trompete [he/him]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 16th, 2021

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  • I don’t have personal experience, but from what I gather they work their employees to the bone. Everybody in there is expected to do all the jobs at a fast pace. The cashiers are expected to work incredibly fast, and if the register is slow, they close it down even for a couple of minutes and have the employees do something else. Pay (in Germany) is above average for cashiers, but there’s been some serious union-busting fuckery at Aldi and Lidl that’s actually quite shocking by German standards. Lidl (maybe Aldi as well?) are surprisingly in favor of a higher minimum wage, because they need less workers than the competition thanks to labor-saving procedures, and that would give them a competitive edge. It sounds alienating as fuck.


  • According to the founding myth, the original inspiration behind Aldi were military logistics. The whole thing was designed to be efficient.

    Only stock predictably fast-selling stuff, for easier logistics and less warehousing. Don’t stock wares into shelves, just dump the whole pallet or box on the floor to save on labor costs. Sell only your own generic brands so you can dump your supplier for a cheaper one. No big advertising campaigns, just print some leaflets and distribute them yourself. And then they massively expanded to benefit from economies of scale.

    In Germany, in response to this, the competition created their own Aldi-style discounters with mostly identical prices and on average roughly equivalent quality, which are now everywhere. The other successful strategy is what Rewe did: This supermarket chain copied some of Aldi’s approach to cost-cutting, and is now a bit of a hybrid between a traditional supermarket and a discounter. Importantly, they offer similar price and quality own-brand product for most things an Aldi would sell, while also selling more expensive alternatives and having a larger inventory. Why go to Aldi when you can get same price/quality as Aldi, but also this thing and that other thing Aldi doesn’t have? No need to go to multiple stores.

    Meanwhile Aldi and Lidl have expanded their inventory and become more supermarket-like themselves (my guess is computerized logistics made this easier to do cheaply, and they have to compete with Rewe).

    One other thing that happened is that these very large chains can squeeze their suppliers with their massive buying power. They basically suck all the profit from the supply chain for the benefit of just a couple of superrich families (though this also happened in other markets with e.g. Walmart in the US.) Oh and they are militantly anti-union, but again the whole industry is.




  • No… Not in practice anyway, maybe in theory. I know on ARM SoCs there’s lack of auto-configuration (like you have on PCs with e.g. PCI), and the kernel has no way of knowing what hardware is available. So there’s a file that lists all the devices, and how to talk to them, called (I think) a “device tree”. This file gets appended to the kernel image, and so the bootloader just loads that together with the kernel. The kernel doesn’t do any auto-configuration and rather just reads this file and loads the relevant drivers based on that. I guess it might be (in theory) possible to do this on PC, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. I also don’t expect that to make any noticeable difference for boot times. Pretty sure boot times are dominated by user space, and not the kernel anyway.

    Sidenote (don’t do this): You can compile your own kernel (this used to be pretty common back in the day). You can select only the drivers you need, and can also select whether they should be compiled directly into the kernel or as modules that can be loaded later if needed. Pretty sure the auto-detection happens regardless for most hardware, since the driver needs to be initialized and told where the hardware is to be found. Compiling a driver right into the kernel just means the driver code is in memory right from the very start. I don’t recommend doing this btw, the only difference you will notice is shit not working due to you screwing up, and you’re going to waste a bunch of time and electricity compiling your kernel with every update. You sometimes needed to do this to get all your hardware working, but I haven’t done this in ages.


  • Should just work. No need to reinstall. You are correct in thinking that all the drivers are included, and furthermore, the drivers on Linux are typically loaded automatically when the hardware is detected on every boot, and this is not configured anywhere in a file or anything like that.

    Usually, anyway. In theory it’s possible that you manually (or some tool) hardcoded drivers somewhere, like in xorg.conf, but I’m willing to bet that isn’t the case.





  • Oh god I actually watched half of this. He says the left (apparently Jeffrey Sachs is left now?) just bought Putin’s argument about security concerns, but (big reveal about halfway in, choir music swells), Putin is actually driven by mystical thinking and megalomania.

    So Putin is lying when he talks about realpolitik or says anything that makes any sense. But when he speaks of history or the motherland or whatever, then he’s telling the truth. He’s definitely not just doing a bit of story telling to hit on those emotions. No Sir! That’s a window right into his soul. And apparently his personal feelings are enough to move whole armies.

    Maybe, just maybe, there are actual material reasons for why stuff happens, and it’s not just ideas in the minds of individual “great men”.





  • Is the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.

    If you want a specific feature that’s available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.

    Edit: If you want to find out whether you’re getting security updates, I’d check the changelog. It should be somewhere like /usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.