Twitch Viewers Will Try To Collaboratively Install Arch Linux (twitchinstalls.com) 103
An anonymous reader writes: Early last year, an anonymous developer had the idea to try to crowd-source a game of Pokemon using Twitch.tv. 16 days of continuous play later, they were victorious, with an estimated 1.17 million people participating. A new experiment is now trying to ramp up the complexity: the goal is to install Arch Linux. "Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine." The launch page recommends taking a look at the Arch Linux Wiki, beginner's guide, and a list of bash commands. People in the video stream chat are already discussing strategy.
rm -rf trolls? (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?
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yes
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sudo rm -rf /
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If sudo is set up, you can still use sudo even as root. No issues, no errors.
This is only true if sudo is configured to allow that. None of my servers allow that.
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that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.
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Isn't it distro specific? I.E., if I remember correctly, most distros set an alias "rm" to "rm --preserve-root" in .bashrc so the command gets called to preserve root by default and needing --no-preserve-root explicitly called if you REALLY want to delete / for some reason?
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that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.
So, rm -rf /* then?
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Ubuntu thing
Why is a decades old utility (originally 1980) an Ubuntu thing. Frankly if a normal arch linux thing is to login as root and just use root... I would never touch it
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sudo rm -rf /
sudo rm --no-preserve-root -rf /
rather
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Finally, an insightful response! Love it.
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This is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.
Yeah, and Windows 10 is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 300 million users why they shouldn't.
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"Ugh, installing Arch in itself, is an ingenious way to demonstrate"
So you don't like to know how your OS works or care about having the choice about what is on your PC/laptop. Perhaps you should not hang around a site with the strap line "News for nerds".
Me, I like choice: I like being able to decide for myself whether I want MS, Apple or Linux or BSD or whatever. As it turns out, I like the Linux way of doing things. I also like to mess around and tinker. So I choose Arch and Gentoo for my own stuff a
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As the input is from /dev/zero they will get written quite quickly, depending on how much RAM is available.
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I totally optimized my install of Ubuntu with systemd by not putting that shit on my machine
look at the stars at night, and realize the observable universe is roughly 10E-23 of the whole or less. Most stars have worlds around them. So the number of worlds is roughly 10^21 in the observable universe, or 10^44 in the whole (or even more). Ten with 44 zeros worlds that Lennart Poettering hasn't fucked up with systemd, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worlds that aren't cursed with
Re: rm -rf trolls? (Score:2)
when dd is part of systemd it isn't going to allow that.
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"I can't allow you to do that, Dave."
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SystemDave
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Yes, there is no way this is going to work. The reason Twitch plays Pokemon is so popular is because one person can't really mess it up. Sure, there were hours of Ash being stuck in the wall because everyone was saying go in the wrong direction, but that's totally different than deleting the entire pokedex (which would be equivalent to sudo rm -rf) and having to start completely over.
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Do you forget the battles over releasing all of Ash's pokemon?
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No, but the pokedex being filled out is one of the requirements to "beating" Twitch plays Pokemon. If you release the Pokemon, your Pokedex still stays intact, which is not the case with rm -rf /. While it may inhibit them from beating the Elite 4 in the interim, they can always go catch more, which I suppose is sort of akin to rm -rf / except that you don't lose your experience and current place in the quests and such.
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Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?
Lol, that'd be my guess. I'd put money on it.
Easy (Score:3, Informative)
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nothing says you can't, hop on and try
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Gentoo has a graphical installer these days. I know, shocking!
Besides, Gentoo and Arch are similar in complexity to install; difference is only internals and USE flags.
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"The point of Gentoo, after all, is extreme configurability. It's not so much a question of tweaking for speed (a common misconception about Gentoo--and a common accusation about the motivations of its users); the big thing is that it lets you add or exclude features according to your own needs and desires. In Gentoo, you have to know what you are doing."
"A complaint we hear about Arch is that its developers drive many of the choices, choices that Gentoo leaves open to the user."
They are both fabulous distr
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... read the article ... (Score:1)
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Maybe someone has a "million monkeys" research grant riding on this...?
Fork bombs (Score:1)
What's the over-under.... (Score:2)
root password (Score:1)
enter twice, good luck!
"Twitch goes to /pol" (Score:3)
This is pretty great, but there's a lot of keystrokes to average out. Is it just plurality? Wouldn't there always be enough first-past-the-post votes to jam backspace, on pretty much any command?
I'm more wondering at this point, what if twitch goes to 8 chan, which has some content that is illegal in some jurisdictions? Or what if twitch goes somewhere even less moderated and downloads illegal-almost-everywhere content? Who has the legal liability on that?
How do they enter an enter? (Score:2)
Does anyone have an idea of how many key strokes are required to install Arch Linux? Take that and multiply by 10 to get the minimum amount of time to complete this in minutes. It will be interesting to see how far off the end product is, both in terms of time and
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From the twitter feed:
Instructions
Avaliable commands:
Letters
Most special keys
'space'
'enter'
'backspace'
'system_reset'
So to have a space or enter, you actually have to type it out.
It actually doesn't accept full commands (Score:5, Informative)
So my previous post about how this won't work is actually wrong. I've been on the actual twitch channel, and the instructions are as follows:
Instructions
Avaliable commands:
So how it actually works is that everyone types 1 letter (or I suppose it takes the first letter you've typed) and it uses that. So to type 'sudo rm -rf /' it would require people to type those exact letters in that sequence. Considering there will probably be many people there at once, some of whom don't want that typed, it will be significantly harder to troll.
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I might have been checking if one can curl the chat as I read this... Might have to scrape it. Ah, the things I do out of love for you guys.
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By the same token, any command will require people to type the right letters in the right sequence. I will be surprised if the project in its curr
WTF???? (Score:2)
Holy fuck, so we're literally just going for the million poo-flinging monkeys and you'll arrive there by random chance??
This isn't crowd sourcing or harnessing the wisdom of crowds.
No, I didn't RTFA ... but this sounds like an utter waste if time. But, hey, if you want to waste your time on crap like this, go ahead .. just don't pretend it's newsworthy.
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It's Twitch. I don't know if you've been there, but you don't go there to do useful things, you go to do fun things. And this looks like it will be pretty entertaining
Exceptionally useless (Score:4, Insightful)
This really seems like an exceptionally useless thing to do.
"Hey, everybody! Let's take something that one person can do well in minutes and have a million people do it badly over a few days, if it ever works at all!"
Just...why?!?
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Silly them, all they need is 1 virgin. Instead they'll have to settle for a bunch of people enjoying something you don't.
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Re:Exceptionally useless, indeed (Score:1)
Can't hear you, busy playing monopoly alone.
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Just...why?!?
For the lulz? I wonder if it is more useful than talking about how useless it is on Slashdot? This article itself will have many thousands of words poured into the comment field and to what end? At least they may have a working Linux install at the end. All we have is that empty feeling your get when you think someone is wrong on the internet.
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Next level: (Score:1)
Accomplish the following task using crowd input:
Write from scratch a Twitch emulator and an AI that emulates a Twitch user. Millions of instances of that AI shall give aggregated input to the Twitch emulator, with the goal of conducting this experiment inside that emulator.
It goes on.
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And in the end, we have a fresh new play by Shakespeare?
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You have, obviously, never seen me game nor seen me install Arch. I dare say, they're not entirely dissimilar. A bit of poke and hope here, a guess there, a hope there's a save feature here, and tada! Somehow, I rescue the princess - while playing Zork.
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Just now 60k people are watching Bob Ross paint happy trees on Twitch.
Their definition of 'gaming' is not very strict and is only enforced when it suits them.
Dear cockroaches/meerkats/squid (Score:2)
Dear cockroaches/meerkats/squid/whatever
If you've reached the point where you can read this you've probably discovered plenty of evidence of our existence. If we had an idea what questions you'd ask, we'd have left answers. But we didn't. Because we were always way too focussed on trivial shit.
So all there is to say is this: we're sorry we fucked it up. Try to be better than us.
Yours sincerely,
the apes.
"Twitch compiles Gentoo" (Score:2)
"Twitch compiles Gentoo" would probably end up with compiler flags optimizing for a Commodore 64 or something.