• Biti
• helper-ama

Biti's Community Helper AMA

This was an event on the FreeBSD Discord server. The transcription was performed by Biti using a screen recording of the event. The transcription exists in its original form without correcting grammar. The phrasing of some elements may have been slightly altered if the original made no sense in text format. Please note that Biti's responses happened live with no preparation time.

Below you will find the Discord event information, the transcription, and a copy of the text channel.

Discord Event Information

• TITLE: Biti's AMA - New Community Helper

• DATE: May 26, 2023

• TIME: 1 PM EDT

• DESCRIPTION: At this AMA, Biti will introduce themself, describe their interests, and explain why they become a FreeBSD Community Helper.

• CHANNEL: Ask Me Anything (AMA)

Transcription

Biti was the only person speaking. All other members mentioned sent their messages in the text channel and Biti read them aloud.

Biti: Ok, so I’m getting the audio from this so I can transcribe it later into a markdown document so that anybody who misses a question can go back and look at the transcript. I’m not publishing audio. I’m just gonna publish the text from the audio.

Biti accidentally leaves and joins the Hangin' Out channel. Then returns to the AMA stage.

Biti: That was a misclick. I accidentally joined back to the other channel.

jauntyd: which branch of FreeBSD do ya run biti?

Biti: So to answer the lobby question so I have it on record.. Which branch of FreeBSD do I run? Uh typically it is quarterly when I set up a system.

4984: biti, are you a bluetooth speaker or a wired speaker?

Biti: I don’t know how to answer that one. I’m gonna say wireless in the 802.11 spec I guess because my headset runs on the same frequency as 2.4 GHz WiFi and if I have a 2.4 GHz device doing data transfers, my headset stops working because they are on the same frequency.

Setesh: So… Biti… are you, or are not, in fact, a cybernetic doombot that will lead to either the end of days, or a new glorious era for the server?

Biti: I’m just a tiger furry. That’s it. I’m not cybernetic yet. I mean I guess if I have a cell phone in my hand I’m technically cybernetic because I’m then connecting and interfacing with a digital device. So there is not much difference between me holding a phone and having an implant.

Setesh: All hail our new cyborg overlord o.o

Biti: I don’t know about overlord. That is a lot of responsibility. I like having someone up… someone higher up on the chain of command that way when something goes wrong I can blame them instead of blaming me.

Wolfi: So, biti, what is your background in relation to BSD?

Biti: So I started out… as a kid I ran Windows for a while and then I started playing around with Linux in VirtualBox. I found the various BSDs fairly quickly around like 2012 I believe. But I never actually ran any of these on bare metal. So I set up a file server one day to get rid of my USB stick that I would carry between computers. I would rather just have a server that I could use. That was Ubuntu for a while. It was just an Ubuntu Samba server. Very simple. And then eventually I got into running Linux full time and then I got curious with BSD a bit more and started diving into that. And that is sort of where I am at now. I can operate both systems. I would say I am more knowledgeable in the Linux side however BSD, if you know the specific places to look you can figure out how to do something. So that is my background with BSD. And now I am here as a community helper because I have no life and use the Discord a lot.

Setesh: On a more serious note, what are you most looking forward to doing, now that you’ve survived all the pre-helper onboarding processes?

Biti: This question seems to be more of an explanation of why I am a helper so I am going to talk about that probably now since more people are joining now too. So… actually I’ll address this one directly now and then go on. This kinda ties into why I’m here so I’m gonna go into that one. So I have bounced around between a lot of open source projects over time. I’ve done the InfiniTime firmware – I’ve tried to help those people out back when it was in its early infancy. They didn’t have a lot of the processes they do now. And then I tried helping out Plasma Mobile because I was looking forward to having a mobile Linux desktop environment on a phone and I thought it would be neat to help out the KDE people. But those communities have a lot of people contributing to it already and they already have a lot of systems in place to get people in. So I went more to FreeBSD because I realized that this community is not only far more advanced, but there is also a need for people who can connect to other people. So somebody might come in and have no idea how to get started but they have the skills to. With the helper role it is more of getting those people connected and trying to help the community grow. Not only grow, but actually put people in contact with the people they need to talk to. So if somebody comes in and says “I know kernel development but I have no idea how to get started or contribute” then I can put them in contact with the kernel team. So what am I looking forward to doing? So my helper role is more in focus with the Discord bot specifically. What I’m more excited to do is get back into doing Discord bot development and help bring back the Pulsar bot. There have been a couple ideas for others that will help out the Discord a little bit more. There is one that might help out the helpers specifically. There is one that might provide more insight into what areas in the community drive the most engagement and what areas don’t. So we could use that information to help grow whatever part of the FreeBSD community is lacking. So that is what I’m looking forward to doing.

jauntyd: Do you use ports or pkg, Biti?

Biti: Both I guess. I will prioritize packages over ports if it is something I can do. There have been times that I had to build something from ports or help test something from ports. Then again, that is probably just trauma from using the AUR on Arch Linux for a while because the AUR is a very nasty thing to get involved with and will break a lot of things if you try to replace the actual system packages with the AUR ones. So I avoid ports if I can just because of my relationship with the AUR – even though I realize those are two separate entities.

jauntyd: (not relevant prob)

Biti: To address the “not relevant probably”: I’d say it is relevant actually. This is the FreeBSD server so anything FreeBSD themed still counts. It’s also an ask me anything so as long as it is a question that doesn’t violate the code of conduct I can probably answer it.

Setesh: What is the favorite thing you’ve ever used FreeBSD for?

Biti: What was the… I forgot what the system was… there was something I was using that had FreeBSD on it and I wasn’t exactly certain… Oh it was a router. I think it was pfSense at the time. Which is a little weird but it is basically just modified FreeBSD but for bring a router. I think that is probably my favorite thing I used FreeBSD for.

jauntyd: Sorry m8s, audio isn’t working for me. I will bug Biti in the lobby

Biti: That’s fine.

codingdreams: When was the first time you installed FreeBSD?

Biti: Back in 2011 or 2012. But back then I was still new to the open source world and was literally an 11 or 12 year old running Windows at the time and I was just playing around with different systems in virtual machines. So I didn’t understand the difference between a Linux distro and a BSD distro. So I didn’t really recognize FreeBSD for what it is. I just thought it was another random operating system. So I didn’t know the inheritance from UNIX and that type of stuff at the time. But that was my first experience with FreeBSD and I don’t think I ever addressed FreeBSD directly back then. I ran the forks that had a desktop environment attached to them. I think one of the bigger ones at the time was like PCBSD or something like that. I used that for a little bit in a virtual machine. There are a few other projects that have spun up and gone away over time so I don’t think any of those still exist. As far as the first FreeBSD install I legitimately used, it would probably be my laptop. I was testing a piece of software and I wanted to see if I could get it running on Linux and BSD at the same time. That was my first serious side of FreeBSD was getting software to run on both which wasn’t too much of a challenge. There were some library differences that can get you if you are not paying attention to it but they still work. I managed to get the software up and running.

Setesh: What discord bots have you worked with before becoming a helper?

Biti: The first Discord bot I made was a bot called CBot. It was for compiling in a Discord server. It was never really finished. I never got the compiler part running because there is the challenge of what if somebody tries to compile a fork bomb and takes down the server. So it never did that. What it actually ended up doing was a bunch of funnier commands or whatever. Like if you would at the server bot it would just get slowly more angry in responses to you. It had a couple different commands built in. Most of them were just jokes among friends. It never actually accomplished the goal of compiling code. Then the rest of my bot experience is actually outside of Discord I would say. So it is more of just Discord bot. I worked with Mattermost a couple times getting bots up and running there. I made a Slack bot one time for a Linux group up in my college town and that one was sort of fun. We had a joke about throwing folding chairs at each other. It was a meme based off of a video or a skit. I forgot what the TV show was that it came from. I think it… I don’t know if it was The Office or not because I don’t watch that show. But we had that joke so I made a chair command that you can use to throw a digital chair at somebody. It would log how many chairs you have thrown and it would also take a random type of chair. So it was also educational because we discovered more types of chairs that exist than we ever thought we had to know. So every now and then we would have to look one up and be like “what is that chair we just threw?” and it would rank the most aggressive people based on how many chairs you threw.

codingdreams: FreeSBIE was good back then as a live CD and everything

Biti: I’m gonna assume you meant FreeBSD. It worked fine. It was more so me just not being able to use the command line installer.

DogBSD: no

4984: “frisbee”

Biti: Oh frisbee. What? Let me look this up. No if that is a separate project then I have not messed with that at all because I didn’t recognize it. Oh it is a pun off of frisbee. Ok. No I never used this distro back then.

DogBSD: http://www.freesbie.org/

DogBSD: tihs?

codingdreams: no, FreeSBIE is a discontinued live CD

DogBSD: this?

codingdreams: it worked fine

Setesh: What are you most dreading about being a helper?

Biti: I’m not entirely sure if there would be anything I would be totally terrified of. I guess the only really big thing would be if something happened with the Discord server that got us in trouble with the Discord admins. Because then Discord the administration will come down on the people who are the air quotes “mods” of the server. So I guess that is the more dreading thing because if something happens in the community and the helpers aren’t able to address it in time and it gets raised to admins and then something happens to the server and our accounts. That is sort of the thing I would be nervous about.

IsFugl: Any expirience with any BSD as firewall ?

Biti: Only when I was using pfSense. I managed to configure a firewall using the web interface. I don’t have much experience with the FreeBSD networking stack unless there is a tool that lets me configure it from a more abstract perspective like a GUI. Any other questions?

Setesh: Hmm, what made you wanna be a helper in the first place?

Biti: I sort of joking said because I have no life. That is the humorous answer. The real answer is that I bounce around projects that I feel like has a need for me. Like, I want to be in a place where I can make the most change and help contribute. The thing with a lot of the software roles that I’ve done volunteering with other communities is that there are a lot of software developers out there that are doing something in open source and I just wasn’t able to make that much of a splash. I wasn’t able about to contribute much because when you have a lot of people working on the same thing everybody just has a small little thing they can do and I wanted to pick an area where I would have a bigger impact and be able to help out. So being a helper is more of a way to have a bigger impact on the community versus being one of thousands of programmers working on KDE for example. So I wanted to be a helper because this is a place where I can contribute more than if I was doing one of those other volunteering roles with a different project.

IsFugl: What timezone are you in ? nice info to know when one can “catch you online”

Biti: Eastern Standard Time or Eastern Daylight Time depending on what time of the year because we still do that stupid daylight savings thing. Eastern Region, United States. I would word it that way.

Biti: I guess while I’m waiting for other questions I can also address the ideas with the bots a little bit more. I’m hoping in the next few weeks to get the Pulsar bot back up and running. That was the one that would send messages in the commits channel. It would talk about what commits have been made to ports and different things. It had a role function on it too where if you wanted to color your username you can self assign a color to you. So that way everybody could pick whatever color they wanted. I also want to add in the ability for the vc-ping role and the free-games-ping role so you can also self-assign those. To explain both of those, the free-games-ping role, there is a channel called feeds. Traditionally, Koobs would send out the ping whenever a free game was available. I’ve taken that over starting yesterday where I pinged about a bunch of stuff that was free. I’m probably gonna start doing that again now so that if people want the free games ping role that would be nice that they can self assign it. To explain the vc-ping role, if there is anybody in a voice chat that is either by themselves or looking for more people, it is a role that you can add to yourself so you can get notified when they are in that channel. So if you are in that channel by yourself you can do like @vc-ping and everybody that has that role will get a notification saying that you are looking for people to chat. So those are the changes to the Discord bot that you can expect to see soon. It is getting Pulsar up and running and it is getting two new roles that you can assign to yourself.

IsFugl: Eastern standart time = UTC-6

Biti: I thought it was UTC-4 or UTC-5. That might be right.

Setesh: Just FYI IsFugl the helper team is aiming to have double coverage for Americas, Afro/Eurozone, and Asia/Oceania. We’re currently in the onboarding process that will bring us up to at least single helper coverage of each set of timezones

Biti: Yeah that is currently a big one for us. We don’t have many people with the helper role yet so there are times when there is no helper on the server or there might be times when there is only one but they might be busy and not checking the server. So getting more helpers involved is gonna be huge.

IsFugl: Ty Setesh

IsFugl: ups,, my bad.. UTC-5

Setesh: @helpers is how to contact them

Biti: Yeah at helpers is how you contact all of us. “Oops my bad UTC-5.” I don’t even understand it half the time. Don’t worry. I absolutely hate daylight savings. I find it to be a very stupid concept and I don’t like that the UTC minus changes depending on the time of year. We are to the point where we have electric lights and whatnot. We don’t have to spring forward and fall back anymore. We can just flick a light switch or something and just work the same time schedule. I don’t understand why things have to shift back and forth. So I get confused with UTC-5 and UTC-4 all the time don’t worry. I actually had to look up whether or not to say EST or EDT because I can’t remember which one we are in.

IsFugl: True.. Dayli saving is bad…

Setesh: Because they wont be in a separate category because helpers arent really meant to be traditional mods, just members of the community helping to facilitate maintaining the community. Anyone can become a helper (a link that explains how to is shown in a pin in many channels) but they’re no different than any member of the project, just with a specialization that helps us keep this thing going.

Biti: Yeah. We have the ability to act as moderators but it is more to facilitate the community. So if somebody is truly disrupting everything and constantly breaking the code of conduct or trying to pick fights then that is trying to facilitate the community and maintain it by removing the person that is trying to disrupt it and destroy it. So we have the moderator access but it is better if we never have to use it. We try to grow a community that is able to interact with one another and is able to focus on different things without having to resort to severe moderation like you see in other servers. There are a lot of servers that I would call “practically dead” because of how overbearing the mod team is. And it is a problem with the way they are trying to foster their community. They would rather lock away any problems that are going on rather than address the direct root of it which is that the community is not being grown in a way that is… how do I word it… the community is just scared of the moderators at that point in those servers. So the community is practically just dead and it is just people that…

Setesh: Engagement oriented?

Biti: I guess… Yeah words are hard for me so I can’t think of the special way to put this. There are a lot of servers out there where people complain about mods being overbearing and it just kills the community. So whatever the original purpose was is just completely gone. So the FreeBSD server is trying to take the opposite approach where we have the moderator ability but we are trying not to use it. So that way the community can grow and focus on its stuff and not be scared of the helpers. At the end of the day, we are here to help – not to censor.

4984: <3

Biti: Less than three in the chat. Nice. I agree.

Setesh: What is your favorite type of pie?

Biti: Since you spelled it like that I’m gonna say the food. I was going to make a joke about Raspberry Pi computers. I would honestly just say chocolate. And I don’t like whipped cream. I find whipped cream to be disgusting so it is just chocolate pie with nothing on it. Even though I actually discovered something recently. My mom and I were looking through a list of president’s favorite desserts. I forgot what president it was, maybe Eisenhower, but their favorite was vinegar pie. We both looked at that and went “that sounds disgusting” but then we looked it up and it is actually extremely sweet. They call it a vinegar pie but it has like two teaspoons of vinegar in it. It is barely a vinegar pie. It is extremely sweet and is almost like a candy. So we actually started making vinegar pie for people and it has become a talking point. We have to tell people not to be afraid of it because it is actually not that bad. Then they try it and are like “oh I would have never guessed that based off the name.” Actually, I’ll say it. Vinegar pie is probably my favorite now. And chocolate pie is a very close second.

Biti: And if you want to go Pi’s as in the computer term, I’m still probably just gonna say just the Raspberry Pi B form factor. I don’t really like the Pi 4 because it has a very weird graphics DRM issue that stops me from using certain displays for different things and it just gets more complicated. I like my Pi 2B. It is very simple and it does what I need. It does not have the computing power of the Pi 4 but it is still really nice.

DogBSD: pi alternatives seem better

Biti: Nowadays I absolutely agree. I really want to get the Pine64.. what is it called? The Quartz64 or something like that? They have one that has a PCIe slot and I really want to get that and just see what I can hook up to it. Just so I can have an ARM platform for some stuff. I think that would be a really cool thing to use. There is also a thing I discovered recently. I have a Pocket C.H.I.P. computer which was made by Next Thing Co a while back. It is basically just a little microcontroller that you shove onto the main board and it has a full keyboard, a battery, a touch screen, and a GPIO header at the top. It was a really powerful portable Linux environment at the time. I say Linux because this company only had drivers for Linux using their own binaries. It was really sketchy. So unfortunately you really couldn’t run any other operating system on it. It was locked into a specific version of Debian. It was still a really cool environment and nowadays there is an alternative to that called the Beepberry and it is basically just using a Raspberry Pi Zero on the back of it. So I can actually get just about any operating system running on it that will boot on a Pi. I’m looking forward to buying one of those and seeing if I can get FreeBSD up and running on it. According to the documentation, the only thing that will not work is the built-in WiFi. There is a problem with the WiFi module that the Raspberry Pi Foundation tends to use and they just don’t have support on FreeBSD. However, it has USB ports on it so I can easily just hook up another WiFi module that does work. And now I have internet on a little handheld.

IsFugl: The numbers off bad pie’s from the US.. is stagering..

Biti: What do you mean by that? Pie as in the food or Pi as in the computer? I mean I don’t like the idea of people taking what can be a really simple circuit and shoving an entire computer into it if that is what you mean. They will take a problem that is so small it can just be done on an 8-bit microcontroller and throw an entire Raspberry Pi computer on it. It is just massively overkill to me. There is also a massive amount of people who break Raspberry Pi’s because they get into it to learn but they don’t research electrical safety or how not to hook up a high voltage thing to a low voltage line and they just blow up their Raspberry Pi. I’ve seen a couple of instances of that where people go “my Pi won’t boot anymore” and it’s like “yeah, you fried the board. you sent way too many volts through it.”

Setesh: What would you say your areas of personal technical expertise are? What are you most experienced at? Best at working with? Enjoy the most?

Biti: These are all very different questions. For personal technical expertise, I mostly just do command line software these days but one area I like to focus the most because I find it interesting is filesystems. I’m not talking about using a filesystem, I’m talking about the implementation of a filesystem. When I store meme.txt, where does that go? How is that stored on the disk? How does the computer know how to find that file and give it back to me? So I would say that is the area I tend to focus on. I did an entire project where I reverse engineered ISO 9660 which is the filesystem used for ISO files. Actually, ISO files are just the dumps of DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. That is the same filesystem that was used for those. It has a lot of limitations. It was read only. It is extremely hard to add a file to ISO 9660 once it is burned. You can do it though if you structure it in a way that is loosely able to handle adding files to the records but typically that is it unless you have a rewritable disc where you can rewrite massive portions of the filesystem. It was still an interesting one to look it. I’ve also looked at BTRFS from an algorithmic standpoint – like how the B-Tree works. I’ve also looked into ZFS a little bit on how they store things on the back end. I also know enough about NTFS now to be scared to ever touch it again based on what I’ve seen from their implementation of a filesystem and how cursed that is. So that is an area I have focused on a lot. Most of my experience though is just making command line utilities. I want my computer to do a thing and I want it to most likely be from a terminal and everybody else’s solutions just suck so I will just write my own. So my most experience is just random terminal utilities and programs. I’m best at working with terminal utilities as well. What I enjoy the most is actually kernel stuff. Like low level embedded stuff. In this case, not necessarily an Arduino but like editing the boot ROM on older 8-bit systems. Stuff like that I enjoy the most. It is very simple and there is not a lot of abstraction going on. You are doing everything basically bare metal. Like you have to research the CPU and go “ok, when the CPU receives power it is going to check that address on the ROM and start executing from that address onward” so you have to align your program with that exact boot address. There is no BIOS. There is no bootloader. It just immediately loads the ROM. So I enjoy working with that the most because there is no BS in the way. You just have direct control of the CPU and it is awesome.

IsFugl: the biggest problem with the Pi4.. is running FreeBSD on it :-p

Biti: I haven’t really tried FreeBSD on a Pi 4 but from what I’ve gathered off of the compatibility page, the only thing that doesn’t work is the WiFi module. And to be honest, I don’t really use WiFi on a Raspberry Pi anyways because even Raspbian has WiFi issues or they just make it really complicated to get WiFi up and running. So I just have it hard connected. I literally have a cable running across the room to where the Raspberry Pi is on a table just so I don’t have to use WiFi.

BrightLight: Not surprised ntfs is messed up… Did some win32 stuff and that was cursed as hell

Biti: Everything Windows related is cursed as hell. That operating system needed to be scrapped and rewritten a long time ago. But there is all this backward compatibility stuff they are making a lot of money off of the fact they still have these same compatibility that they don’t want to mess up even though it is a very buggy compatibility. So I don’t ever see a Windows rewrite happening but it is so cursed because of the history of it and any mistakes they made in the past they leave in for “compatibility reasons” and it is just really bad. And NTFS is basically just an extension of FAT32. So a lot of the problems with FAT32 still exist in NTFS. All they really did was up the file size limit and how big the volume can be. The rest of it is practically the same. There are some minor differences but you can think of NTFS as FAT64.

DogBSD: what are your pc specs?

Biti: I guess it depends on which computer. This desktop right now is an Intel i7-12700K. I have an Nvidia RTX 3060. I have two NVMe drives – one stores games for Windows and the other stores Linux. I have a spinning rust drive that stores FreeBSD. I also have an SSD that stores Windows. That is only because it is an old SSD and I don’t really care if it dies since I don’t use it that often. So that is my desktop. It is a really weird triple boot setup where I can pick Arch Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows.

Wolfi: pi4 compatibility on freebsd from what I saw doesnt have ethernet or wifi, also audio doesnt work either

Biti: I don’t even think audio works on Linux with the Pi 4. I’ve never gotten sound out of a Pi 4. I just want to go back to a Pi 2. If they can just stick to that hardware and just… I don’t know… just overclock the CPU a little every time it will be fine. But they had to make the Pi 4 and just absolutely mess things up.

Wolfi: i hate my freaking wifi

Wolfi: i left cause it broke again

Wolfi: my wifi is faulty

Wolfi: my router is like 10$

Biti: I’ve had that issue too. I also just don’t like WiFi in general though. The moment you start researching radio waves and how wireless transmissions work, it becomes a lot more cursed and you start to hate it a lot more. And if you ever buy an SDR (software defined radio) device, you can do a lot of fun things with people’s WiFi. As long as it can broadcast on those frequencies you can cause all sorts of chaos with people. And Bluetooth runs on basically the same frequency so you can also mess with Bluetooth because it is not secure at all. And yeah there is a lot of weird stuff with radio waves. That is an area I would love to get into though. I just don’t have the money for the SDR controller.

Setesh: But if you do the FCC wont let you be <.<

Biti: It depends on what frequencies you go into. Consumer WiFi at your own house is fine but if you go to an airport and jam the GPS signals… now you are going to a CIA black site. And that’s not good. So it depends on what you are doing on the radio waves. I would also stay away from any military frequencies – especially the ones that are in active use. Yeah it just depends on what frequencies you are in and where you are. And obviously GPS blockers are a bit of a gray area. You would never use one at an airport because that is illegal. But if you are out in the middle of the woods or at a park or something and there are people flying drones and it has a very short jamming range, that would probably be fine just because you are not interfering with anything that would be dangerous. Like the radius would be relatively close to you. You do have to be careful though because the FCC won’t let you be if you get into some of the other stuff.

BrightLight: I would love to see freebsd ported to a risc-v chip like star64. Not sure what the roadmap is for that but here’s hoping 🙂

Biti: I thought RISC-V support was already in FreeBSD according to the compatibility list. I know that there is something involved with RISC-V 32 bit. I think that has been demoted to tier 2 or 3 compared to tier 1 which is like the “it will work” tier. I’m not familiar with the star64 though.

At this point, Biti looks up the tier list along with some audience members.

Biti: Actually I’m not seeing 32 bit RISC-V anywhere on this list unless I am just reading it wrong. But yeah 64 bit is tier 2. The soft float RISC-V is unsupported in FreeBSD 14 though. And it looks like they are dropping support for SPARC as well. Actually SPARC support was dropped in FreeBSD 13. But if you are doing RISC-V 64 bit and it is not soft float then you should be good.

Biti: While I am waiting for more questions, I can also rant on other areas if y’all have a particular topic and I know something about it. I do some networking stuff. I do servers. I have a file server in the other room. I have a print server. That’s what my Raspberry Pi 2B is running – it’s OctoPrint. Then I have a cloud server that runs Nextcloud and various game servers. I run Minecraft on that sometimes. OpenRA is another one. And then I have the server in the other room that is running Pi-hole and a local DNS resolver and that is my bigger file server.

Wolfi: does freebsd support refer to the compile process, or the pkg mirrors?

Biti: The FreeBSD Handbook. I forgot what chapter it is specifically but if you look at the handbook there is a table of contents and there is a section on package management and there is also a section on building from source in the package management section.

IsFugl: and where do one see the mening on TIER x ?

Biti: It is on one of the Wiki pages. Tier 1 means it is officially supported. So like if you are on a tier 1 platform like X86_64 then you have like the priority support basically. It is going to work because basically everything has been fully tested or mostly tested to the point where it is stable. And you can rely on FreeBSD working on that tier. Tier 2 is like a secondary or alternative one. Basically support isn’t good enough to claim that it will run perfectly but you should still be able to get it booting and you might encounter a few bugs here and there. Tier 3 is like super demoted. It is like you might get it running if you are really skilled on how to build the kernel and to make the modifications necessary to get it running. Then unsupported means FreeBSD has nothing for it. So if you want to get FreeBSD running on an unsupported device, you have to really know your kernel development and driver development in order to actually get it running because nobody is going to help you because it is not supported.

DogBSD: Do you think rust belongs in kernels?

Biti: It think it needs a little more time to mature until it reaches that point. Obviously Linux has started adding Rust to the kernel but it is always as a kernel module. They haven’t allowed Rust code to be in the Linux core yet. I do see Rust probably becoming bigger in the future if they can mature more. And they definitely need to work on their toolchain a bit. I have issues with Cargo and some of the things it does like parallel compilation is weird. If you can split it up into multiple modules then you can compile modules in parallel but every file within that module has to be done single threaded. So it is not like C where I can just have every file compile by itself into an object and then merge the objects later. They haven’t figured that point out yet. So I probably wouldn’t put Rust into the core of the kernel just because of how long that would take to compile. If they can get that down and can reliable produce machine code executables natively to that architecture, I can see it getting into the kernel. But once again, you also have to add support for different architectures. Like, we support some weird ones with C and if Rust doesn’t have support for that then we have to drop that platform. So there is a little bit of maturity to be doing. I think it will happen in the next few years. Probably 10 or 15 years from now I can see an operating system being fully Rust, maybe. Or maybe you have the kernel being fully Rust and then you have your other languages on top of that further up in user space.

DogBSD: there is redox

Biti: Yes! I love Redox. So for those who are not aware, Redox is a UNIX-like operating system where the entire kernel is Rust. As far as I understand, you are now able to build Redox from Redox. They have a full operating system now that you can use to build it and make other images of that same operating system. They have also managed to get GCC and a couple other things running so once you get up to the userland you are able to use whatever programming language you want. But the core of Redox is fully Rust. Like I said though, the Rust compiler is single threaded unless you divide things up into modules so the Redox build process is painful. it takes a very long time. You might just want to start it and wait a couple days for the binary to finish and then you can boot it. But once you get it, it is a very solid system. It is also pretty quick. I had no hardware acceleration inside the virtual machine I was using because I didn’t think it would need it and everything was just super fast. So it is a really good operating system. I don’t know about their driver support though. Until they can sideload Linux drivers or any other operating system’s drivers, I think they might have a few problems there. But if it is just like a very basic X86 machine it should run fine. But yeah Redox is one of my favorite projects to check every now and then. I like their progress.

BrightLight: My microkernel (far from ready) is D lol

Biti: Nice. I haven’t really experimented with writing my own kernel entirely. I’ve done some modification stuff every now and then. I’ve done embedded stuff but I haven’t actually written like a full kernel.

IsFugl: remember the days of 3-4 days “make build world” :-p

Biti: I’m glad we have come a long way especially in CPU speed. Now if we increase the number of threads high enough we can build a lot of stuff very quickly. I actually had one thing that I never though I would be able to compile but it turns out it was just super slow on that hardware. When I got my new desktop and I threw 20 threads at it, it suddenly compiled in like 10 minutes. Compare that to the day and a half that I let it run on my old laptop.

IsFugl: What are your thoughts on hammer2 or other bsd’s filesystems?

Biti: I really like ZFS and the features it has. I’m glad it is the primary from the feature set it has and the support. I like the idea of live snapshots and rollbacks without having to reboot. That’s one of my main complaints about BTRFS is that it can’t do that. Hammer2… I thought Hammer was kinda cool even though I just learned about it relatively recently. I forgot when that came up in conversation. But I think Hammer for the era was pretty neat. Because that was before B-Tree filesystems had matured to a certain level where they could be used reliably. So I think Hammer had a purpose. Hammer2… I don’t really see the purpose of it because by the time Hammer2 was released, ZFS was already far enough along that it could replace Hammer2. And if you absolutely want to stick to B-Trees then I guess there is BTRFS. I would not go down that route but if you want to stick yourself on one data structure for the backend and only use that one data structure then I would rather merge efforts than split efforts because that is how you get one project lagging behind another. And which one am I missing? Oh. UFS. I like UFS just because of how universal it is. There is a lot of stuff that tends to read it very well. It is also one of the few that Linux has built-in support for. So I actually have a UFS partition that I use to share things between my Linux system and my FreeBSD system because getting OpenZFS running on Linux is a very special pain. UFS also pretty much goes back to the UNIX days… like the really old UNIX days. It is like the really nerdy version of FAT32 if that makes any sense. It has just been there for a while. Everyone knows how to speak it. Yeah I like UFS. I wouldn’t put that in production anymore but it definitely has a great value for existing even today.

Setesh: Before you start winding things down, I just wanna say thank you for joining us on the helper team Biti, and you rock pretty extra. It’s good to have you with us.

Biti: Thank you! It has been interesting so far being on the helper side of things.

Biti: Let’s see… what else can I go on about. The session is probably just going to be about an hour so I guess I can rant for maybe two more minutes. Or three more minutes. I’ve sort of played with mobile operating systems if you all want to go down that route. I’m gonna be getting a new phone soon that I’m going to put… I think either GrapheneOS or CalyxOS on for a de-Googled Android experience. I’ve looked up how those work and I’ve started doing Electron app development – or trying to. Coming from a C/C++ background, it hurts my head doing stuff in JavaScript but I have been trying to get apps up and running on those. Let’s see… I’ve done stuff with mobile Linux. I’ve also done stuff with postmarketOS and Manjaro ARM. Manjaro ARM seems to be really bad right now. The Manjaro Foundation has done a lot of really sketchy stuff in the past and it is just not as stable. PostmarketOS is really solid and their build system is incredible. You can make really custom ROMs with that. The thing with mobile Linux is the lack of applications. It just doesn’t have a very good user experience yet because it is lacking the developers to make the software for it to run on. I think it will mature at some point and get pretty good. It would also be nice to see a FreeBSD mobile environment. Even if FreeBSD could boot on it though, you still need a more custom mobile-friendly UI. I think that could be a good area for FreeBSD to target since even on the mobile Linux side it still just hasn’t matured at all. So that could be a possibility in the future is having mobile devices running FreeBSD.

gtewallace: what about Flutter for mobile?

Biti: I have heard of Flutter before but let me refresh my memory on that is. I think Flutter is that UI framework, right? Ok yeah. So I have touched Flutter a couple times in other projects. I’m not a big fan of it but I know it exists and I’ve used it a couple times. It is ok. I mostly touched it when someone was writing a chat app in Go and they used Flutter for the front-end. I just feel like if I am gonna do things cross-platform then nowadays I would probably just do it using either Electron or super light for an interface so it would run on anything. So I could just say “ok this can be a web app or a desktop app or a mobile app” and it could do all of those. So that is typically what I stick to when I do GUI stuff. I mostly just do terminal though because anything can have a shell and if you have access to a terminal then you can do whatever you want.

Setesh: I mean we have pretty decent arm support re: mobilizing freebsd

Biti: Absolutely. The big thing with mobile devices that is gonna be the challenge is getting Bluetooth and WiFi up and running – and especially getting the modem if it is a phone or a device with a cellular connection. Getting the modem built into FreeBSD is gonna be incredibly hard because most of them don’t even support Linux so it will be a little harder to push FreeBSD to that level. But if we can get the drivers going for certain devices that are more popular I think we could absolutely have FreeBSD try to push into the mobile space. There is that niche of people who don’t want to run iOS or Android. They want something fully open source and that is a market that I think FreeBSD has the people with the skills to make that happen. It is just a matter of organizing people together and saying “ok let’s make a mobile operating system that doesn’t suck and will actually respect privacy.” If we rally enough people together, we can make that happen.

Biti: I think when I get that new phone for GrapheneOS or CalyxOS, I’m gonna try getting FreeBSD on there if I can. I don’t know how weird that flashing process is going to be but I wouldn’t mind at least attempting it. And then there is that Beepberry that runs a Raspberry Pi so I am gonna try to get FreeBSD running on that too. If the WiFi doesn’t work and I can’t figure out how to make it work, I’ll probably just get a module for WiFi. It honestly doesn’t matter much because the WiFi radio just kills your battery anyways. So in a handheld portable device like that, having the ability to either not have WiFi at all or the ability to physically disable the WiFi chip to stop it from drawing power – I can actually see no WiFi as a feature for battery life in a device like that. So having to use an external module for WiFi on that would be pretty good because I could then just solder in a switch and be like “ok now I can turn the WiFi module on or off so it either receives power or doesn’t.”

BrightLight: One obstacle re-privacy might be anything resembling intel ME on mobile.

Biti: Yeah there is also… I forgot what they call it… AMD has theirs too. It is not called a management engine but if I remember correctly, some AMD chips do have a management engine-ish thing built into them as well. As far as I’m aware, ARM doesn’t have anything like that currently. But if that gets added in that’s going to be really bad. Yeah. There is also the challenge with mobile platforms where the modem… so basically cell phone hardware hasn’t passed the 80’s in terms of implementation. A lot of the time, the modem shares the same data and address busses with the CPU and RAM. So if your carrier is running spyware on the modem that is able to pull from the RAM, then it has full ring 0 access to your operating system. So the modem is basically the perfect backdoor for getting stuff off from the CPU. So at that point it doesn’t matter what operating system you are running – you are backdoored because your modem is splitting resources with the CPU. The modem is basically its own computer, it just uses the RAM as its like… how do I word it… On older devices when you wanted to interface with a peripheral, you did it using the memory. So it would be banked at a certain RAM address and you would just write data to RAM whenever you wanted to interface with the device. And that is practically how modems work in phones these days. We still haven’t gotten past that in mobile spaces. There have been some ideas in the past. There was a phone idea on… I think it was the Librem 5 – I don’t know if they ended up doing this. But they were talking about having two CPUs. So basically one of them would act as bait where the modem would interface with that CPU. So the modem can fully backdoor that CPU all it wanted to do. But what it would do is also open up a line of communication as a peripheral to the main CPU running your operating system. So in that case if they were to backdoor you using the modem, they would only have access to that first CPU that is bait. They would not have access to the main operating system. So that was a really good idea on how to bypass having the modem as a backdoor into those devices. Then there is the approach that the PinePhone does where if you don’t want the modem on for privacy you can just turn it off. There is a physical switch on the back. That is also an idea but you need to keep in mind the moment you switch the modem on, you’re all of a sudden opening up the backdoor into your system. So the moment the modem is powered, anything that is in RAM at the time is now publicly available for the cellular carrier to pull. So it would be better to turn off the phone, boot a different ROM or whatever, and then let that be the bait one that you use whenever you are calling or texting on the architectures that don’t do the dual CPUs thing. But yeah if there is a management engine or something just in the CPU directly then even the dual CPU approach to stop the modem is the least of your worries because now you have two backdoors – the modem and one in the processor.

BrightLight: Interesting workarounds!

Biti: Yeah. The dual CPU one is a bit harder to do because in a mobile device you are constantly competing for power. So every device is going to be pulling from the battery and the the more devices that are active and running, it is just gonna drain your battery faster. So having two CPUs is a very power hungry workaround because now you are powering three computers – the one inside the modem, the one the modem connects to, and then the main one running the operating system. So battery life is really bad when they are doing it that way. But it is a pretty good idea. I like the physical hardware switch though because with that one, when you cut off power to the modem, then it is just not able to pull from the battery. So it is actually a very energy efficient way for privacy just because now I turn off the modem and now I have more battery life. And they also have switches for the WiFi and Bluetooth too. So if you are fine just not having any radios on your phone at all, you can just turn all of those off and your battery life is incredible because you are just not powering those chips anymore. I think I like the physical switch the best. That one is probably the greatest idea. The PinePhone’s implementation is pretty good but the switches are very tiny and you almost need like a toothpick to turn them on and off. So it is not as practical when you are on the go unless you, I don’t know, store a toothpick in your phone case or something. But that is a little weird. I feel like if you went to the airport with that they would ask you why you had a toothpick stashed away in your phone so you may not be able to do that route. If they could design that with bigger switches that would be great. And I would not trust turning these things on and off in software because software can be either hacked or maliciously contributed to where people just add in bad code on purpose and then the end result of their bad code efforts is to make sure this device just doesn’t work or a software bug that prevents the hardware from turning on and off. So I love that there are physical tactile switches for turning things on and off.

fenrir: What phone were you talking about before pinephone?

Biti: I believe it is called the Librem 5. I think the dual CPU one was an early prototype they had. I’m not sure if they went that route. I think they went with physical switches in the end where the switches are on the side of the phone. But there was a time when they were talking about dual architectures where you have dual CPUs. Yeah they have dual kill switches on the side. That is the route they ended up going but they did have a prototype board with two processors. And honestly the Librem 5 is probably better than the PinePhone’s way just because if you put the switches on the side, you don’t need that toothpick I was talking about to flip the dip switches on the back. You can just hit the switches on the side and be fine. Then there is the whole think of like… what if you are calling someone on the phone and then your finger slips and you turn off the modem. Then you have to call them back because you turned off the modem accidentally.

fenrir: Can you type out the name please?

Biti: Librem 5

Biti: I think that is the spelling… L-I-B-R-E-M and then 5.

fenrir: Thx!

Biti: Yeah that is correct. I looked it up. That is the right spelling. And then PinePhone is just pine like a pinecone and then phone just all as one word. Oh yeah you already typed that. My bad. The Librem 5 is pretty expensive though but so is the PinePhone Pro. And I guess it makes sense because they are running really decent hardware now. It is not just some super cheap Android device processor that got rigged into running Linux. It is actually a… it is almost like a flagship processor at that point. Like something you would see in the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy or whatever. It is really beefy hardware now.

fenrir: Yeah I’m a eager fan of the pinenote

fenrir: They ran out of stock before I could buy one

Biti: Is the PineNote the e-ink display one? Is that the e-ink display one? I actually thought about getting one at one time.

fenrir: Yeah

Biti: Yeah I want one of those badly too. I actually wouldn’t mind trying to play around with the PineNote as like a monitor or something. I know e-ink displays have a really low refresh rate but if you are just sitting at a TTY – just text in a terminal then refresh rate really doesn’t matter as much. So I feel like that would be a great device for a portable handheld. Not to mention e-ink displays are just super easy to read.

fenrir: They have like super cool emr digitiser thing too

Biti: Yeah. I can’t wait to see what people do with the PineNote and the software starts maturing.

BrightLight: I think power drain on eink is also fantastic

Biti: Yeah so the e-ink displays… the reason that… so you have probably seen e-ink displays in like shops and stores and whatnot, right? Like they have price tags that are digital. That’s an e-ink display. That thing has no battery. And the reason that is, is because they use electricity to move the ink from like the bottom of the ink cell to the surface, and when it goes to the surface, that is when it gets dark. That is the black ink you can see. And then you put another electric field through it and the ink goes to the back and now it is suddenly whatever color the cell is by default. Typically it is a lighter, paper-ish color. Like a cream to a white. Basically, if you are not updating the screen, you don’t need to power it. So those price tags in the stores, they have no battery because what they do is they connect it to a different device that powers it up and updates the display and then they disconnect it and put it back on the shelf. So yeah, e-ink displays can run on no electricity. You only have to power it when you are updating it. It also makes things great for smartwatches. I think it was called like the Pebble or the Pebble Time. It is a watch with an e-ink display and it has a stupidly long battery life because you only have to update the screen whenever the time changes. So that is like once every minute or if you have seconds enabled then once every second. So at that point it only has a refresh rate of once a second or 1 Hertz. So it is just a ridiculously long battery life.

fenrir: Apple time?

Biti: No I think it was called the Pebble Time. Let me get a link to that. It may just be called Pebble. I’m not entirely sure. If that is the name of it then it might be called something else. I think the Pebble Time is the e-ink display. Yeah it was a color e-ink display. Yeah it was the Pebble. I found a link to their Kickstarter but I don’t know if they have a full website anymore. Oh they do – pebble.com it looks like. Let me see if they – oh no it is owned by Fitbit now? When did that happen? Or at least it took me to the Fitbit store. Oh well. Yeah the Pebble Time is that one. There is also a different one that came out by the same people that make the Beepberry device that I was talking about earlier. The little Linux mobile handheld. I guess I shouldn’t even say Linux since it runs practically anything.

fenrir: posts pictures of magnetic drawing board

fenrir: “eink” nostalgia!

Biti: I still have an Etch A Sketch somewhere in my house. That was another really fun thing from back in the day. That can not be digitized though. I mean… you can use servos to turn the knobs but it doesn’t have any electricity going to it.

fenrir: Etch a Sketch is the know thing right?

fenrir: *knob

Biti: Yeah that is the knob thing. It is like a knob on the left side for moving right and left and I think the right knob moves up and down and you can make pictures with that. That would be interesting though. Hooking one of those up to a Pi or something to make it move around.

fenrir: Yeah these ones aren’t electrised too just a magnetic tip

Biti: Yeah but I would love to see someone hook up one of those Etch A Sketches to some servos and just draw out vector graphics on it. It would have a very bad frame rate but if you just wanna take an image, like an SVG file, and send it to the Etch A Sketch that would be really cool.

Setesh: That moment when you use an etch a sketch as your main display

Setesh: <.<

Biti: Nice.

fenrir: Ooo that’s sounds interesting

Biti: I just realized that transcribing this into text is gonna be interesting. The recording is at about an hour and 15 minutes for audio.

Setesh: Omai

Setesh: Not our fault you gotta big mouth and like to hear yourself talk

Biti: I don’t know if I like to hear myself talk. I do rant when I am nervous though. Which includes any type of public speaking. But I don’t like hearing myself talk and I hate recordings of myself. This is gonna be a pain having to go back and do this. I might actually look for a speech to text engine and just let that run on the audio and then see how accurate it is and just make edits to it so I don’t have to hear myself. And I’m working on voice training so we will see how that goes in the future. It uh… how do I word it… I don’t know how to describe it… but like, whenever I try to do voice training it just ends up sounding absolutely horrible. It almost sounds like a voice you would use when you are reading something stupid online and you are trying to make fun of somebody. It almost ends up being like that. So I have a lot of voice training to do before I stop hating my voice.

fenrir (replying to Setesh’s comment about using an Etch A Sketch as a main display): Well they don’t have a pen up iirc,

fenrir: That sounds like a deal buster

Biti: I would be interested in knowing if there is a way I could use an Etch A Sketch by using a pen on the top of it. So like I could make an electrostatic pen or something that moves on the top of it in order to push off the metal powder in it. And then you can do it that way too. So that way you can actually use an Etch A Sketch as a drawing tablet. But that is cheating. Like the whole point behind an Etch A Sketch is that you have to turn the knobs to make the picture. The moment you don’t use the knobs anymore, now you are cheating it.

Setesh: (I’m just joking. Anyone who knows Biti from vc knows they tend to be pretty quiet then just suddenly drops max value on you)

Biti: Yeah and 9 times out of 10 I am multitasking and barely paying attention to voice chat. Then somebody will say something that gets my attention and then suddenly I am back to the conversation.

BrightLight: Gotta learn that transatlantic accent to sound like you’re from 50’s shows

Biti: True. That would be an interesting one for voice training.

fenrir: That’s so relatable from biti’s pov ~

gtewallace: fwiw, I have been taking singing lessons for a year and have my recital sunday, and we did a dry run recording and my teachers, who are professional musicians, said everyone always hates how they sound, even professional singers…

gtewallace: (PPS you seem great at this)

Biti: Thank you. Good luck with the recital as well. I uh.. I did not participate in any type of, like, recitals, singing, or anything. As a kid in a youth group, we had church performances occasionally but even then I didn’t like doing that and that was extremely rare. And I just don’t do anything musically anymore at all because like I said, I just don’t like my voice. I can’t sing in key. I just have my own thing that I do. But when I mentioned voice training I’m more talking about voice feminization and that type of thing. Or switching from a deeper masculine-ish voice to something that is a bit more ambiguous as well. That would be neat. Basically if I can have the three tiers covered, that would be kind of cool. A feminine voice, a vague ambiguous non-binary voice, and then a deep masculine voice. Then if I can master the three voices I can then wreak havoc on any group. Like switching from one to the others.

Setesh: You should totally learn some cartoon voices too

Setesh: <.<

Biti: That would be fun. I would love to do a Stitch voice. Because Stitch is one of my favorite characters ever. More so because of the story behind Lilo & Stitch. How do I word this… Stitch’s thing of not belonging parallels my life a lot and I just have a connection to that story so Stitch is my favorite character. So I would love to be able to do a Stitch voice.

gtewallace: I gotto go - thanks!

Biti: Thank you for being here. I’ll definitely see you around in the server if you start talking in some of the chats.

Setesh: I envy the vocal flexibility of some voice actors @.@

Biti: Yeah. Who is the person that did basically my entire childhood? Was it Mel Gibson? Was that the voice actor who did like all of the Looney Tunes stuff? I mean.. I know he wasn’t the only one doing Looney Tunes characters if I remember right but he did like the vast majority of characters that I know.

At this point, Biti looks up Mel Gibson and realizes that is someone totally different.

Biti: Maybe I am thinking of somebody else. Who did the voices? Is it a different Mel?

Setesh: Mark Hamil

Biti: Ok I don’t know why I thought it was Mel Gibson. I don’t know celebrities.

Setesh: Luke Skywalker >.>

Setesh: Also the joker

Setesh: in the cartoons

Biti: In a very, very self-contained sense, I vibe with the Joker.

fenrir: I’m gonna drop too. Bye.

Biti: See you around. I’ll definitely see you in VC again. You typically hop in there every now and again.

fenrir: Which joker?

Biti: I guess the comic character… I think. Oh! I found it! I know why I was thinking it was Mel Gibson. The person I was thinking of is Mel Blanc. M-E-L B-L-A-N-C. That is who I am thinking of. They did Bugs Bunny and I forgot what other characters. They did a lot of stuff from my childhood though, the shows I used to watch growing up. So that is why I was thinking Mel Gibson was from the first name. I just connected it wrong. Yeah… Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil and numerous other characters from Looney Tunes. But yeah they did most of the Looney Tunes characters. If you ever look up an interview with him where he does all the different voices it is just crazy how fast he can switch. There is no warm up period. Like the people interviewing him will just say like “can you say this phase in this voice” and he can instantly switch to it. There is no warmup period. There is no practice beforehand. it just happens. It is really cool to watch him speak in the different voices.

BrightLight: Thanks for the talk, I’ll head out too

Biti: Thanks for being here. I’ll see you around the server.

Setesh: Batman the Animated Series (1992)

Biti: To be honest, I never really watched Batman at all. I’ve never really been big into Marvel and DC and that type of thing. I never really got into comics that much either. I just keep up with a couple characters and that is it. Like whenever a Deadpool movie comes out I’ll watch the Deadpool movie. I don’t really follow superheroes or supervillains or that type of thing. I just know the joker mostly from memes. I’ll be honest about that one. Most of it comes from meme culture.

fenrir: The vibe part, batheads do a whole analysis on which joker, comics, which times, movies etc.

Biti: Yeah I don’t have much knowledge in that area. Sorry. The abstract concept of just being done and… how do I word it… unplugging from society I guess… that part of the Joker… I get that. I understand that vibe of just wanting to say “screw this, I am my own entity and I’m just not participating anymore.” That is sort of what I am talking about. I don’t know which joker that is. I feel like that might be a central theme for the Joker from what I understand.

fenrir: Speaking of voices, Seth does all of family guy…

Biti: That’s impressive. One of the wildest things I’ve found out recently is that the voice of Jimmy Neutron, like the actual character Jimmy Neutron was done by a female voice actress. And that is one of the reasons why Jimmy Neutron’s voice is so hard for men to emulate. It is because they don’t have the voice training practice to be able to hit that as easily as she can. She also does a lot of children’s books from what I’ve discovered. She uses the platform from being the voice of Jimmy Neutron as a way to do a lot of stuff with children’s books and publications and many things like that. She will also do different voice acting events for charities and whatnot. Really cool. But that really surprised me because I had no idea. I thought it was… I don’t know why I thought they actually cast a child to play the voice of Jimmy Neutron but she did a really good job with that role.

Setesh: Bobby Hill’s VA is the same.

Biti: Awesome. I love stories like this. I think I was talking earlier about Hamilton and the cast and whatnot. One of the things they did is basically… how do I word it… the entire cast with few exceptions were not white and they did it on purpose. Because they were like “these are the characters and anybody can play any character” and they were trying to showcase the skill that different people have being able to do different characters. That is one of the reasons I like Hamilton is because they chose a mixed race cast and mix gendered cast on purpose to show that anybody can play any role with the right skills – and I thought that was incredible. But you had people being like “oh all these historical figures were like white men so why did you cast an African American for that?” and I’m just like “they played the role not only really well but they set a new standard for musicals because they did so well.” And that is one of the things I like about Hamilton is that it proved a point to everybody that when you are doing a performance, weather it be voice acting or on a stage in a play, anybody can just absolutely knock it out of the park.

fenrir: Seth does Peter Griffin, Stewie Griffin, Brian Griffin, and Glenn Quagmire.

Biti: Nice.

Setesh: I’d love to see a rework of older works with racial themes, like gone with the wind, but with a fully reversed ethnicity cast

Biti: That would be an interesting one. Yeah.

Biti: Well I guess I can go ahead and declare the AMA over with unless anybody has like a very quick last question or last statement to make. And then I will probably pop back into Hangin' Out and end the AMA.

Setesh: It would probably make way too many peeps uncomfy

Biti: They are gonna be uncomfy regardless. Like… I don’t know if you have seen the new uh… what was Disney doing again they were making a remake of… was it Mermaid… one of the Mermaid ones… The Little Mermaid or something like that?

Setesh: Ariel

Biti: Yeah they freaked out over that.

Biti: Alright, I’m going back into Hangin' Out. I think I’m gonna go ahead and end the event.

Text Chat Log

Biti (they/them) started Biti’s AMA - New Community Helper

Setesh: Announce it in lobby?

4984: this is a question?

Setesh: Maybe?

4984: wrong?

4984: 2+2=4?

4984: wrong?

4984: what is polish notation

Biti (they/them) is now a speaker. — Yesterday at 1:03 PM

4984: biti, are you a bluetooth speaker or a wired speaker?

Setesh: So… Biti… are you, or are not, in fact, a cybernetic doombot that will lead to either the end of days, or a new glorious era for the server?

Setesh: All hail our new cyborg overlord o.o

Setesh: Lol

Wolfi: So, biti, what is your background in relation to BSD?

Setesh: On a more serious note, what are you most looking forward to doing, now that you’ve survived all the pre-helper onboarding processes?

Wolfi: cool to hear

Setesh: Oki

jauntyd: Do you use ports or pkg, Biti? 🙂

jauntyd: (not relevant prob)

Setesh: What is your favorite thing you’ve ever used FreeBSD for?

jauntyd: Sorry m8s, audio isn’t working for me. I will bug Biti in the lobby

codingdreams: When was the first time you installed FreeBSD?

Setesh: What discord bots have you worked with before becoming a helper?

codingdreams: FreeSBIE was good back then as a live CD and everything

DogBSD: no

4984: “frisbee”

DogBSD: http://www.freesbie.org/

DogBSD: tihs?

codingdreams: no, FreeSBIE is a discontinued live CD

DogBSD: this?

codingdreams: it worked fine

Setesh: What are you most dreading about being a helper?

IsFugl: Any expirience with any BSD as firewall ?

Setesh: <.<

codingdreams: @DogBSD https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=freesbie

Setesh: Hmm, what made you wanna be a helper in the first place?

IsFugl: What timezone are you in ? nice info to know when one can “catch you online”

IsFugl: Eastern standart time = UTC-6

Setesh: Just FYI @IsFugl the helper team is aiming to have double coverage for Americas, Afro/Eurozone, and Asia/Oceania. We’re currently in the onboarding process that will bring us up to at least single helper coverage of each set of timezones

IsFugl: Ty @Setesh

IsFugl: ups,, my bad.. UTC-5

Setesh: @helpers is how to contact them

IsFugl: True.. Dayli saving is bad…

Setesh: Because they wont be in a separate category because helpers arent really meant to be traditional mods, just members of the community helping to facilitate maintaining the community. Anyone can become a helper (a link that explains how to is shown in a pin in many channels) but they’re no different than any member of the project, just with a specialization that helps us keep this thing going.

Setesh: Engagement oriented?

4984: <3

Setesh: What is your favorite type of pie?

IsFugl: The numbers off bad pie’s from the US.. is stagering..

DogBSD: pi alternatives seem better

Setesh: What would you say your areas of personal technical expertise are? What are you most experienced at? Best at working with? Enjoy the most?

IsFugl: the biggest problem with the Pi4.. is running FreeBSD on it :-p

IsFugl: food

BrightLight: Not surprised ntfs is messed up… Did some win32 stuff and that was cursed as hell

DogBSD: what are your pc specs?

Wolfi: pi4 compatibility on freebsd from what I saw doesnt have ethernet or wifi, also audio doesnt work either

DogBSD: i hate my freaking wifi

DogBSD: i left cause it broke again

DogBSD: my wifi is faulty

DogBSD: my router is like 10$

BrightLight: I would love to see freebsd ported to a risc-v chip like star64. Not sure what the roadmap is for that but here’s hoping 🙂

Setesh: But if you do the FCC wont let you be <.<

BrightLight (responding to their previous message): Ah got it, thanks

Wolfi: https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv/

gtewallace: https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/#_supported_platforms

Wolfi: does freebsd support refer to the compile process, or the pkg mirrors?

IsFugl: and where do one see the mening on TIER x ?

DogBSD: Do you think rust belongs in kernels?

gtewallace (responding to IsFugl’s last message): as Biti is saying, and you can find more here: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#archs

DogBSD: there is redox

BrightLight: My microkernel (far from ready) is D lol

IsFugl: remember the days of 3-4 days “make build world” :-p

BrightLight: What are your thoughts on hammer2 or other bsd’s filesystems?

IsFugl: I am off..

Setesh: Take care!

Setesh: Before you start winding things down, I just wanna say thank you for joining us on the helper team Biti, and you rock pretty extra. It’s good to have you with us.

Setesh: Take as long as you wanna and people are interested tbh :p that’s what this is for

gtewallace: what about Flutter for mobile?

gtewallace: yup

Setesh: I mean we have pretty decent arm support re: mobilizing freebsd

BrightLight: One obstacle re-privacy might be anything resembling intel ME on mobile.

BrightLight: Interesting workarounds!

fenrir: What phone were you talking about before pinephone?

fenrir: Can you type out the name please?

Biti (they/them): Librem 5

fenrir: Thx!

fenrir: Yeah I’m a eager fan of the pinenote

fenrir: They ran out of stock before I could buy one

fenrir: Yeah

fenrir: They have like super cool emr digitiser thing too

BrightLight: I think power drain on eink is also fantastic

fenrir: Apple time?

fenrir: Oh i misheard

fenrir shares pictures of a magnetic drawing board

fenrir: “eink” nostalgia!

fenrir: Etch a Sketch is the know thing right?

fenrir: *knob

fenrir: Yeah these ones aren’t electrised too just a magnetic tip

Setesh: Lol

Setesh: That moment when you use an etch a sketch as your main display

Setesh: <.<

fenrir: Ooo that’s sounds interesting

Setesh: Omai

Setesh: Not our fault you gotta big mouth and like to hear yourself talk

fenrir (replying to Setesh talking about using an Etch A Sketch): Well they don’t have a pen up iirc,

fenrir: That sounds like a deal buster

Setesh: (I’m just joking. Anyone who knows Biti from vc knows they tend to be pretty quiet then just suddenly drops max value on you)

BrightLight: Gotta learn that transatlantic accent to sound like you’re from 50’s shows

fenrir: That’s so relatable from biti’s pov ~

gtewallace: fwiw, I have been taking singing lessons for a year and have my recital sunday, and we did a dry run recording and my teachers, who are professional musicians, said everyone always hates how they sound, even professional singers…

gtewallace: (PPS you seem great at this)

gtewallace: thanks

fenrir: I never had a etch a Sketch…

fenrir: Are the knobs cartesian or polar?

Setesh: You should totally learn some cartoon voices too

Setesh: <.<

Setesh: I envy the vocal flexibility of some voice actors @.@

gtewallace: I gotto go - thanks!

fenrir: I saw someone today with a lilo n stitch tshirt

fenrir: Someone really grown up

Setesh: Mark Hamil

Setesh: Luke Skywalker >.>

Setesh: Also the joker

Setesh: In the cartoons

fenrir: I’m gonna drop too. Bye

fenrir: Which joker?

BrightLight: Thanks for the talk, I’ll head out too

Setesh: Batman the Animated Series (1992)

fenrir: The vibe part, batheads do a whole analysis on which joker, comics, which times, movies etc.

Setesh: Mark Hamil was also Ozai in ATLA

fenrir: Speaking of voices, Seth does all of family guy…

fenrir: Damn

fenrir: I was/am sooo into lee falk’s phantom comics

fenrir: mandrake, flash gordon, rip kirby etc

fenrir: Oh okay

Setesh: I thought Mila Kunis did meg

fenrir (replying to Setesh’s last message): XD

Setesh: Bobby Hill’s VA is the same.

Setesh: A woman voice actor

fenrir: Seth does Peter Griffin, Stewie Griffin, Brian Griffin, and Glenn Quagmire.

fenrir: from Wikipedia

Setesh: I’d love to see a rework of older works with racial themes, like gone with the wind, but with a fully reversed ethnicity cast

Setesh: It would probably make way too many peeps uncomfy

Setesh: Kk

Setesh: Ariel

Setesh: Yeah

Biti (they/them) ended Biti’s AMA - New Community Helper