Why I dislike systemd - <AUTHOR> http://www.steven-mcdonald.id.au/articles/systemd.shtml <comment><USER2> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. I think I first touched a Linux machine in 1997 or 1998. systemd has been part of the reasons I did that for precisely the same reason.

There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. It's more efervescent than it's ever been. Fifteen years ago, I'd have been ecstatic to see so much development being done.

Yet for all this fierce code churning, there's _absurdly little innovation_. Even in systemd, there's a lot of focus on non-issues like booting without needing a shell, while still inventing service startup notification types because none of the gazillion startup notification types already existent can actually solve precisely the problem systemd claims it solves -- managing complex startup chains.

In the last three or four years, my Linux systems have become increasingly blackboxed, and consequently harder and harder to configure, let along debug when they stop working. Over the span of six months, a tool you just got to learn how to work with (mostly because the documentation seems to have been written by very bored and very verbose monkeys who had only a typewriter to pass the time with) becomes obsolete or is revamped to be unrecognizable. Which would be _fine_ if that actually solved any problems. Instead, it replaces the old set of problems with a new, even more complicated set of problems that developers claim you shouldn't have, while insisting that the old problems were simply due to the old architecture and we'll have none of that now that we have this shiny new thing.

Ironically, systemd is actually one of the better pieces of software to come out of that ecosystem. No, seriously. It's decently documented and as long as you don't need anything more complex than "here, start this daemon after this other daemon started", it does its job.

If you want to peck at something, have a look at Polkit, where someone brilliantly figured out that the best way to configure policies is to write basically undebugable JavaScript code in .rules files.

<comment><USER3> > I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so.

Ha. FreeBSD here.

And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there.

Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs.

Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no concept they have of "Handbook", in the sense FreeBSD has. It's so adhoc, they're healthy, but they're in denial about how hard they make it for new people. By the time you've taken to time to learn Debian's dev warts, you're apart of the convent and no longer care about fixing the onboarding problems.

But to be fair. I have day to day gripes with FreeBSD just because we're short on the manpower Linux distributions have in excess:

On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that).

I do my 90% of daily routines simpler and better on FreeBSD. If only Google / Mozilla (with all the resources they have) gave someone who could work to fix this stuff.

<comment><USER2> I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah:

> I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there.

The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to connect to a wifi network? ifconfig <interface> <ESSID> <passphrase>. If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's _that_ simple.

In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end.

Better yet, this is _all_ nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager.

> On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox > just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better > position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we > don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me > on that).

I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non- standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly _what_ part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.

<comment><USER4> actually, wpa_supplicant isn't that hard to configure as long as you only use the GUI. just scan for APs, double-click on the network, and type in the PSK. no documentation-reading required.

<comment><USER2> But I don't want to (just) use it through a GUI, I want to be able to script it. What am I, a connection-making machine :)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Steven, if you're reading, you got your history slightly wrong. System V got its init handling from Sun's SunOS 4.x. It was negotiated as part of the integration between SunOS and System V which would become the "one UNIX for everyone". Unfortunately for all of us, AT&T really really loved "run levels" and Sun really really liked BSD's way of configuring the system. Which got you the unholy love child you saw in Solaris 2.0 and System V release 2.0.

For the other Sun folks from the systems group who quit rather than submit to the demands, you were right, I was wrong. We couldn't convince them of the error of their ways.

<comment><USER6> This history looks wrong. Eg it was SVR4 that merged SunOS

<comment><USER5> You are correct it was System V, release 4 that merged with SunOS. It was also the release that Sun and AT&T "combined" the BSD init/rc system with the System V init/run-level system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _It got the job done by making the 99% majority of use cases more difficult in order to make the 1% minority simpler. This is a design pattern I think is being repeated in systemd._

I kinda had the opposite impression. I first encountered systemd when I started messing around with arch for a couple little vps projects. At the time I was doing sysadmin that involved both Ubuntu and CentOS, and I definitely found day-to-day tasks easier with systemd (better built in monitoring, consistent syntax, etc). For simple cases, writing a unit file sucks _a lot less_ than writing an initscript. The warts in systemd only started to irritate me when I was first setting up my personal machines (one laptop, one tower) to run arch [1]. Even then, the bloat in the design irked me more than actually using it. So, I'm in favor of systemd, but not thrilled (dbus everywhere is annoying).

Then again, I don't maintain any packages with strange and/or complex daemons. If anybody's had a really hard time getting their stuff to work with systemd, I'd be interested to hear stories.

1: Not completely true. I want my damn log files back.

<comment><USER8> This is why I suspect that most of the divisions in the sysadmin community regarding systemd are generational. For people (like me!) who have been writing init scripts forever and can do it in their sleep, they'd prefer the flexibility and familiarity of init scripts to a new system that at first glance appears more limited.

For people who are less experien^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrusty :-), init scripts look like a horrifying way to manage a startup process, and just about anything -- including Yet Another Config File Format -- looks preferable.

I think this is also why so little progress is being made on resolving conflicts over systemd. There really isn't a whole lot of room for compromise; one group simply wants things to stay more or less the same (or evolve incrementally), the other group simply wants to throw it all out and start over.

I bet there would've been a lot less argument and vitriol about systemd if Debian hadn't made the decision to default to it, basically leaving all the crusty sysadmins homeless. Once Debian switched, there was a near guarantee that all of Linux was going to move to systemd. That suits one group just fine, another one not so much.

On the plus side, the BSDs should be seeing a really nice upswell of installations over the next couple of years, which is great, because they've been quietly building some pretty great operating systems that deserve more love.

<comment><USER9> It's perfectly possible to run scripts with systemd unit files, so there's no real "flexibility" lost anywhere. The primary improvement is that systemd handles by default most of what used to be boiler-plate in every script, on top of calculating dependencies automatically. Then you get integrated process supervisor capabilities so that the init system actually knows whether services are running or not.

Speed was certainly a major motivator as well, considering the increasing popularity of containers and on-demand virtual machines.

To me it seems that "gradual evolution" was exactly what they did, and it wasn't really going anywhere. Lennart came up with systemd and convinced enough people that it's worth the pain of migration to get a clean start.

<comment><USER10> The key is the expense vs reward ratio.

I don't know how to write sysvinit scripts any more than I know how to write fizzbuzz. What I do know is how to program and specifically how to write and maintain and debug shell scripts. I NEED that for other automation purposes and cannot get rid of that mandatory requirement so it used to dovetail quite well with init scripts. There are corner cases and security issues and tradition, which means copying a known good init script and editing nothing but the executable names is a great start, but its not really a serious problem. I don't care if its verbose, as long as its simple and understandable and most importantly, predictable.

Now instead of applying a language and tradition I know to a simple task like init, I get to learn a whole new ecosystem and technology to do about the same thing I always did except vastly more complicated, and I can't even shed the old knowledge because its needed elsewhere. That makes overall systems harder to use, slower, buggier, and less reliable. And thats defined as "progress" because its new so it must be better.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's really fair to compare writing unit files to being able to program in shell.

True, knowing the systemd unit options is not a reusable skill, but it's not a huge effort either: the syntax is trivial (INI-inspired, the same as .desktop files) and the options themselves are rather well documented.

And for sure, these options are immensely more reusable when writing a new unit file than mixing and matching shell snippets taken from different init script using different styles and conventions.

(Not to mention how subtly tricky programming in shell is even when you're doing trivial things, see [http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in- shell.html](http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html) )

<comment><USER12> _knowing the systemd unit options is not a reusable skill_

That is, to an extent, not true. There is at least one system that can import systemd unit files, subject to some fairly obvious limits on Linux idiosyncrasies. [http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/worked- example.html)

<comment><USER13> Heh, i was wondering how long it would take before we would get something like this.

<comment><USER12> It was around before the Debian Technical Committee made its decision. It wasn't one of the options to choose from, but it was an existence proof, for those making the decisions, that systemd unit files will not lock them in and that there's a route for Debian packages that have systemd units on Debian kFreeBSD and Debian Hurd.

<comment><USER13> Too bad it is not the unit files one should worry about, but the continued scope creep of the systemd project.

by the time one want to move from systemd to nosh, or anything more limited in scope, one may have face the rebuilding of Linux user space from the ground up.

<comment><USER12> It's not the unit files as a potential lock-in that one need worry about _now_ , because of the nosh project. But it most definitely _was_ one thing that people thought about then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author mentions that he believes the biggest problem of systemd is repeating some mistakes of SysV init, but I think it's actually pretty important that familiarity is preserved to help people upgrade. For example, the author mentions babysitting the users (systemctl edit) and config/daemon reloading as things that could be made automatic, I'm assuming with e.g. inotify change events.

But you often want some confidence that the change you're making to your system is what you expect, and we've had them all along:

\- visudo(8) sanity checks, for atomicity and syntax, to help prevent you from bricking your authorization

\- an explicit SIGHUP to reload the configuration file for your daemon, after you've checked the config, rather than accidentally saving your file while you're editing it and bringing down your daemon.

You could expect everyone to adopt new practices for editing the configurations, but the behavior would be very surprising to anyone used to the old way.

<comment><USER15> So I have not yet had to use systemd in any serious way, so I may be misinterpreting here, but I think this:

> ... and config/daemon reloading as things that could be made automatic, I'm > assuming with e.g. inotify change events.

is a misinterpretation of the author's complaint. It sounds like with systemd, if you tell it to restart a service it will continue to use the old definition until you run a separate command to 'reload' it (and, presumably, all other configurations). On top of that, it indicates its knowledge that you've changed the file by telling you to run the aforementioned reload command.

No inotify seems to be involved in what he wants, which is that the reload command use the new configuration. Hell, be clever and use the old configuration's stop mechanism and the new one's start mechanism or complain if the restart mechanism differs or something, but a message telling you you didn't do something you almost always want to do is a pretty obvious smell for a UI problem.

I deeply dislike the similar behaviour of upstart, fwiw. In order to reload an upstart init script you have to stop and start it, restart uses the old one. I have spent annoying amounts of time wondering why it was doing it wrong.

<comment><USER16> Because systemd is event-driven, you can't actually be sure the service file won't be re-used in the running configuration - or that it won't trigger other service reloads/starts/stops due to its dependency specifications. Ergo systemd requires an explicit reload to commit the state of the unit files once you're satisfied they are as intended.

This is very important when you consider that unit files can kill other units on their conditions - I've used this feature in particular to make sure nginx goes down if a mountpoint becomes unavailable or the servicing process dies (and systemd can't restart it). This is extremely useful because it means a load balancer won't send requests to a webserver in an improper state. But it also means that while editing those config files, I wouldn't want systemd auto-reloading everytime I saved.

<comment><USER13> And in the end i will gladly trade a few seconds longer boot for a system i can actually reason about rather than treat as some kind of black box voodoo. The latter is why i moved away from Windows in the first place.

<comment><USER16> It's definitely more then a few seconds (systemd boots fast), but more importantly reasoning about unit files is a lot easier then reasoning about the init-script ordering.

With a unit file I can just declare the conditions under which it should run or stop. If the system doesn't achieve those conditions, then I can solve that problem - rather then having my unit run before the system is ready to do so.

You're not really reasoning about your system because you can say "this runs after this" if you don't also express all the dependencies and failure conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with most of this, especially the fact that complexity has simply been shifted to other places. It's much easier for me to read a systemd unit file than it was for me to read a complex set of init scripts. The problem is that when I have 10 or 20 units with interlocking dependencies, it's an absolute nightmare to try and untangle because I have to jump between so many different files. Having to specify After=X and Requires=X seems like a prime example of optimizing for the 1% usecase. 99% of the time, when A must start after B, it's _because_ A requires B. Having to specify both is something that is easily and often missed, and a hard problem to track down if you didn't read the documentation carefully. There's also the problem that it seems to be metastasizing and taking other parts of the OS. The longstanding /var/log/messages is now replaced by journalctl tool, and the logs are actually in binary. The venerable "hostname" command is now "hostnamectl" because it must go through systemd. They have also replaced chroot with systemd-nspawn, and made it so you cannot even use systemd while in a normal chroot!

<comment><USER18> $0.02: journalctl isn't even tab-completable until you've nearly finished typing it. :)

<comment><USER19> depends on what you have in your path.

<comment><USER20> I feel like systemd's tools and Emacs are on a race to achieve the title of "only program(s) necessary in one's path to have a fully-featured operating system". :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't "hate" systemd either, I just think it's a bad approach. It flies in the face of the "open architecture" concept and stifles innovation. It discourages users from learning about how their operating system works, and it unnecessarily puts too much control of a fundamental component of the OS in the hands of a too-small number of people.

None of these reflect the Linux I grew up with. Thus, I am not a fan of systemd. #notmylinux

<comment><USER22> ossreality you are [dead]

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is something epically beautiful about OpenBSD's consistency over the last 10 years. I swear that a 2004 OpenBSD sysadmin would be close to 100% efficient with a circa 2015 OpenBSD system, despite the absolutely massive number of improvements and changes that have been made with the operating system.

Once systemd starts to get traction, it's cognitive overhead is going to become a real problem for sysadmins who want to be able to model the entire boot process and run-state in their head.

For better or worse (I honestly don't know which, btw), you are going to have to start to trust the operating system to manage its boot process/run-state correctly rather than having it be a direct implementation of your mental model. (I would argue other *nix Operating systems, like OS X, have, to some degree, been doing that successfully for a while, so it's certainly possible - just not clear whether you want that type of behavior on your server systems. I guess time will tell.)

<comment><USER24> I'm not a professional sysadmin, but as a developer with a bunch of virtual servers systemd has only made things far easier.

Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in two minutes and it works...

Maybe there's something to be said for "sysadmins who want to be able to model the entire boot process and run-state in their head" but with correct information about dependencies and so on, I personally think that's something computers are a lot better at solving.

<comment><USER25> > Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in > two minutes and it works...

This.

I'm not saying systemd is the best answer, but I really think sysadmins could learn a thing or two from developers. Nearly every custom init script I've ever seen has bugs, and isn't portable between systems. Where are the unit tests? Code reuse? Focus on maintainability/readability?

Shell scripting used to be amazing, but as a language these days it's behind the times.

<comment><USER8> Sysadmins would say that developers could learn a lot from them. Like, documentation, maintaining backwards compatibility, sane upgrade processes ...

Don't throw stones in glass houses and all that. We all could stand to learn things from other people.

Sure, sysadmins could stand to be better programmers, but software developers tend to forget that software is just a tool, and sysadmins use it like a tool. They just want to get in, get out, and move on to the next problem, so for them, certain best practices in software development aren't all that attractive.

<comment><USER11> > but software developers tend to forget that software is just a tool, and > sysadmins use it like a tool. They just want to get in, get out, and move on > to the next problem

Which is exactly why developers don't get to write any documentation other than the bare minimum: software for the client is just a tool, once it is running they want developers to move on to the next problem, not wasting time on any additional documentation (which, arguably, is not strictly a developer task, more a QA one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Am I missing something? The author states:

> Try to find the answer to "which units are going to be started on next > boot?".

Isn't this just `ls /etc/systemd/{user,system,network}/ __/ *` (bah HN formatting is messing this up)

Also the other states:

> Speaking of which, why is systemctl daemon-reload even a thing?

Because configuration changes while things are running. Otherwise we wouldn't need apache2 reload, nginx reload, haproxy reload, etc. Also, according to the man page:

> After the units have been edited, systemd configuration is reloaded (in a > way that is equivalent to daemon-reload).

As for systemctl edit, it allows you to add diffs to the unit file. For example, let's say I am using redis and I want to ensure it always restarts (for whatever reason). Rather than manually editing the unit file (which will have issues if an upstream change happens), I can simply use systemctl edit to add a diff for my change. This way I can still maintain compatibility with the upstream unit file instead of having to deal with potential conflicts. It's not so much babysitting the user as it is a potentially better experience.

<comment><USER27> > Isn't this just `ls /etc/systemd/{user,system,network}//*` (bah HN > formatting is messing this up)

Nope.

There are many virtual units for which there are no files. One example is the on-demand getty units. There are two for "plymouth" boot-splash stuff (I see these attempted-and-failed units on archlinux where plymouth never exists). There's some autofs thing. There's auditd.

I'm actually not booted into linux right now so I'm struggling to remember the specifics... but if you also count all the simple mounts and devices which clutter up the output of "systemd --all" as "units which are not files in /etc/systemd" then the count is around 100.

<comment><USER28> Couldn't/Shouldn't this be solved with some script that traces the dependencies of units?

I'm not familiar enough with systemd to understand how to trace dependencies and create a complete list of all units that will run at next boot but I expect this to be doable by someone with that expertise.

<comment><USER29>
      systemd-analyze dot --order | dot -Tsvg > /tmp/system.svg

The resulting dependency diagram may look complex, but consider that there is no equivalent functionality for SysV init scripts despite the fact that _they have the same level of inter-dependent complexity_.

<comment><USER30> The complexity of the dependency graph produced by system-analyze is not present in most sysv init systems. That complexity is mostly a reflection of the efforts to make system services boot in parallel. Most sysv init scripts were blocking and executed serially, which is what allowed the simple filename prefixes to be used for ordering.

What to see your entire sysv init, as it will run every single time?

        ls -1 /etc/rc3.d/[SK]* /etc/rc.local | xargs -- cat | less

Obviously, substitute whichever runlevel you're concerned with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is the first anti-systemd article that I've read that focuses exclusively on the technical issues with it (well, mostly: the last one kind of gets touchy on the politics). And this article is a good summarization of them.

Linux in the server world is rapidly turning into a thin platform hosting containers (docker, kubernetes, etc) of "fat" Linux distros. Systemd makes a lot more sense if you consider it in that context: a container can use systemd to have the host start a monitoring process whenever any processes are executed, etc. Sure, this probably could have been grafted on to sysvinit, but it would have been an ugly hack just like every other thing that's been grafted on to sysvinit.

Linux everywhere else but the server world is all about low power usage and tight integration with custom hardware. Embedded devices, mobile phones, tablets, wearables, etc. All of these use cases demand an init system that is aware of and able to manage the system power state as a gradient, not a binary value. Again, this could probably be hacked on to sysvinit or the kernel itself, but would require big kernel changes and likely a fork for "Mobile Linux" and "Server Linux" as the market begins to demand power-aware schedulers, memory mappers, etc.

If the computing world were to remain in a paradigm where we run small physical or virtual servers dedicated to tasks, then sysvinit would be fine. But that's not where we are today nor where we will be, and sysvinit simply isn't flexible enough for a lot of the use cases where Linux is seen today. The *BSDs exist if you want a rock-solid and simple x86 Unix system for hosting traditional applications in a client-server setup; but if you want a flexible platform for building arbitrary products, Linux is the way to go.

<comment><USER32> Thanks, I think your perspective on the different use cases for Linux vs *BSD were helpful and something I hadn't seen all in one place before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Some of the complaints resonate with me. In particular, the limited power of systemd's unit file DSL is why I think it's better to allow services to be written using a general purpose programming language. GNU dmd, while still not developed enough to do cool things like socket activation, gives the user the full power of Scheme to configure their system services as they like. I run it as PID 1 on two of my machines, and I also run it as an unprivileged user to manage my gpg agent, emacs daemon, offlineimap, mpd, development web servers, etc. on all of the computers I use, including at work. I think people that aren't happy with systemd, that are also interested in rolling up their sleeves and hacking on an init system, should give dmd some love.

[https://gnu.org/s/dmd](https://gnu.org/s/dmd)

</comment><comment><USER34> One of the more sensible ^rants^ I've read against systemd (it is KISS for some weirdly convoluted definition of KISS). Too bad these naysayers are not/will not be taken seriously.

<comment><USER18> The naysayers are taken seriously, but they're in the decision-making minority. Linux distro maintainers wanted to move on from SysV Init, and systemd looked promising. Just because the naysayers didn't get their way (and on some distros, they did) doesn't mean that their criticisms aren't noted.

<comment><USER8> Which distros? Slackware is the only near-mainstream Linux distro I know of that is even possibly not moving immediately to systemd, and even then, the Slackware folks have said that once it becomes too difficult to maintain upstream packages, they'll switch too. They're just being pragmatic about it.

<comment><USER22> Gentoo by default prefers OpenRC over systemd, though you can chose which one you want while installing.

<comment><USER13> And gentoo had to jump through hoops (to the point of forking udev) to be able to continue to do so.

The whole systemd vs sysv back and forth is a smokescreen, because while sysv stops at init systemd continues on to cron, networking, sessions, dhcp, dns, /dev, and soon to be ttys etc.

And while the kernel is maintained under the rule that change do not break user space, systemd developers seem to do changes with a permanent "deal with it" meme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> With System V and Debian, one added some new apache or bind configuration and then called _invoke-rc.d daemon reload_ to inform the daemon to reread the configuration files.

With systemd, you do the exact same thing and then call _systemctl reload daemon_. Is the author making an argument here based some other distributions way of handling System V?

<comment><USER12> No. The author is not getting reloading the daemon's configuration mixed up with reloading systemd's configuration. You, however, are. The systemctl manual page warns about this mistake. See what it says under _daemon-reload_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > nearly everyone (or at least the most vocal crowd) seems to either love it > or hate it

"At least the most vocal crowd". Which means that most people DO NOT CARE, and the systemd war is beyond ridiculous.

As Linus said, > "I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself."

<comment><USER37> The systemd war is probably the best thing that could have happened to ensure widespread adoption of systemd. It allowed the supporters to lump anyone with any concerns or objections in with the frothing-at-the-mouth haters, and completely ignore them.

I don't hate systemd. I like what it's trying to do, and I don't hate the big- picture implementation either. But I, and many others, have a bunch of concerns around some specific details of the system, that got ignored and swept under the rug in the tide of vitriol between the two sides of the "war".

If the discussion had been more civil, maybe the more rational objections might have got heard, and we might have been able to pressure Lennart and Kay into not rolling their own, un-reviewed, crypto for journald[0]. We might have been able to avoid some of the feature-creep[1] that seems to have grown out of a NIH-mentality, and a better relationship with the community might have made the core developers more willing to play nicely with others[2][3].

0: [http://lwn.net/Articles/512895/](http://lwn.net/Articles/512895/) 1: [http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd- reso...](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd- resolved.service.html) 2: [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935) 3: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1116651](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1116651)

<comment><USER11> Why is resolved feature-creep? It's rather nice to have working name resolution out of the box when coupling it with networkd and firing up a container.

I mean, it's not my standard usecase in this moment of my life, but I see how it can be useful.

(Also, your last link reports that "This bug is for livecd-tools which has been fixed", I don't know what's the point you're trying to make.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord To all those who complain about unreadable initscripts, please see: [http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/ru...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/run- scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> About a year ago, we started switching over new servers to systemd instead of openrc at work. I knew sysv/openrc/bsdinit and I liked them so for the first month or two I utterly despised systemd. (Plus as a sysadmin it seems like I have to hate it or risk losing my linux card) I just wanted my damn scripts back instead of dealing with the .ini-inspired config file crap. If I had a choice at the time, I would've been willing to move to busybox-init just to get away from systemd. Had I spent less time complaining to my coworkers about how much it sucked, I probably would've written this post myself. But little by little it grew on me.

 _Oh, so if an nfs mount fails on boot, it 's not going to just sit there and hang? I guess that's pretty cool, saves me from having to throw a console on it while muttering under my breath. And it didn't start nginx either, so it's not going to serve a half broken site and tell the loadbalancer all is good? Maybe it's not all that bad. No no, what am I thinking, this is still crap, I could've written all this in to the init scripts (but I didn't). _

_This client 's service is irritatingly unreliable, maybe I should write a wrapper to supervise it. Someone must have done something like this for syst... Restart=OnFailure... well that's nifty._

 _Ugh, monitoring daemon ate up all the memory again, why can 't the vendor get their shit together or the client switch to something that isn't useless. Guess I'll google some ideas for a watchdog script. Hmm, looks like I can just throw MemoryLimit and Restart=onfailure in the unit? No way it's that easy. (it was)_

After a couple months of this, systemd actually started to seem useful, I even started having a little bit of dread when hopping on an older server and having to deal with openrc. All of the complaints here really seem off base to me now that I've had a chunk of time to figure it out. Init scripts pissed me off when I didn't have much experience with them too. Now, thats not to say I like everything about the systemd switch. netctl is utterly worthless for anything other than a static ipv4 address (and reenable, really?). I still forward all my logs to syslog, because I prefer text files (and all the awk/sed/grep/cut/sort/column/etc goodness that comes with them) for anything more than running `systemctl status <service>` and seeing that I accidentally the config file for something.

I also don't buy the whole "It should be on desktops, not servers" because I don't see much of an advantage for desktops, other than maybe the trivially faster boots. Wifi is a pain in the ass with netctl and netctl doesn't seem play well with anything else. But for servers, I've found it to be pretty awesome.

To address a few things straight from the article that I disagree with:

 _> At least one Debian package (memcached) is already invoking a wrapper script from ExecStart._

This is exactly why I don't understand the whole argument around it being inflexible. If you need to call a script that does some setup that's incompatible with systemd, call the script? It's no different from helper scripts that many packages used with init scripts. If you still want to do some checks and call start-stop-daemon, go right ahead, nothing is stopping you. It seems pretty strange to consider it a fault that you can't use a bash script, and then complain that you'll have to use a bash script.

 _> Here, let me helpfully tell you that you should run systemctl daemon- reload, but perform the action you requested using the old configuration anyway. _

This really seems like a trivial complaint. I guess you could always alias systemctl="systemctl daemon-reload; systemctl" if it's that much of an issue. Personally it's saved me after an accidental :wq (damn that muscle memory). "File has changed on disk" _uhhh it shouldn 't have. crap._ I guess it's a matter of preference. Also I didn't even know systemctl edit was a thing. That does seem kinda pointless, but it also seems kinda pointless to be bent out of shape over it. Do you also cat `* * * * * command >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/$USER` because crontab -e is babysitting you? (I used to do that, but because e and r are too close together and reconstructing a crontab from logs is painful. Now I just alias crontab="crontab -l; crontab")

 _> Now, systemd does rely heavily on D-Bus_

I've never run into issues with it, but I do agree with you on that point from a philosophical standpoint.

 _> And yes, you can avoid the whole issue just by masking any units you don't want to start, but that's missing the point. _

The only point I see is that it's different. Of course whatever you're used to is going to be more effecient to you than something new.

 _> I believe it creates more problems than it solves. Sadly, many of those problems will take years to become apparent, by which time all the major Linux distributions will have fully integrated it._

Well it definitely seems to solve more problems for me than it creates, and saying those problems will only be apparent years down the road is not only impossible to argue against, it's a hand wavy cop out of "Trust me, its just bad! Because reasons!" However this does touch on what is probably my biggest gripe with systemd, and that is that ALL the big distros seem to be switching. Granted I don't mind from a having-to-use-it angle, since I personally prefer it and would probably stick with distros that do anyways, but it does give me a certain unease, it may be my choice but it shouldn't be the only one, and I'd have the same problem if it was sysv that everyone switched to.

All in all, these complaints really just seem like complaining that it's different. And it is different, but that doesn't necessarily make it better or worse, just takes time to get used to.

<comment><USER13> You either must have gotten in late, or been exceedingly lucky, as failing NFS mounts is one of those things systemd downright hates.

People have had whole boxes fail to come up because of a NFS mount that didn't work, and therefore the unit file didn't come up roses, and so systemd decided to abandon ship and present the admin with a borked minimal console.

One early fix, a brute force 30 second kill timer on every unit file.

Went over well with one Fedora Alpha (lucky for them) where said timer tripped on the post distro upgrade house cleaning unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't care about systemd, as I want to use OSes that embrace modern architectures, unikernels, containers, safer programming languages, improved UI stacks,....

This rant is a good example how luddite users rather stay stuck in a UNIX System V world with their green phosphor VT100 terminals.

<comment><USER13> Thing is, Linux used to be flexible. This because of some stuff it inherited from Unix about user space being made out of loosely coupled parts with solidified interfaces between them.

Meaning that it could accomodate both the latest and "greatest" coming out of the labs, and the tried and tested stuff that had been sitting in production for a decade.

systemd instead gloops it all into a lightly coupled shoggoth of a project that is chasing the future come hell or high water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pretty much the same reason why I'm slowly moving to FreeBSD. OpenBSD is another possibility.

</comment><comment><USER41> It seems that the author completely disregards the modern tendency to treat boxes as commodities. While pondering a "what's going to start on this particular machine" question is interesting in the "old world", it is hardly a question anyone asks when your fleet starts to be measured in tens of thousands of cloud instances.

<comment><USER13> No, his issue is that because others choose to do so he has to do so because the fad of the year is tramping all over the alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love the valid html/css icons at the bottom while the whole page is just a yellow text on a black background.

</comment><comment><USER43> "It babysits its users"

</comment><comment><USER44> Thats one responsive site!

</comment><comment><USER45> My eyeballs just exploded... Unreadable.

<comment><USER46> Readability's bookmarklets help: [https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/](https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/)

(But, yeah.)

<comment><USER47> The newest version of Firefox has a little icon resembling an open book at the right side of address field that does something similar. Quite handy :)

<comment><USER46> Nice. I'd prefer that was the _default_ browser view, frankly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why would you punish yourself with various *BSDs when you can have OpenRC and more advanced ports on Gentoo? Do people really associate systemd, Gnome and other nuisances with Linux?

<comment><USER49> Punish ? .... BSD is extremely user friendly. It just seems to be picky at who it calls friends. They ONLY reason I still use Linux anywhere is because I have to keep my skills for it fresh since its where I make a living.

The metric I like to use for adopting new processes / services is pretty simple. I have _____ problem. What tool solves that problem for me.

In my case systemd solves nothing and creates more.

<comment><USER13> > Punish ? .... BSD is extremely user friendly. It just seems to be picky at > who it calls friends.

I seem to recall the same line being used about (GNU/)Linux at one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This page's horrible readability is a perfect reflection of the kind of folks that dislike systemd.

Yeah, newcomers to the Linux land without the expertise you guys acquired through 10 years of using Linux, would apparently appreciate how easy it is to manage a server by invoking some lengthy commands they learned through reading the often overly-dense manual instead of `systemctl start/stop x`.

Nowadays some of those so-called "hackers" tend to ignore the part of work that makes the user experience better. They claim that they want simplicity and avoid bloat but most of the times they are just being lazy and not sympathetic to their users.

I'm not saying that things should be dumbed down to clicking GUI buttons on Linux. But if you want your program to become mainstream you need to think about providing good and practical docs and making your program easier to use, even for text-based programs.

Accept that most people would like Bootstrap'ed sites more than yours:

      body
      {
        background-color: #080808;
        color: #ffff70;
        font-family: sans;
      }

That's why I opt for Ubuntu 15.04 instead of 14.04 LTS on my VPS, since 15.04 has systemd.

<comment><USER51> Are we really using website design choices as a valid target to discredit someone's opinion on the technical merit of an init system?

Can I use Lennart's inability to buy a properly sized polo as a reason why systemd is bad?

Yeah. The guy has an ugly website. But he has specific points about mistakes that systemd didn't learn from and is repeating. Did he list 'it's too user friendly' as one of those mistakes? In fact, one of his core arguments is that there will actually be an increase in complexity and reduction in user friendliness due to design choices that have been made.

<comment><USER50> I'm saying that, if people keep responding to those less-experienced Linux users who complain init scripts too complex by saying "Quite. Deal with it." like this author ([http://www.steven- mcdonald.id.au/ugly.shtml](http://www.steven-mcdonald.id.au/ugly.shtml)), I fail to see how systemd is gonna fail.

My comment is not about design choices but attitude and sympathy to users. This is not intended as an ad-hominem.

The author seems to think systemd "babysits" its users, but as a user I find systemd "cares" about its users.</comment></comment></comment>


Timeline of the far future - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future <comment><USER3> > _The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about > 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap > second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by > then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have > been officially lengthened by one SI second._

Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?

<comment><USER4> It will be easier to boost the Earth's spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.

<comment><USER5> It's been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they've done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.

<comment><USER6> That is fascinating! Do you have a reference?

<comment><USER7> I think he might be sarcastic. There is no known method I know for measuring the rotational period of extrasolar planets, without having enough observational power to defiantly notice the astronomical engineering required to alter an inhabited planet's rotation rate.

<comment><USER8> "You see that big city past that mountain range? Use it as a marker to measure the planet's rotation."

<comment> loa-in-backup If we measure this city's position then we'll know if there's life on the planet.

<comment><USER7> You get the joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating: "10^(10^50) years: Estimated time for a _Boltzmann brain_ to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease." [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain)

> [...] a _Boltzmann brain_ is a self-aware entity that arises due to > extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic > equilibrium. [...]

<comment><USER10> That is __severely__ underestimating the true probability - it considers only random thermal fluctuations. But the universe is really powered by processes that dissipate energy across a gradient to fuel a structured, very low entropy state.

The math is the same as calculating the probability that the glass you just broke will spontaneously jump back onto the table and reassemble itself. Which is a standard introductory example in thermodynamics... but you add self- awareness and suddenly this rather mundane thing is spooky and amazing.

You should be far more interested in what's happening when you boil a pot of water and convection rolls spontaneously form.

<comment><USER11> _the universe is really powered by processes that dissipate energy across a gradient to fuel a structured, very low entropy state._

By 10^(10^50) years that'll be long over.

<comment><USER12> which is exactly his point...

<comment><USER11> Re-reading the post: no I don't think I can reasonably interpret it so that that was his point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My all-time favorite wikipedia article, great to see it getting some attention. I find that along with providing great fodder for small-talk (among certain types), it causes me to experience a psychological effect analogous to the so-called "overview effect" experienced by astronauts. Attempting to conceive of one's place in cosmological time is great exercise.

<comment><USER14> Made me remember a Carl Sagan quote.

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever"

<comment><USER15> As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place shall know it no more. -Psalm 103:15-17

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Goldstein, Natalie (2009). Global Warming. Infobase Publishing. p. 53. "The last time acidification on this scale occurred (about 65 mya) it took more than 2 million years for corals and other marine organisms to recover; some scientists today believe, optimistically, that it could take tens of thousands of years for the ocean to regain the chemistry it had in preindustrial times."

In my opinion, this is the greatest threat to humanity of continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere.

<comment><USER17> One should maintain some perspective: Coral reefs have gone through enormous variations in extent and location, and near extinction, many times since 500 million years ago. Not even the last Ice Age or CO2 levels 10x higher than what we have today managed to cause the extinction of coral.

<comment><USER18> How does this near extinction compare to previous ones?

<comment><USER17> We're not currently witnessing a near-extinction.

<comment><USER19> Scientists consulted when creating the tv show Blue Planet II seems to disagree. According to them we are in fact in the midst of an extinction.

<comment><USER17> There are wide varieties of corals and of their symbionts. To claim that they are all simultaneously going extinct in all seas and microclimates is absurd, and contradicts the evidence of their repeated adaptations to past climate variations over 500 million years as well as ignores the observation of their thriving across countless local seasonal and weather variations.

<comment><USER20> Straw man, no one claimed that there will be a complete extinction of coral, only that it will be 2 million years for coral to recover to pre-industrial levels.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. Coral reefs are important nursery's for many fish species, and reducing the areas for fish to safely grow up puts yet another pressure on declining fish stocks. Not to mention marine crustaceans that are also affected by rising acidity, and the overall warming trend of the ocean itself is pressuring all kinds of marine life that humanity depends on as a major food source.

Not only that, but the ocean is rising due to land-based glaciers/ice melting, the continental rebound involved from the reduced ice load, and yet more: the warming ocean is less dense and expands. The rising seas along with other factors mentioned also puts pressure on coral reefs, as they often cannot grow fast enough to catch up with that sweet-spot near the ocean surface!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While the topic is on. I am trying to find a short story I read some years ago (4-5) about the evolution of life on our planet in the far future.

Warning, massive spoilers:

There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then it jumps to another civ. and the earth is totally smooth and people are living in holes in the ground (this might be another story from Baxter). Then it's some earth inner core creatures fungi-like. It ends with the sun expansion making life on earth impossible and a mars creature pondering all that.

Rings any bells ?

<comment><USER22> How could the Earth be totally smooth?

<comment><USER21> Dunno. Also, the author hints than the night is endless and cold and the child, which the author uses to convey that part of the story, is scolded by his parents and ordered to get back underground where it's warmer.

<comment><USER22> Hmm... maybe it only looks smooth from space, like Venus or Uranus? An impenetrable cloud layer (like in The Matrix) would explain the cold on the surface and the endless night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to > flat), and thus, will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the > infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively > improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.

I always thought that the universe will just reach zero Kelvin and the party is over. That it will just continue to do improbable stuff was beyond my imagination. I don't really understand how it should be possible that effects like the emergence of virtual particles still work if all the energy is now in a form which can't be used for energy transformations anymore (entropy) - <USER2> know that annihilation of anti-particles of virtual particles (which causes them to exist - that was the amazing finding of Hawking with the Hawking radiation where the anti-particles of virtual particles get annihilated at the event horizon and his counterpart is happily living on because he got lucky that he wasn't too close) is a way to form new particles "out of nothing" (using quantum effects), but I still can't believe that this still works when _nothing 's moving because we're at absolute zero_.

Could someone explain why those quantum effects still continue to work (and sometimes even spawn particles and even brains if we get lucky) even if the universe is at absolute zero?

<comment><USER24> My understanding of it is that it wouldn't reach zero Kelvin. The heat only becomes uniformly distributed. Everything becomes maximally disorderly. Things move, but all interesting information is gone.

But order is probabilistic. It's not physically impossible for order to increase, it's just ridiculously unlikely. If you wait long enough ( _really_ long) it'll probably happen some time.

I don't think quantum effects are especially related, except to the extent they relate to everything.

<comment><USER25> That's the crazy thing about large numbers like these. Even Entropy's Heat Death are swallowed up by them. Not only do such events become probable but they become inevitable an endless number of times over a long enough timescale. Infinity kills even Heat Death.

<comment><USER23> I will start to use this in rock-paper-scissors-infinity.

But first I have to deeply realize that I'm just one out of all possible ones and that I exist infinitely times and also infinitely times where I finally have a beard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of these are ironically myopic: " _10,000 years: If globalization trends lead to panmixia, human genetic variation will no longer be regionalized, as the effective population size will equal the actual population size. This does not mean homogeneity, as minority traits will still be preserved, e.g. the blonde gene will not disappear, but it will be rather evenly distributed worldwide._ "

That prediction makes the rather questionable assumption that humans will still be primarily, if not entirely, on Earth in 10,000 years! Interplanetary colonization will likely dwarf the regional evolutionary isolation we've experienced on this planet. In the longrun it will likely even trend towards speciation (as a more reasonable prediction further on does hit on.) Consider that a European, an African, and a Japanese all share an _incredibly_ recent ancestor.

The exciting thing about interplanetary colonization is once the technology starts to become robust, our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited. It would be like if the western frontier in the US was uninhabited and somehow went on to infinity. The implications of this are difficult to even imagine.

<comment><USER23> > our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited

It's still finite. I recommend this famous Asimov story [1]. I don't think that it makes humanity "more meaningful" or something similar if we start interplanetary colonization.

Really, it doesn't matter even if we inhabit the whole observable universe. We will die and it doesn't matter if I die on an exoplanet as a 1500y/o guy in a young body or if I die on earth as a 80y/o. Maybe I will experience more and whatever, but I don't really give a sh*t because life will always be finite (even if you can be billions of years old). And the implications of becoming so old can be seen in the Netflix series "Altered Carbon": You will develop weird sexual fetishes because you're bored af. And if we "overcome humans" and become some other weird sentient being it's still limited and if it's not limited it still doesn't matter from some other angle.

I don't understand why everybody is excited about interplanetary colonization and immortality. There's this quote: "To philosophize is to learn to die" \- I think this is more important than trying to increase your life span or do some other stuff to delay death or even become immortal. I think most of those Silicon Valley tycoons who want this, e.g. Peter Thiel, just like the thought of accumulating power over hundreds of years. Sounds hedonistic to me + all that "will to power" ego talk.

[1]: [http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

<comment><USER26> Excellent short story.

We each have to find our own personal meaning to life. For myself it's simply knowledge. And starting to colonize other planets, and more generally become a genuinely space faring civilization, is going to revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of this universe. To what end? Well, I'll tell you when we run out of things that we don't know. I expect, even if immortality should come to pass, this is a question I will not have to answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A number of Science Fiction works talk about how prediction is more accurate the further out you go into the future, but how predictions in the short term are not so much.

Like the episode of Deep Space 9 where Bashier works with the other genetically modified humans. They talk about how eventually the galaxy will come to an end due to entropy, but their predictions for the Dominion War had too many variables to accurately predict close up.

Psycho-history and Foundation is sorta like this, but I think Issac Asimov doesn't do as good a job with this story/theory/believably.

<comment><USER28> There is an absolutely delightful short story by -- who else? -- Robert Silverberg about predictions of the far future, "When We Went to See the End of the World". You'll be amused and you'll laugh, though perhaps you'll need a dark sense of humor for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend "Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur" available on Youtube and in other formats.

<comment><USER30> He publishes it in a podcast format as well without the background music, which I am very thankful for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Amazing that the entirety of human civilization as we know it fits in a smaller time scale than the very first event on this timeline (10,000 years from now).

So while these time spans are minuscule on an astronomical scale, they are enormous on a human scale.

<comment><USER32> Indeed. In Neil DeGrasse Tyson's version of "Cosmos" there is a great illustration where he says that if we visualize the entire history of the universe as being scaled to one calendar year then every human being that has ever lived has essentially existed somewhere within the last 12 seconds of that year.

<comment><USER33> > In Neil DeGrasse Tyson's version of "Cosmos" there is a great illustration > where he says that if we visualize the entire history of the universe as > being scaled to one calendar year then every human being that has ever lived > has essentially existed somewhere within the last 12 seconds of that year.

Was that in the original Carl Sagan version of Cosmos as well? I seem to recall it, but I've never seen the Neil DeGrasse Tyson version.

<comment><USER32> Apparently it was. I have never seen the older version so wasn't aware. Another commenter above posted the youtube link to the original segment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Relevant Kurzgesagt video explaining 3 ways the universe will die: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_aOIA- vyBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_aOIA-vyBo)

I've been posting too many Kurzgesagt videos recently, but it's amazing how much of their content is relevant! :D

</comment><comment><USER35> This reminded me of a question I've had knocking around in my head since I've heard of hawking radiation- the prediction is that the black holes slowly evaporate into subatomic particles.

However, it seems to me at some point a critical juncture would be passed and the black hole would cease being bound gravitationally and the matter would be released similarly to a supernova or just spontaneously form a neutron star.

What is the fallacy in that thinking?

<comment><USER36> Theoretically, a black hole can exist at any mass as long as it is dense enough. It is true that a black hole won't form without enough mass to cause it to collapse, but once formed, it can evaporate down to nothing without ever becoming gravitationally unbound.

<comment><USER35> Theoretically it _could_ evaporate but is there any necessity of that? Is exploding a theoretical possibility or once a stellar mass black hole forms is it thereafter in such a small circumference that it is stuck in that form until it evaporates?

<comment><USER37> Well, evaporation is simply a conclusion from hawking radiation.

The black hole losses energy over this radiation, energy it produces from it's own mass.

Since hawking radiation output increases relative to the size of the black hole as it gets smaller, eventually you end up with an explosion. I do believe that Kurzgesagt made a video that details what would happen with a blackhole with the mass of a coin in your pocket (short version: you die)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The further I read, the smaller I feel.

<comment><USER39> The further I read, the smaller some of the issues we face today seem. I could spend my life fighting to prevent global warming or fix the world, but this list just makes me want to enjoy the time I have here with my loved ones... I don't know how I feel about these feelings.

<comment><USER3> > _According to Berger and Loutre, the current interglacial period ends[14] > sending the Earth back into a glacial period of the current ice age, > regardless of the effects of anthropogenic global warming._

According to that guy, there will be a new ice age in 50k years regardless of the current global warming being stopped or not.

<comment><USER23> Climate change? Sounds like a problem for patient man!

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-superhero-we-need](https://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/the-superhero-we-need)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Years from now: 2.4 million

Java is still at the top of the TIOBE index. Moreover, the familiar Java update progress dialog will display "100 Trillion Devices Run Java Across Thousands of Galaxies".

</comment><comment><USER41> Reading that timeline was quite a trip. Humanity is really just a tiny blip in the grand scale of time.

They don't talk much about AI and other synthetic replacements for humanity. Maybe it's just too difficult to extrapolate.

One can guess, though, that long before another 10,000 years have passed, we will have developed artificial beings that are billions of times smarter than we are.

By then, we probably will have augmented our minds and bodies to the point where we are vastly more intelligent and powerful as well, so perhaps we will survive in some form or other.

<comment><USER42> Or we will have unleashed highly lethal, self-replicating nanobots in the prosecution of a devastating global war, and the human race will be crawling along with a population at extinction levels. (Or maybe just a good old fashioned series of nuclear exchanges?)

The future can be more brilliant than we could imagine, or darker than our worst fears can conjure. Likely, it will be somewhere in the middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Now I feel like a moron for going to speak about housing issues at the city council meeting...

</comment><comment><USER44> One of my favorite Wikipedia pages of all time. A little sad that there are only three Biology events there though: North American earthworms spreading to Canada, coral reefs recovering, and C4 photosynthesis no longer possible. Can anyone think of more possible biology events?

<comment><USER45> We have added a second language of relication, language itself, to biology, and are using it to alter the first language in a rapidly expanding way.

It's not easy to make predictions, short or long term, given this. The coral prediction, which does have the word "if" in it, also assumes we

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd highly recommend taking a look at [https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2020.htm#2020-202...](https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2020.htm#2020-2025)

</comment><comment><USER47> > The red supergiant star Antares will likely have exploded in a supernova. > The explosion is expected to be easily visible in daylight.

Wow, I'd love to be able to see that. Makes one sad about all the things they'll never get to experience.

<comment><USER48> Actually, the prediction accuracy here is more like "may go off any time". Likewise, for Betelgeuse (the brightest star of Orion), which would also be visible in daylight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's very interesting to speculate about all this, and also crazy to think all these predictions were only made in the last century. I wonder how much different this list will look in another 100 years (if at all).

</comment><comment><USER50> > _230 million - Prediction of the orbits of the planets is impossible over > greater time spans than this, due to the limitations of Lyapunov time._

> _[...]_

> _3.3 billion - 1% chance that Jupiter 's gravity may make Mercury's orbit so > eccentric as to collide with Venus, sending the inner Solar System into > chaos. Possible scenarios include Mercury colliding with the Sun, being > ejected from the Solar System, or colliding with Earth._

Are these statements contradictory or am I missing something?

<comment><USER51> They're from different sources, which presumably don't necessarily agree on how far out their predictions are likely to be reasonable.

<comment><USER52> It's more like the first says we can't know exactly where the planets will be while the second is talking about some of the extremes that divergence will go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is extremely interesting, but couldn't it be that in 10.000 our technology has advanced so much that we are able to "refill" dying stars for example? I mean, look at how much we have achieved in the past 1000 years, exponential technology growth over a timefrime 10x that can be unimaginable now.

These are cool predictions but they need not be true

<comment><USER54> I've never figured out why people think technological growth would be exponential indefinitely.

<comment><USER55> on an exponential scale 10000 years is just one step ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Can someone explain:

> 800 million Carbon dioxide levels fall to the point at which C4 > photosynthesis is no longer possible.[57] Without plant life to recycle > oxygen in the atmosphere, free oxygen and the ozone layer will disappear > from the atmosphere. All multicellular life will die out.[58]

<comment><USER57> I couldn't find the 800 million year figure specifically in the cited source: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.2482.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.2482.pdf)

The general idea, I believe, is that the carbonate-silicate cycle will shift more toward carbonates over time. The Earth will warm substantially as the sun's luminosity increases over millions of years. Warmer conditions will accelerate the reaction of water and carbon dioxide with silicate minerals like magnesium and calcium silicates, shifting the equilibrium to favor more carbon-as-insoluble-carbonate and less carbon-as-available-CO2. Plant life will eventually go extinct from insufficient atmospheric CO2. I haven't spotted a discussion of oxygen loss in either citation 57 or 58. But "just" losing plant life would be enough to drive the extinction of most other multicellular life on Earth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cycle)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Main_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Main_sequence)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> While I'm not totally on board with outlooks on a technological singularity a la Kurzweil and peers, what does it mean that there is no real representation of that idea here? For example, Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns" where the speed of technological change increases exponentially has many flaws according to scientists I respect greatly, yet also has many hints at possible futures, ironically also according to scientists I respect greatly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)

<comment><USER59> It is a controversial idea, and most people can only imagine a future for humanity where things look pretty much as they do now, but with slightly better technology (cf Star Trek, where meat bags are flying among the stars, mostly unchanged from present humanity).

I'm fairly certain we're looking at the end of human civilization one way or the other within the next 100 years max. The Global Pollution Epidemic, robot uprising, and nuclear war are the more likely bad scenarios for the end of civilization.

We might instead be able to develop technology which solves all present problems (like pollution and energy production) and then use it wisely to bring wealth and enlightenment to everyone.

I wouldn't care to estimate what outcome is more likely.

<comment><USER58> Even Kurzweil's updated ideas and projections in _The Singularity is Near_ from around 2005 still make assumptions of humanity having a longer technology maturation period than 100 years. I actually have the same opinion as you when it comes to our time left if we can't make some global changes; it bums me out, having two girls who are not even in High School yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The Timeline talks about Nuclear waste but what about cumulative effect of daily garbage, solid waste, plastic degradation until human beings survive on earth...

[https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-long-does-it-take- garbage-...](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-long-does-it-take-garbage-to- decompose-2878033)

I think this should have been mentioned somewhere in 'Human constructs' section

</comment><comment><USER61> And then there's this: [http://www.exitmundi.nl/](http://www.exitmundi.nl/) ;-)

</comment><comment><USER62> Awesome piece. Will have to read that one again and bookmark it. Puts all life's little shitty events into context!

</comment><comment><USER63> I was getting depressed towards the end of the event list, and the last one cheered me up. Everything is circular.

<comment><USER64> It is happier, still a bit depressing, though, knowing that everything that happened already happened and will keep on happening.

<comment><USER65> _Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light.

Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A blog post I made putting this and the timeline of life on Earth on the same graph:

[http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake- eq...](http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-equation- again.html)

</comment><comment><USER66> Who knew that the "store stuff forever" problem was basically solved:

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage)

</comment><comment><USER67> Is someone aware of any non-fiction book that imagines the far future? There're plenty of good books about the past, but I'm not aware of something that spins a tale similar to this article, it could make a great read.

</comment><comment><USER68> Fascinating reading, but does anybody else find it incredibly depressing? Everything we've seen, every place we loved, everything we've produced, every bit of our history, literature, arts, every smallest trace of our passage in the universe, and every living being, species, descendant or distant cousin, is going to be pulverized, baked, incinerated and atomized. Not even too far from now, in geological terms- much before the universe has stopped producing new stars and planets and new life.

</comment><comment><USER69> Pretty useful for real estate investors who want to plan ahead for the next few hundred million years....

</comment><comment><USER70> TIL: I don't really know how much about the future and all there is to know in science....

</comment><comment><USER71> this is one of the worst put together wikipedia articles I have ever read

</comment><comment><USER72> if you enjoyed this, you'll probably like this as well: library of babel [https://libraryofbabel.info/](https://libraryofbabel.info/)

</comment><comment><USER73> This really belongs in XKCD.

</comment><comment><USER74> My only question is whether the world's cumulative student loan debt will have been paid back before the red giant Sun engulfs Earth.

</comment><comment><USER75> Anyone who was holding their breath waiting for coastal California to fall into the ocean is going to be disappointment to find out it's not happening in their lifetime.

<comment><USER76> Would you mind making your comments more thoughtful and informative?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


The Evolution of Ember.js at Intercom - <AUTHOR> https://www.intercom.com/blog/videos/evolution-of-ember-at-intercom/ <comment><USER2> The ease of updating Ember apps is really great. I've helped take apps through the early 2.x to latest 3.x. There _has_ been some tedious work involved, but on the whole, I usually know exactly what to do to get the new features. Not breaking existing features is a godsend, because the rest of the team can keep developing features and we can introduce new features via lint rules at a reasonable pace.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is neat to read. The README for the Ember.js repo (github.com/emberjs/ember.js) was updated recently too, and I feel like there's a lot more specific clarity about what Ember really has to offer, especially for folks who might not have considered it an option yet.</comment>


Placebo Surgery - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/03/placebo-surgery.html

<comment><USER2> The placebo effect applies to other types of surgery as well. Back in 2002 there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that concluded that arthroscopic knee surgery yielded results no better than placebo surgery. That article is cited in both of the linked articles at the bottom of this article, and also in this Wikipedia entry:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sham_surgery>

</comment><comment><USER3> > The Cobb and Dimond mammary ligation studies show better than any drug study > just how powerful the placebo effect can be. Angina is potentially > debilitating. Yet the placebo effect brought pain down to manageable levels > in people who had sham surgery, 80+ percent of the time. Is it any wonder > acupuncture works for so many people? Or hypnosis? Or Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, > Zoloft, Effexor, and all the rest?

Or, for that matter, psychological treatments, whether drugs, therapy or both.</comment>


Why should we use pnpm? - <AUTHOR> https://www.kochan.io/nodejs/why-should-we-use-pnpm.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is what I thought Yarn would be

<comment><USER2> Exactly. There was so much hype around Yarn when it came out, and it turned out to be pretty much npm with a couple more bells attached. OTOH, pnpm is doing it just right.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best digital camera for a post-4k world? - this-dang-guy I saw this post up on G+, and decided that Hacker News was really a better place to ask this kind of question.
What with a 12MP camera really being 4,000 by 3,000 and a 4K screen displaying 4,000 by 2,000 - I had never considered how fast display technology was advancing.
So - what would be the best options for someone to go with? Should they just go WAY out there and get an ultra high MP camera, or stick to something just slightly ahead of the current displays?
(original post went here: http://rationalviews.com/t/best-digital-camera-for-a-post-4k-world/267?u=mbybee) <comment><AUTHOR> Different camera systems are best at different things. Are you shooting sports and action and wildlife photos? Are you into portraits? Shooting video? Dark clubs at night? Street photos? There's lots of types of photography. For me I'd personally look more into Fuji and Nikon stuff, but there's a lot of options.

I'd second looking more at the glass you'd need to get than the camera. The camera body you spend 1000-2000 or more on today will be available on eBay for relatively cheap in 5 years, but good glass will retain its value and use for decades. There's 20+ year old lenses that are better for some tasks than any modern equivalents: they just lack a few modern features.

Depending on your type of photos, look into spending more of your budget on lighting. You can do more with a junk camera and Lens and great light than you can with poor light and a great camera and lens.

</comment><comment><USER2> Camera bodies come and go fairly quickly, which is why I tend to invest more in glass.

If you start paying over say $1000 per lens, they generally retain their value. What's more, a quality lens on a mediocre chip is going to look much better than the inverse. That's my experience anyway.

<comment> this-dang-guy That's what I would think. Just keep swapping out bodies to keep pace with the tech

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an odd question. Unless someone's a professional photog, they're going to pick an amount of money they feel like spending on a camera and then do that. If that's less than thousands of dollars, they're not going to be getting an "ultra high MP camera".

</comment><comment><USER4> The "best digital camera" is the one you can afford. That said unless you're a true enthusiast spending £3-5k on a top end body it's pretty pointless, might as well go for something along with the 70D or d7100/7200.

<comment> this-dang-guy I think it's a given that anyone asking about cameras that high end is spending that kind of money.

I brought it to HN from a different angle. Most photographers crop and downsample to help them establish proof of copyright (since they don't have negatives). With 4K screens becoming commonplace, it seems like they're about to lose that arms race.

<comment><USER4> But even then most DSLRs are at least 20MP+ giving enough wiggle room to crop/manipulate the image and still have a high enough resolution to display on 4K devices.

I don't think it will be an issue for a good while yet and by that time I'm sure new bodies will come out to take advantage of it.

<comment> this-dang-guy The one he was referring to in his post is 12MP.

<comment><USER5> I think the parent was talking about currently available models. The D90 quoted is from 2008, and nowadays even good compact/superzoom cameras can do useful 4k photos.

<comment> this-dang-guy Yes - looks like from his followup he's going with a D750.

So, yeah, body swap. I guess the war continues :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The editorial boards are failing on climate - <AUTHOR> https://heated.world/p/the-editorial-boards-are-failing <comment><USER2> I think a lot of people including NYT & WaPo staff don't understand that economic prosperity and environmental sustainability are mutually exclusive. In fact most, if not all politicians and business people suffer the same lack of understanding.

<comment><USER3> That view send to be shared by 16 Nobel laureates of economics and other 2600 economists signing the Economist statement on climate change in 1997 ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_C...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Climate_Change)). Calling your difference in opinion a "lack of understanding" seems a bit inappropriate.

<comment><USER4> 97 is ancient history in climate modelling

<comment><USER5> Is it? Models going back decades are pretty darn correct from what I've read

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/climate-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/climate- models-have-accurately-predicted-global-heating-study-finds)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lawrence Lessig's TED Talk: We the People – the Republic we must reclaim [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html?utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=addthis-custom&awesm=on.ted.com_q8Nq&source=twitter&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter%23.UVw2UOAYZGA.twitter

<comment><USER2> For those who can't watch the full video:

 _132 Americans gave 60% of SuperPAC funds in the last election cycle._

Republic lost, indeed.</comment>


Million Dollar Cat Billboard - <AUTHOR> https://catbillboard.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> Just like [http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/) . I guess there's some sort of human nature law: where there's surface, we will mark.

<comment><USER3> That gave me horrible flashbacks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're asking for a million dollars, the least you could have done was set up the site as a non-generic Wordpress one.

<comment><USER5> But then you are spending less money on the cats and if they find out they will crap in your shoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Terrible website. Explains very few of the core questions people will have.

Size of a default square?

Where is the square I buy going to be on the billboard?

Where in each city will the billboard be placed?

Who are you people?

Why should I trust you are going to do it?

How much do you think will be left over to donate to charity?

<comment><USER7> Sorry about that. Everything you ask here is very important. We updated the website and tried to explain everything more clearly. Thanks for your interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given a large Billboard ([http://www.lamar.com/Products/Bulletins](http://www.lamar.com/Products/Bulletins)) size of 672 sq. ft. unless my math is wrong (could be) you're paying $100 for about .8 square inches. That would be visible from what? 5-6 feet away?

<comment><USER5> Is 9.67 square inches, your maths is out.

Which still only gives a square just over 3 inches on a side, so the kitties at the top of the board may get angry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It claims that:

> "All money left from this campaign will be donated to Morris Animal > Foundation and several other animal charities and funds. Full list will be > provided to those who bought at least one "square"."

So maybe they aren't even trying to profit from this? I don't know. The website tells me nothing.

<comment><USER7> We're not doing it for profit. We'll donate all money left after this campaign is over, ad space bought, billboards are designed, printed, and put out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just so I'm clear, the same print will be in all cities, so I can be sure my cat gets the most exposure possible. Also, what about dogs?

<comment><USER7> Same print for all cities, yes. Sorry, no dogs for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is no list of cities where these billboards will be.

Would not want to buy a billboard for my cat and none of the bill boards are in my city.

<comment><USER12> There's a list now. Perhaps they edited it in?

> _After all "squares" are sold, billboards will be printed and put up in the > following cities: New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Madrid, Paris, > Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is gonna be great for the lucky people who get the used vinyl after the billboard comes down.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is backwards. Advertisers should be paying for the cats, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wasn't this on 'shark tank' ?

</comment><comment><USER16> how about photos of shelter cats? With QR-code with each photo pointing to the adoption page of the cat.

<comment><USER17> That would be a neat idea, but that wouldn't make the creator $1 million, so I wouldn't be too hopeful on that option.

<comment><USER18> Well, he does say that the earnings will be donated to an animal shelter.</comment></comment></comment>