. So think about this. System just, you get it working, you like it a lot, boom, that's a template now, and now you can reuse that over and over again. Lots of very awesome features.

I think as a longtime Linux user, the thing I appreciate the most is that they truly do follow Linux development. They watch that driver space. They watch the file system space. And they incorporate it intelligently and safely into Unraid. They are really taking an active role in that position. And they're not falling behind and forgetting about updating the kernel and that kind of stuff.

They make sure they track that. When they ship a new version of Unraid, you get Linux features that have been tested, tried, and the ones you want for this kind of system. That's part of what I really like about it. And I think that's why it's awesome they actually have a monetization strategy for Unraid. That's what's made this possible for all these years. So get started now. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged. See how far your imagination and your server can go while you're supporting the show.

You get a free 30-day trial, no credit card required. Kick the tires. See what we're talking about. Unraid.net slash unplugged.

It's something we all enjoy about you. I can give it to you now if you want. Yeah. Could you give us the script, please? Could you let Wes experience? I would love the script. Can you set the scene for me? Oh, yeah, sure. Let me get my, Wes, do you have a pen? No, I can just pretend like I have a pen. It's fine. We're not actually taking it. Yeah, here's my pen. Oh, great. Thank you. Hello, sir. Are you ready to order? Oh, Wes, you should go first.

Yeah, gin and tonic, please. Okay, gin and tonic. Anything to eat. No food. Just the booze. Got you. I like you. All right, sir. And what about you? You look like a hungry man. Yes, but I have some allergies I'd like to mention. Oh, sure. Yeah, okay. So there's two of them. I think this dish will work, but I have a backup in case. So one is dairy, you know? But down here I have to specify sometimes. Okay, yeah. Sure. Anything with cheese. Cream base, too.

Okay, cream, too? Well, dairy. But butter's fine. Only in Mexican rice, but... Uh-huh. But usually not. So if you can, you know. I'm open to anything the chef wants to do, though. Yeah, okay. So no dairy. Anything else? Anything else? Well, gluten, too. Oh. What about flour? Because we have flour in, like, everything. Well, corn flour's fine. No, no. What about flour? Flour? You mean, like, wheat flour? Yeah, yeah.

Actually, that contains gluten. Okay, all right. I'll double check with the chef, but go ahead. Okay, but I can give you, like, two options. Okay, yeah. That way you're not going back and forth. Happy to double check for you, sir. I'm happy to do that. Okay, okay. Well, I forgot what I was going to order. Okay. What do you suggest? Do you guys need another minute? Oh, you know, what's really popular here is the steak fried chicken. People love that.

Love that. Can you describe that? Oh, with the cream gravy. Yeah, it comes. Oh, so first of all, we make our own batter here. Now, we don't grow the chickens, but we get it from a great source. So we have chicken and steak because, you know, not everybody likes beef. I'm sure that, you know, like you mentioned, you have some allergies. So what we do is we just take that piece of meat and, you know, we just don't, we just source from anywhere we can get it. because it's a pretty expensive market.

But we get it in stock, pretty much in bulk, and then the stuff that's been sitting around for a while, it starts to get a little funky, so you don't notice is we have this really great batter. Ooh. Now, it is made with flour. I think you said flour is okay? So anyways, we just batter this thing up real good, and then we fry it in a bunch of oil. Does the batter have beer in it? We do have a beer batter offering, yeah. Is it like a black beer? No, no, no. It's our IPA with extra wheat.

Oh, like a wheat ale. No, no, no, it's an IPA Oh, sorry None of that's going to work for me Okay, so you need another minute? You know what, I'll come back and take your order when you guys are ready, okay? I'll be back in just a few minutes But can I just tell you about some allergies that I have? Yeah, sure, go ahead I thought you did that, I'll just have water Okay, a water and a gin.

the dabbling in the art side of things god bless your cotton socks if you are you probably run in a desktop environment got your graphical interface all you know pretty and neat you open up that system monitor click around seeing how your cpu is chewing through tasks or or how much ram slack has eaten up this week it's well it's adequate gets the job done for browsing the web or or watching cat videos sure fine but let me tell you something if you shy away from that

command line the little black box you're leaving serious horsepower right there on the table serious you're letting the machine kind of spoon feed you its version of reality can i just say one i don't breathe like that in the microphone i have better mic technique than that so i don't know where they got that from they add that in because if they're sampling it for me they're not getting it from me two listen right now you hear.

How silent our background is yeah i've noticed sometimes when it's doing the weird voices or kind of breaking there's more background noise yeah we have good clean quiet audio and they've so they've made me breathe more they make me sound like a moron who just ties a bunch of dumb analogies together and they've added a bunch of background noise. Instead of you telling the machine exactly what tiny little piece of information you need right now, see?

Think about pulling up HTOP versus your graphical task manager. HTOP gives you the detail, real detail. You can see individual threads, the full process tree, CPU affinity. I mean, you can sort, filter, search, kill processes with just a single key press. I guess that's actually the most information I've ever heard it actually give. That's actual specifics. I don't know if any of them are right. It's closer. I think what burns me about it, A, is it's my voice,

but bad quality, right? That's what, I don't like that. And then B, it sounds worse, and I think it sounds worse because their version of what a podcast is, is something where somebody breathes into the microphone a bunch and has shitty audio. And that pisses me off because it tells you the intentions of the creators of the tool is like, well, we've got to suck this up a little bit, so that way people think it's a podcast. That's what's happening. They're like, it doesn't sound amateur enough.

Make it sound more sh**. I mean, it may be that that's the LLM found that. Maybe. Maybe you're saying that's the best way. On average, podcasts suck. Uh-huh. You might be on a Sunday. Which means we stand out. Okay, one more. Folks, let me tell you. Tired of those old, drawn-out BIOS reboots? You need to try Kazek. That's right. I'm Wes, and I'm the head of KigTix content for Jupyter Broadcasting, and I'm here to tell you about the miracle.

Yes, the miracle of the Linux kernel's Kazek. Now, listen up. This ain't just your regular rebooting, no, sir. This is enlightened rebooting. Kazek lets your currently running Linux kernel, it lets it act like a bootloader itself. Think about that. It loads up a brand new kernel, writing to memory, gets it all ready to go. And then it just performs the control jump straight into it. Pow! You completely bypass.

Skip right over. That slow, tedious firmware initialization, all that POST stuff, gone. Voice two speakers. Skip the wait. That's right. We're talking milliseconds, folks. Milliseconds to load and jump, not minutes sitting there staring at them. Did you hear it in there just for a second? A little bit of Wes's torture came through. Did you catch it? I want to see if I can... All that POST stuff, gone.

Voice two speakers. skipped the way that's right we're talking milliseconds folks voice two speakers so that's where it aired out so when wes gets it to do the weird voices it fails to do the second speaker most often often yeah and so that's an that sometimes like abrupt topic changes i've been trying that recently that'll kick it to a different voice too so it's interesting because i think that or voice two where he says voice two out loud is where the second voice would have come in right.

Broken you are a torture of the AI and I love it it's funny the things you get oh that one that you sent where the AI was actually just screaming, yeah I've gotten some kind of dark stuff out of it yeah weirdly I had one where a person was turning into a dog like a on our live radio broadcast weird yeah but they were like dedicated to trying to finish the broadcast as they were so their brains no shut up yeah it's kind of creepy sadly

i forgot to download oh god i would have loved to hear that sounds like a good okay i got i found it what'd you get which one the tortured oh you found it uh-huh so i just kind of replied to the thread and it should show up at the bottom of our chat there okay is that the crazy one there yeah okay all right here we go you seem hesitant well just because i don't want it to be too loud it comes in like yeah i do norm i'm pretty hot okay folks hold on right there.

What is it doing? Just warming up in smoke or something. The bees, they're attacking. This is really creepy. I'm going to have to manually fetch a few lib files straight from the repo mirror. Bless their hearts they mean well. But sometimes the package management system just, It ain't as robust as you'd hope, you know? I know, man. Freedom, performance, control of your own machine. That's what it's all about, ain't it? Taking back the reins, making things run away.

The way the good Lord intended. Oh, my God. Insane. And this is what west does in his free time those poor machines they're gonna come for you one day this is what the gpus are for i'm telling you how many kilowatt hours did it take to make that good question well notebook put in a limit i've got to i've got to assume i was part of that yeah they're like this some guy yeah some guy in seattle and i only ever thumbs up the weird one so I'm really just trying to give feedback to their system.

Oh, no, really? Uh-huh. You're so twisted. I love it.