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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Don’t force me to deal with your shiny language of the day,

    WE HavE LegItImaTe COnCeRNs

    Exact same shit as last time, some cranky old dude with the territorial instinct of a bulldog sabotages anything to do with rust under a very thin layer of so-called technical concerns, yet refuses to partake in constructive discussion. Like, literally, the changeset is just bindings in rust/kernel? What even is there to complain about regarding maintainability of kernel/dma, given that as far as I can tell the rust devs will deal with any future incompatibilities?

    Very shameful for the kernel community that this kind of aggressive sabotage is regular and seemingly accepted. The incessant toxicity is not a good look and very discouraging to anyone thinking of contributing.


  • Yeah that’s the gender-radical answer. I’m all for it but we’re certainly not there yet despite being on the very progressive side of gender rights.

    There are also the positive discrimination laws to take into account (in Belgium it’s illegal for companies to have a pay gap between men and wonen in equivalent positions) but IMO those should not rely on a central government database to be enforced.

    Then there’s the fact that people usually change their names if they change their legal gender… When Robert becomes Julia there’s no need for a gender marker to guess what happened.


  • Side-note but this is exactly the reason why my country never asked for my ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation (and AFAIK is not legally allowed to do so). We learned from WWII that this is too great of a liability to entrust to future, potentially hostile governments. The Nazis poured over every written registry of Jewish population census to make a handy murder list, maybe we shouldn’t facilitate their job next time?

    (Side-side note: because of what I just said it is very surprising that Germany keeps a registry of everyone’s religion for tax purposes, like maybe just find any other way to allocate subsidies?)

    (Side³ note: I’m going to guess unfortunately my government does have “legally trans” people in a database due to the logistics of changing legal gender)


  • Hitler died before he could be tried. Does that mean he is presumed innocent?

    Trick question, you’re falling for semantics. “Innocent until proven guilty” really is “legally-innocent until court-proven legally-guilty”, which is the only avenue the state has to imprison someone.

    What it doesn’t mean is “you’re not allowed to have an opinion and/or act on it until the accused has gone to court”. The court of public opinion works independently from the court of stuffy judges in wigs. Sometimes it’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s always wrong nor that it shouldn’t exist. OTOH the legal courts very often fall short of delivering a verdict for a bunch of reasons, many quite bad (victims don’t want to relive their traumas for months, cops are uncooperative, court system is backed up, legal definition of rape is unprovable, etc.).



  • Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application…

    Slack/Discord is “too complex and confusing”. Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord’s threading model.

    Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams’ UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like “yeah, I guess? Who cares?”

    Corporate types literally can’t understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone’s constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams’ pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you’re just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

    Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.


  • The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus’ final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn’t review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.

    So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn’t C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm’s length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn’t very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.

    I don’t have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it’s interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We’re all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.


  • “whatever power decides” is legal

    Not true. When Biden decided to cancel student debt, the court system said “no”. The SCOTUS isn’t subservient to “power” in general, it’s subservient to powerful fascists. Big difference. Trump has spent a decade following the Nazi playbook and acquiring complete personal control over all branches of government and people don’t seem to have fully realized that yet. That’s why things are way worse this time around. When he started his first term the SCOTUS was conservative and corrupt but not yet fascist. This time it’s fully loyalist. In case you forgot, he also had already placed a bunch of loyalists in key judicial roles that Biden didn’t fire.

    He’s made sure the law won’t stop him, and now he’s purging his enemies to make sure the institutions won’t resist his unlawful orders. It’s not a “both sides” issue, it’s not even just a “the rich are winning” issue. They might get the green light to deport every union leader, but they’ll be ruling over a kingdom of ashes and blood by the time this is over. Assuming the billionaires aren’t caught up in the purge; plenty of that in autocratic regimes, oligarchs infighting is a great way to ensure loyalty because that makes them incapable of organizing to stage a coup.



  • If I steal a cheap pen, it’s because I wanted a cheap pen. There’s no deeper meaning to it. I’m not going to fence it for a fifteenth of a baguette at the bakery.

    If I steal ten cents though, I break a much deeper taboo because money is by definition fungible. Why do I need the money, what am I going to use it for, and why didn’t I empty the cash register while I was at it? These are all worryingly open questions.

    Furthermore I reject the premise that stealing 10 cents is functionally equivalent to stealing a pen worth 10 cents; if anything, the premise that these are equivalent depends on a very debatable modern consumerist idea that commodities are perfectly interchangeable for money and/or the belief in a “rational actor” that has never existed outside of economics classes. Sure that may have been be valid if I was in charge of doing a bulk purchase of pens (and even then people aren’t as rational as economists would like but I digress). These economics concepts are all too theoretical to apply to individual actors in everyday life.
    That pen is “worthless” to my employer (at least in my mind) and simultaneously worth a lot to me; I wouldn’t part with it for 10 cents or even 1 euro because that wouldn’t be worth the inconvenience of not having a pen, or simply because the idea of someone wanting to buy something I own and didn’t intend to sell is offensive to me.

    I do agree with the basic premise that we treat money as special, but to me that’s a natural and rational consequence of its fungible and abstract nature. It’s much weirder to consider physical objects to be fungible IMO (even if it makes sense on an abstract level for commodities), and that’s why the sentence “you’ll own nothing and be happy” induces so much existential dread despite being based on theoretically sound economic principles. I don’t care if it’s actually cheaper or more resource efficient, I’m not buying a subscription to my woodworking tools or selling my house. I like the psychological safety of owning things.


  • Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

    ❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
    266516
    

    So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

    • Daemon manager
    • Syslog daemon
    • DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
    • udev daemon
    • network daemon
    • login daemon
    • VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
    • user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

    For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

    For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.


  • Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

    The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

    Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol



  • On the one hand, deanonimization attacks are never entirely avoidable on unhardened targets and this one isn’t particularly sophisticated and leaks relatively little information.

    On the other hand deanonimization attacks are always bad and it’s a good reminder to people of the risks they are taking. This is also slightly non-obvious behavior, even if it makes sense to the technically competent, as something like an IP grabber normally requires user interaction such as clicking a link. It’s also a vector that CF might be able to mitigate by patching the ability to query a given cache directly.



    1. Don’t infantilise him. He’s not attention-starved, he’s a Nazi.
    2. Did everyone forget Trump already did that during his first term??? I am going absolutely insane. We know he will threaten to nuke anyone and everyone. And right now the odds aren’t looking good that he won’t actually do it. That’s my call. Nuclear war. People called me crazy in 2020 when I called Trump a fascist, and my worst predictions will be proven right again because everyone seems to be dead-set on downplaying the actions of these Nazi lunatics and acting surprised when they pull through with a Nazi promise which only emboldens them.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.world...
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    19 days ago

    My Audi typically displays the outdoors temp on the digital dash, which is convenient. Except when there is any warning light on, which takes its place. Want to take a quick glance at the temp? Well right now it’s “low on windshield wiper fluid” degrees outside.

    Also why the fuck does this shitty dash scream at me about warnings when I get in the car but not out. By the time I get home I will have completely forgotten about the windshield wiper. How is “also display reminders after shutting the engine off” not the obvious implementation?


  • The algorithms used to “derank” swear-laden videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the exact same one used to derank “political” content and/or queer content.

    So yeah, it fucking pisses me off every time someone self-censors to appease the Algorithm, lending it more credibility.

    Not very high on our very long list of items on the Descent Into Fascism checklist, but it’s on there.