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.
Recovering skooma addict.
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.
Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.
Failing to respond in detail to all of the claims you believe to be your most important ones is not what is usually meant by a “straw man.”
While I don’t mind Rust (although I’m not too good at it yet) I really do find the crowd of overzealous enthusiasts claiming in the most hyperbolic terms that the necessity of its universal use is an urgent security issue quite off-putting sometimes.
I’ve yet to see any serious usage of SELinux in the real world
I too have successfully avoided it, but we must acknowledge that not everyone has been so fortunate.
The agonizingly slow progress into mainstream discourse of this idea that we should all stop using twitter continues at its steady pace. Will the obvious truth of it mean that it continues until even the politicians get it? Or will it in time become be one of those “yeah we probably should’ve done that” things that never gets done?
Indeed the language is extremely fashionable among government types and many others. I did not really mean to suggest otherwise. If accusing me of erecting a straw man is your way of apologizing for your initial comment, I accept it.
Nah. If you’d been leaning on specific statements of any given expert — of which it is of course possible to find plenty that might in such casual rhetoric be used to support whichever conclusion you like — that would’ve been argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to authority. Instead you cited an imagined “vast majority” to exaggerate the universality of your opinion.
P.S. Whilst I’m indulging my argumentative side perhaps it is also worth pointing out that you totally mischaracterized my own statements and motivation. I am not primarily a C programmer, and I’ve been happy to use Rust myself when the opportunity arises. I have no personal stake in this particular fight.
Turns out there is a name for that. I had to look it up. Never seen such a striking example before.
Gender neutral pronouns are pretty huge too. Sure you can do them in English without too many problems usually, just as it’s also possible to code safely in C. It requires everyone to change their old habits, but it’s much less of a change than is involved in adopting a whole new language.
Anyway, I do like Rust better personally.
Switching everything from C to Rust because it has better memory safety is more akin to changing languages from English to Esperanto because it has gender neutral pronouns and other cool features. Maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s understandable that some people are reluctant.
Immutable IoT thin-client Snap container-based systems seems like a pretty weird kink, but who am I to judge?
To be fair, Mozilla does have a lot of problems. It’s just that starting out with an unsupportable premise like “Firefox is just a puppet for Google” is not the way to do a good job of describing them accurately or in a way that’s going to convince anyone.
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.