Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.

What was the problem again?

The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You’ve got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn’t do, and things it’s imagined they might’ve done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.

Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @mozilla@mozilla.social needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they’re doing to improve things.

If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.

Indeed. But cups-browsed isn’t necessary in order to be able to print things, it’s for automatically discovering new printers on the network.

cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source

Well that would explain why I didn’t have it installed (although I did have other parts of cups until jwz coincidentally reminded us two days ago that it can all be removed if you don’t have a printer.) I clear out anything that opens ports I don’t need to be open. A practice I would recommend to anyone.

Maybe some day after we’re done replacing X11 people will collectively find the will to do something about systemd before it gets too much worse. I wonder which will be easier: Throw it all out and start again, or split it up into parts of more manageable size with well-defined interfaces between them.

Where is it? It’s in the 1970s. Tempted by Lucifer to get brighter and brighter, we collectively chose to leave it behind.

I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:

He enjoys the arguments, it’s nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.

It’s more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don’t, and that’s okay.

Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he’s optimistic about it.

The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.

There aren’t many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it’s going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.

If you make your own he’s looking forward to seeing it.

If most pirates are the kind who sail around drinking rum and chasing booty, patent trolls are the kind of pirates who blow a big hole in the side of a supertanker to steal a few barrels of oil and let the rest drain into the ocean.

Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.