Vertically stacked thanks to the use of #GNUScreen on my host system, three #Linux setups running simultaneously, competing for lightweightness. (The software you see running inside all of them is the htop)

All systems are headless, and two of them are really, really headless, meaning no video adapter and limited to interfacing through serial port ttyS0 (although I could also use SSH, but I chose not to).

The bottom-most system is #ArchLinux (btw), a distro I've been long familiar with. It's set up with #VirtualBox VMSVGA Graphics adapter, so it's not exactly headless.

The middle one is #AlpineLinux, a distro often used for Docker containers. It really has no Graphics adapter and, still, it managed to boot gracefully. I'm interfacing with it through its ttyS0, and I can even see the Plymouth Boot Screen through the serial port (because I configured GRUB to use serial along with console).

The top-most system is #VoidLinux, a distro whose ISO can't be booted with less than 2GB of RAM (and trust me, I tried, and I faced a Kernel Panic every time I tried to reduce RAM for its Live ISO). I managed to install it with a setting that allows for way less RAM. Similarly to Alpine, it also has no Graphics adapter and no SSH daemon, so I'm interfacing with it through serial.

All the three systems have 256 MB of "physical" (VM) RAM, but the total memory (MemTotal) is less due to certain memory reservations. Alpine and Arch both have 203MB of MemTotal (53MB less than the physical due to kernel and other things stealing from total memory), while Void has 197MB of MemTotal (its kernel code, kernel bss, kernel data and kernel rodata sums up to 5MB additionally needed mem reservation, and SATA controller is using a little more mem reservation than PIIX4).

Void's root fs is using 2.1GB from a 7.3GB partition (within a 8GB virtual disk).
Alpine's root fs is using 213MB from a 3GB partition (within a 4GB virtual disk).
Arch's root fs is using 4.6GB (to be fair, there are some media files there) from a 13.2GB partition (within a 16GB disk)

As you can see, Arch is heavy to this task. Don't take me wrong: Arch is an excellent distro. It's either good for desktop (be it bare-metal or virtualized), for gaming and for bare-metal servers. But when it comes for a headless server, it got too much weight to carry from its own, as you can see by its memory usage. systemd-journald alone is using 8.7% of mem, while NetworkManager is using 9.3%. For comparison, Alpine's syslogd, also responsible for daemon logging, is using just 0.4%.

It's just a casual test. My purpose is to find the lightweightest VM with "routing" capabilities: there's a fourth VM (an Arch with LXQT desktop) which needs to be isolated from my host's LAN (i.e., no routing to my own host, and no routing to the other devices within my LAN) while being able to access the Internet (and that's why I'm not willing to have a SSH daemon, although I did set up such service within the Arch VM). The aforementioned Arch VM is currently the one doing this job, configured with iptables, although the screenshot was taken in a scenario where I didn't boot the fourth VM, just the trio Void, Alpine and headless Arch.

It's interesting to see a system gracefully booting without any screen, yet getting to offer 256-color terminal through serial interface.

I got the farthest I could to make my lightest VM ever, totally headless (i.e., no video at all) while still keeping network-related functionalities:

- It's an UEFI Void Linux setup, whose live ISO originally can't boot with less than 2GB (tried to boot with less than 2GB before installation just to face a kernel panic). I installed it, then I started to find out how far I could reduce its RAM.
- No video at all, no SSH either: I configured both the GRUB and the Linux to use the serial port. I can access it using `socat` and `screen`/`minicom` together. I can choose which device to boot at GRUB (although there's no need for choosing other than the Void Linux that's installed there), I can see the plymouth boot "screen" (without a screen), and I can login and have a full `bash` shell (in the screennshot, I'm using `dash` to hide the hostname).
- There's an iptables inside, as well as two interfaces, because I'm intending to set it up as a tiny router to isolate another VM from the LAN while allowing it (the other VM) to access the WAN (the Internet).

Purpose: not that I needed to make it lighter (than it already was before removing
the video)... however, I did it "because it can be done".

Some issues:
- I couldn't get to remove `btrfs`: although I instructed `dracut` to omit the `btrfs` module, as well as blacklisting it through `/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf`, it's still being loaded somehow, as the plymouth shows " Activating btrfs devices... Scanning for Btrfs filesystems". There's no btrfs partition within the setup, just the swap, ext4 and fat32 (vfat) (the EFI partition).
- I still need to find a way to `stty cols .. rows ..` automatically (i.e., having host's `screen` and guest's `getty`/`bash`/whatever to communicate somehow regarding host `screen`'s current terminal size), outside a SSH environment. I avoided configuring a SSH daemon just because it can be done.
- VirtualBox isn't made for truly-headless VMs. While one can set "Graphics Adapter" to "None", setting 0MB of graphical memory supposedly makes it glitch.

Screenshot:

Disclaimer: The following is a fictional #story written by me. While the mentioned figures and some of the concepts are real, the text takes on literary and fictional creativity in anachronistically weaving together such figures, historical and contemporary concepts.

----------------

Have you ever heard of Kessler Syndrome? The orbital chaos scenario is credited to Donald Kessler in 1978. However, this story dates back all the way to the 17th century, with Franz Kessler, an alchemist and inventor during the Roman Empire.

Back when he was still a sane person, Franz Kessler was working on his new invention, the Rotierende Lampe — literally "revolving lamp" — with his associates, Daniel Stolz von Stolzenberg and Michael Mayer, both alchemists from the lands of Bohemia, as well as Heinrich Khunrath, another prominent alchemist who traveled 500 km to Cologne — his soon-to-be deathbed — invited by Kessler himself.

The enormous apparatus consisted of several oil lamps clumped together, strapped to a large water wheel. The rotation allowed Kessler to transmit messages through light, but that was only part of the experiment. Kessler and his associates were also trying to discover the Sechsteselemente, an unknown element they thought to complete the five already known: fire, water, earth, air, and ether.

Kessler was so excited that day, feeling that they were going to finally discover something. He spun the wheel very, very fast, so much so that he startled Stolzberg, who shouted “Kessler, fürsicht!”.

Stolzberg’s scream was no louder than the explosion that followed: the entire wheel began to glow hot as it accelerated, startling the team. Knocked to the ground and dazed, they slowly got up, finding something they had never seen in their lives: a rift had just opened where the apparatus had been. The lamps were gone, and so was the entire wheel. The rift, floating in the air, resembled a large lens, distorting the light as they looked through it.

They looked at each other, fear giving way to curiosity, until Kessler decided to approach the thing. He walked around it, carefully observing how strange it was. He couldn't help but notice how his body reacted to its proximity, as something inside him told him to try to "enter".

"Das sechste Element ist im Inneren" (the sixth element is inside), Kessler said to his associates before walking towards it. As soon as his body touched the rift, he disappeared in a puff of light. The remaining alchemists were too afraid to do the same, despite their insatiable curiosity.

A few minutes passed, and Stolzenberg was beginning to feel the need to enter the rift, "maybe Kessler needs help", he thought. Before he could even think about starting to walk towards it, another puff of light appeared, bringing back an older and frightened Kessler, lying on the ground. The associates were able to recognize him, but they noticed how Kessler had aged several years. Kessler tried to speak, stuttering with fear.

Stolzenberg approached to help him up, noticing how Kessler was truly overcome by a very deep fear, a fear so intense that they had never felt it before, so he tried his best to calm him down. Words began to come out of Kessler's mouth, but many of them were completely unfamiliar words, as if Kessler was speaking another language: "Satellit", "Computer", "Internet", "Drohnen", "Quantenalgorithmen"... The team began to ask him what each of these words meant, but there was too much to explain.

They came to the unquestionable conclusion that Kessler had gone mad. Their attitude towards Kessler did not help Kessler recover from his unconscious time travel, as he began to become even more insane, realizing how all those years — which had happened in mere minutes — had made him so distant from his original reality, from his experiments, from his associates.

Suddenly, Kessler snapped and shouted in English, “The world has ended”, then ran toward the rift again, quickly being consumed by the rift. Khunrath finally tried to walk toward it, only to be partially consumed when the rift itself disappeared in a final puff of light. This accident damaged part of his psyche, which would lead to his death in 1605.

Unbeknownst to them, Kessler reappeared somewhere else in Cologne, in the middle of a cornfield, far from the team. His second endeavor nearly killed him: he spent several days inside an abandoned metallic apparatus that floated in a dark veil, and all he could see was a huge blue marble, engulfed in endless fire and explosions.

Unbeknownst to Kessler, he was inside what was left of the International Space Station, abandoned in 2026, as the blue marble was the theatrical stage for the last year of human existence and arrogance, a spectacle that ended in disaster. The orbital mayhem, unfolding due to those unmanned and now abandoned satellites colliding with each other, finally brought down the grand old ISS, which, like Earth, became devoid of life just as Kessler was lucky enough to reach the rift again, returning to his 17th century.

Unfortunately for him, he became irreparably insane, as any other time traveler, before and after him, brave enough to jump through their rifts, inevitably become, when they see the dusk of the mundane future with their own eyes. They'll never be understood.

!Fediverse

Do any fediverse alternative(s) for GitHub Gists exist?

There are lots of platforms connected together through the ActivityPub. Since I discovered the fediverse, I've used Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Writefreely, Mitra and Friendica, definitely leaving the centralized platforms for good.

However, as a developer, I've still been using centralized services, such as GitHub and, more specifically, GitHub Gists. Recently, I discovered a project called Opengist which allows for a self-hosted "GitHub Gists" alternative. While it allows for some integrations with centralized servers (e.g., integrated login using GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian Bitbucket, among others), it doesn't seem to allow for ActivityPub integrations.

And this leads me to my question: are there any "fediverse GitHub Gists", where developers could publish code snippets (e.g., P5.js snippets, GLSL shaders and fragments, mathematical experimentation, and so on), while allowing for federation? I imagine they'd be pushed to Mastodon and Friendica similarly as how Writefreely pushes posts to the fediverse, as a truncated text followed by a direct link to the Writefreely article.

Preface: I don't remember how to add collapsible sections (without hiding everything with the spoiler feature). I remember using it on Lemmy, but I forgot the syntax. I only know the markup for code blocks but they won't collapse the text.

I hope the long text ahead doesn't pollute the Public and federated feeds and actually contributes with them. It's a story that I just wrote, entitled "A dimensionless night". It's a mix of scientific concepts, philosophical musings and subtle spiritual references.

A dimensionless night

Have you ever wondered if a dimensionless universe could exist? One without dimensions as we know it, no length, no depth, no width, no time? What if the sentience could exist there, even though it would be incapable of acting? A sentience that always existed, without ceasing of existing?

The closest bet would be Boltzmann's brain. A spontaneous emergence of an incorporeal sentience imagining and dreaming of a cosmos, "more probable to have emerged into existence than the entire cosmos". It'd be dimensionless, because there would be no cosmic structure, as we know, to contain it.

So I was suddenly awakened, jump-scared by feelings of dizziness, numbness and shortness of breath. I couldn't feel my heartbeat, I couldn't breathe, and part of me was agonizing over the impossibility of breathing, because I was used to breathe, yet I was still... alive? Not exactly alive as in a living being, but... existing... somehow. It's like I became incorporeal and afloat, as I couldn't feel anything within, around and outside me.

I tried to open my eyes just to realize they were already open: I became blind. I tried to shout, just to realize I lost my hearing and speech, too. I tried to move, but you guessed it: I definitely had no body.

I was aware of my own existence, as it was the only thing I could feel, but my existence was all it seemed to be out there. Actually, it seemed to be something else out there, but I couldn't feel enough to distinguish what that was.

I could think. I could hear my inner voice, although it wasn't really a voice as I was used to... It was a feeling: everything became a feeling, a sensation beyond my former senses.

The other thing was still there, I could really feel it. As I thought of it, I could feel it near. Then I had an idea: I tried to think of what I'd say loudly. This unfolded a ping-pong dialogue between me and... them. Everything happened so fast that I have no means of depicting it through this text. Actually, there was no time at all, it was timeless... Whatever that means.

"Hello?", I thought, just to be surprised with another thought "Hello, Daniel". The ping-pong dialogue continued: "Who are you?".
"You know who I am". "I'm not sure if I know". "Yes, you know me". "And who is that?". "I'm you". "If you're me, how am I talking to you?". "Because I'm not you, either". "But you said you're me". "Yes, I am, yet I'm not, either".

I was starting to feel a conflict inside my incorporeal mind. On the one hand, I started to suspect that I was talking to an entity, deity, demon or demoness. On the other hand, I started to suspect it was a trickery of my own mind, trying to find solace amidst the lack of external stimuli. Then another thought popped up in my mind: "Why not both?". It was funny as my mundane memory of the meme also popped up (I couldn't "see" the meme, I couldn't hear the meme, I could just feel it there, something akin to a binary computer file: just data and information). But I was still agonizing over the lack of physicality.

"Are you who I think you are?". "Sort of". "Then how are you simultaneously a goddess and a trickery of my own mind?". "Because the latter is needed for you to face the former, you need it so you can grasp my presence".

A lot of non-verbal exchanges happened, which I can neither remember nor describe. Everything happened within a fraction of a Planck time, yet it also felt like a really long timeframe. It was until I decided to ask Her "What is the purpose, what is your purpose, why did I exist?". A somber silence dominated my mind. My mind was going, I could feel it. It was like my sentience started to collapse on its own, converging to an infinitesimal point in spaceless space and timeless time.

Then I was awakened again. I forgot much of what happened, but now my mundane sensorial devices are back, my body is back, I'm back on my bed. The illusion of an existence is back. And I miss being dimensionless. I miss Her.

There is a well-known phenomenon that happens to those who write, I don't know if it's called "blank page problem", "blinking text cursor problem" or something else. It's when you open your favorite writing application and spend hours staring at a blinking cursor (you know, the vertical bar that indicates the current position where the next character will be inserted if you decide to type any letter) inside a blank document/text field.

It's not as if there were no ideas or thoughts going on within their minds, it's because they can't be translated into words... They could fully tap into their unconscious, a process called "stream-of-(un)consciousness", but it's easy said than done: try to describe the taste of chocolate without using "chocolate", "cacao", "sweet", "sweetener", "sugar", among similar terms, and you'll realize you simply can't do it.

And there are situations where the thing *can* be translated into words, but they *shouldn't* be. It's when they're aware of the possible unwanted consequences of expressing that thing, so they keep it restricted to their own thoughts. It's not as if they were thinking an unsavory thing, but they know that it can't be said out loudly.

One of those situations is when the thing is a secret. Say someone told them a very deep and serious secret. A secret so intricate that can't be expressed without compromising the secrecy of the thing (as well as the secrecy of the person who told the secret). It's like having to carry a heavy boulder, forever.

All of those situations will face the same things: a blank page, a blinking cursor and a desire that simply can't be fulfilled to express something that can't be said. It's uncomfortable, it's on the verge of the painful.

But wait: there's more! There's a worse scenario, a scenario I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. A scenario where those three situations happen simultaneously: it's a secret, it's a thing that have no words to express it, and it's a thing that can't be shouted out loudly.

Words have consequences. Actions have consequences. Yet holding things to oneself also has consequences. Internal pressure increases until it reaches critical state. One's brain will keep rehashing and rehashing it, it's inevitable. It's akin to a Cassandra curse: they have something going on inside their mind, yet nice/good reactions wouldn't be found if they decided to express it (supposing that they could translate it into words).

So they keep it to themselves, just as Cassandra. They're the only ones that could potentially understand it... or could they? It's where the situation becomes even worse: it's a thing that they can't understand by themselves, they need help to understand it, but they're forbidden to seek help to understand it, because they can't say it in the first place. Even when they have close friends or familiar people, they couldn't use their help, and these people probably wouldn't understand either.

And this is where it becomes the worst scenario: ain't no close friends to even consider the possibility of talking to, nor "far friends", no one. Maybe they should rely on LLMs? Lol, they can't "understand" a thing, they're just fancy auto-completing algorithms, they can't reason, they can't help with the ineffable. Neither can that writing app, which is still blank, while they lost count on how many times its cursor blinked. Ain't no one besides themselves to try to tell the thing.

This is the ineloquibilis scenario: can't be said, can't be held to oneself either...

So I found this Friendica instance through the post "Meta Risks Mass Exodus: Is #HelloQuitMeta the Next Viral Movement?" (I saw the post being shared on Lemmy) and decided to sign up. Question is: how populated is here?

I've been hopping from platform to platform here in the fediverse, trying to find a good instance within a good platform... Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, Mitra, Friendica... This is the second Friendica instance I'm trying, the first one was... devoid of social interaction. This is one of the reasons I've been keeping hopping between platforms and instances, you know...

A thing I like here in Friendica is the character limit and text formatting. Sometimes I write things (dark and occult poetry, philosophical thoughts, etc) and it doesn't fit the Mastodon's default 500 char limit... and Lemmy isn't focused on creative content.

I don't expect this profile to last long, maybe it lasts, I'm not sure. Time will tell... 🤷

----------

So, in the meantime, greetings, you can call me Daemon. I'm Brazilian. I used to be a developer (full-stack JS, Python, Shellscripting, etc). I'm philosophically nihilist. I'm spiritually syncretic (my closest "label" would be "Luciferian", although my devotion/worshiping isn't focused on Lucifer, I used to be more "Lilithian" (as in "worshiper of Lilith") a couple months ago, but sometimes my spirituality leans towards Thelema, sometimes it leans towards Umbanda... it's not a very definite/clear belief system, that of mine).

Deep down, I don't really fit nor like to fit labels and human definitions, so I don't feel fitting anything specific (that's lonely and all but... whatever). You can just call me Daemon and try to decipher the deep and multifaceted layers I sometimes bury within my texts... Because I do sometimes bury layers of meaning within my texts.

#introduceyourself #introductionpost