Delk

> Remember, a hash is a "one way function". It isn't invertible (that would defeat the purpose!). It is a surjective function. Meaning that reversing the function results in a non-unique output.

This is a bit of a nitpick and not even relevant to the topic, but that's not the reason cryptographic hashes are (assumed to be) one-way functions. You could in principle have a function f: X -> Y that's not invertible but for which the set of every x that give a particular y could be tractably computed given y. In that case f would not be a one-way function in the computational sense.

Cryptographic hashes are practically treated as one-way functions because the inverse computation would take an intractable amount of time.

> biwepe(?)

Probably beweep; lament, weep over.

> pinunge(?)

This is explained later on the page. "Where a modern writer would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered pinunge instead."

I also couldn't understand this one although the word "pining" did come to mind, apparently not totally off, as that has apparently come from the same ancestor. Didn't help me figure out the intended meaning, though.

> No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).

I guessed this meant something along the lines of "[?] shall I never [?] forget, not while I live". I didn't figure out that "uu" is actually "w" until that was explained, so it escaped me that "uuhiles" is "while[s]", though.

I think Transport Fever is of a slightly but significantly different genre.

Railroad Tycoon is a strategy game with competition whereas Transport Fever is pretty much a building and optimization sandbox. Even Transport Tycoon falls more in the latter category, IMO, despite superficially having competition even in single player. (I haven't played OpenTTD in a long time so I don't know if the AIs are nowadays competent enough to make the competition interesting.)

In RRT, with cut-throat competition enabled your company can even be opportunistically bought by the competition if you aren't careful. You can also be driven out of cities by rate wars. Some of the other strategy aspects feel perhaps a bit artificial -- you can't cross the other companies' track, for example, so you can effectively cordon off areas from competition. Nevertheless, those competitive strategy aspects add a significant edge to the game.

I've also played a lot of Transport Fever. The competitive aspect, even if against the old and cheating AI, is probably one of the reasons I still end up returning to the old Railroad Tycoon now and then, though.

Some of the technical limitations of the original are somewhat frustrating, though, so I find the reverse engineering effort really interesting.

It actually says "hacking on one of our programs", which makes it even more obvious that it's using the word closer to the positive traditional hacker culture sense.

I'm sure that still looks unprofessional to some people, just like any jargon that isn't corporatese does.

If humans are considered apex(-ish) predators, it's because there's mostly nothing "above" us in the food chain. We aren't typical prey for any other animal, so we are at the top-ish.

It doesn't mean the diets of humans are biologically supposed to consist of huge amounts of meat.

Most apex predators are of course obligate carnivores. But humans are probably near the top because the use of weapons and tools makes us highly dangerous, so most land animals are wary of humans. Even many predators don't prey on humans for food.

(Although some large land predators do, mostly when they're desperate for food.)

Games that require kernel-level anticheat will probably try to detect VMs and refuse to run.

I remember not getting Close Combat 2 (from 1997) running on Windows 10 some years ago but I did getting it running under Wine, albeit with some tweaks.

Whether that was a Windows compatibility issue or potentially some display driver thing, I'm not sure. (90's Windows games may have used some DirectDraw features that just don't get that much attention nowadays, which I think may have been the issue, but my memory's a bit spotty.)

> Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership

Just about every commercial software license says the software is licensed, not sold.

Of course the practical difference is in whether you can trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.

(Also, whether the idea that a software product is only licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a game or other piece of software you bought on physical media because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That argument didn't necessarily fly.)

I'm guessing that was a 286. I think Intel parts topped out at 12.5 MHz but AMD and Harris eventually reached 20 or even 25 MHz. I still have my original PC with a 12.5 MHz one.

The difference with the 386, I think, is that AFAIK the second-sourced 8086 and 286 CPUs from non-Intel manufacturers still made use of licensed Intel designs. The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered again and AMD designed their own implementation. That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game (the Am386 came out in 1991 while the 80386 had already been released in 1985) but, on the other hand, they were able to achieve better performance.

Probably the Underhanded C Contest (https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html) but yeah. Obfuscated C Contest entries usually aren't underhanded, just intentionally obscure about what they do or how they do it.

That replaces number two and is the correct alternative in most cases.

There are cases where a password manager may not solve the problem, though. It doesn't help if I forget my disk encryption or work AD password and I need to be able to login before I can get to the password manager in the first place. Enterprise IT is also where you find some of those frustrating password policies, such as long and complex passwords with mandated changes every month or two, and where you usually can't choose your management tools.

Of course those particular passwords usually get typed so often that remembering them isn't much of a problem. And password managers work well for pretty much all secrets that aren't needed that often.

For what it's worth, my computer science degree also had courses and projects that included requirements analysis, breaking down the problem, and elements of software engineering methodology and project management. (I believe we had a course titled "software engineering" even though the university doesn't award engineering degrees.)

I suppose in some schools computer science programmes might be fairly distinct from engineering ones. However, it seems that in lots of places a bachelor's in computer science is rather an generalist degree that covers lots of (mostly software) tech topics and some CS theory.

I'd still have trouble calling myself a software engineer, though, since I don't technically have an engineering degree, even though in lots of places my job might be described as such.

I also don't know a single programmer/developer whose job is distinct from field 2.

I haven't looked at leetcode in a long time but if the problems require e.g. rebalancing a tree, I honestly don't remember how to do it and might not be able to reason it out on the spot either. I have no problems with concepts like recursion or computational complexity though.

It sounds like leetcode problems require either memorization of a significant number of algorithm design patterns or seriously sharp algorithmic problem solving skills.

I can't think of any official documents I'd be getting in Office file formats. Forms are mostly web ones or in some cases PDF, read-only documents are PDF. Maybe you can submit some documents or attachments in the Word format as a citizen but I wouldn't be surprised if PDF is already required anyway, or an image format for scans.

I'd be more worried about document interoperability between government agencies and other organizations such as companies that do work for the government. The government could of course mandate contractors to use an open source office suite which would extend the need for training to those companies.

Also, I've seen some orgs make heavy use of Office formats in terms of e.g. surprisingly elaborate formatting, document history and comments, and although I haven't tried to use those in LibreOffice, I wouldn't be sure it supports all of those in the same extent some people have learned to use them in Office.

There are lots of ways of "just not working" but IME the problem with corporate Windows laptops is often the enterprise software crap on them rather than the hardware, necessarily.

My work laptop with a high(ish)-end AMD laptop CPU and reasonable hardware quality drains the battery in a couple of hours. It also doesn't feel any faster than my personal three-year-old more lightweight (also AMD, same brand) laptop. In some cases the private device is faster despite its lower specs. Its battery would also easily last 5 times longer than the work one, probably, if I used it on the road.

(Incidentally, the poor battery life isn't much of a practical concern with the work device either because I need to use it at the desk 98% of the time anyway. But I can certainly see how crappy software and configurations can make using those devices a pain.)

> Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.

I'm okay with that, even if I'd personally prefer the serviceability. But I'm honestly not okay with the idea that it's fine to just toss a laptop after two years. I want people who do that to get their own planet.

Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.

I think the difference is that if an autistic person learns to mask, that's probably useful as a coping mechanism but doesn't remove the autism in the sense of making the fundamental neurological difference go away. Anxiety (even in anxiety disorders) can be fundamentally reduced by exposure therapy, not only in the sense of finding more effective coping mechanisms but in the sense of the anxiety itself diminishing or ceasing to exist.

For what it's worth, exposure therapy is a real term and it's an actual part of cognitive behavioural therapy.

Obesity may increase the risk of Alzheimer's but it's far from a requirement for the disease. I can't find a link between Alzheimer's and being overweight except in case of obesity.

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/managing-the-ri...

I'm pretty sure they aren't. I invested in what was obviously Facebook under a different name.

Lots of organizations have a blanket ban on any third-party software that wasn't specifically approved by IT. Being free might help it get cleared but that's nowhere sufficient. Since Notepad comes with Windows, it's probably always there and never banned. (Although of course the cloud-based LLM integration might actually be a problem.)

With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.

Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)

All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.

It would be pretty high for a resting heart rate.

> An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.

I think that depended (and still depends) a lot on the organization and the nature of the product.

I distinctly remember doing backend and some frontend development, requirements specification, database design, customer interfacing and even a bit of ops, all on the same job and with the same title in the 00's. That was in a small-to-medium company and my clients were on the small side so the projects might not have even had half a dozen people to begin with.

Larger organizations and more enterprisey projects would have had more specialized and limited roles: customer/specs people, possibly frontend and backend devs, DBAs, testing people, and those in charge of ops and environments. In my experience, that's still more or less true in enterprisey development today.

I think a part of the problem is that while new technologies have emerged and reduced the need to manually work with some older or underlying technologies, they haven't replaced previous skills.

Containers have reduced the amount of work needed to deal with deployments and environments but they haven't removed the need to know servers or operating systems. Cluster management can reduce the amount of manual work on setting up containers but it doesn't remove the need to know the underlying container engine. So now you need to know Linux servers and containers and k8s and whatnot just in order to manage a local backend development setup. At the same time, frameworks have made a lot of frontend work more manageable but they haven't made JavaScript or other underlying stuff disappear.

Thus the scope of what being a fully-versed full-stack developer entails has grown.

IMO it's not even quite right in its description. The first picture that describes virtual memory shows all processes as occupying the same "logical" address space with the page table just mapping pages in the "logical" address space to physical addresses one-to-one. In reality (at least in all VM systems I know of) each process has its own independent virtual address space.

> Why do you think xz was targeted?

Possibly for any number of reasons. A sole maintainer with a bit too little capacity to keep up the development. A central role as a dependency for crucial packages in a couple of key distros.

What would be the connection between the backdoor (or indeed any supply chain security) and any design details of the xz file format? How would the backdoor have been avoided if the archive format were different?

The question of whether the xz format is a good choice for long-term archival is entirely unrelated to backdoors or open source supply chain security.

> thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers

Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.

But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.

Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.

Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.

And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.

I suspect failing to report significant income to the tax authorities would be considered tax fraud in just about any legislation. If there weren't any kind of a potential penalty for failing to report or for significantly under-reporting, doing so would be potentially beneficial with no drawbacks.

Failing to report income or reporting false information for financial gain can lead to extra tax or prosecution for tax fraud where I live. I'd definitely be careful to report all income if I had income from sources that don't automatically withhold taxes, especially if it were significant.

I don't think they'll drag you to criminal court if you make a small mistake, though. But if you fail to report thousands of euros of income and the authorities get wind of it, sure, especially if it seems intentional.

I don't know if the risk of prosecution or other legal consequences is somehow greater in the US.

It's hard to tell if there's much of a difference or not since I don't really know the US system (and I'm, in all likelihood, from yet another country different than GP).

The simplest cases, however, don't really require filing forms at all. The withholding process sounds similar, and when the time for filing taxes comes, you get a pre-filled return sheet with withheld taxes and your pre-calculated actual tax based on the information the tax office has.

Employers directly report income to the tax office, so that information is already included. Banks also automatically withhold taxes on the interest they pay and report it to the tax office. I think banks and broker companies usually report sales of stocks etc. made through them as well.

The same pre-filled return sheet includes national and local income taxes that have been automatically calculated based on your place of residence. (I assume this is more complex in the US due to different state legislations; here the tax legislation is the same everywhere even though local tax rates vary.)

If you don't want to add deductions (in addition to standard ones) and you don't have any corrections to make, you don't need to file any forms. The only things you need to do are to pay the difference if you owe something or to report your account number for a refund if they don't have it already. Otherwise filing in a simple case is a no-op.

If you do want to file for deductions or make corrections, you can do that with an online form.

And of course you still do want to check that the pre-calculated information is correct and whether there are any non-automatic deductions for which you're eligible.

More complex cases are, well, more complex. If you've got income from renting an apartment, for example, you do need to report that information yourself. But it's still a relatively simple online form.

Real estate tax is handled separately from income tax. You get sent a bill with a pre-calculated sum based on property registered in your name. If you have no corrections to make, you just pay the bill.

In contrast, I think even small businesses commonly hire accountants since for them the process is probably more complex with all the deductibles etc.

If the simple cases are similarly simple in the US and making corrections is a relatively straightforward form away, I wonder why there always seems to be such a big fuss in the US about filing taxes. Because of state/local differences in tax code? Just overall complex legislation? Or maybe it's just more common to have income from a variety of sources so more people need to deal with the more complex cases? Is the filing process paper-only and the only way to do simple online filing with automatic calculation to go through commercial tax-filing software?

You may find it morally objectionable to sell distributions of free software for a fee but for F/OSS licensing in no way forbids that.

GPL version 3 explicitly says "you may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey". The MIT license also explicitly allows selling the work.

No other free or open source license forbids selling either. In fact the Open Source Definition from OSI expressly says: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."

Linux distributions have been commercially sold for decades. Red Hat built its entire RHEL business on that, even when they still played nicer with open source. (Of course the key really was the support they provided to their paying customers but I think you still needed to pay to get your hands on RHEL anyway.)

Of course the problem you'd be facing if you wanted to sell free software at a significant price would be that since you can't forbid redistribution of the copies you sold (and you need to provide source code), someone else can take what you sell and redistribute it for free. So you can only really sell other people's free software if you either get ignorant people to buy it despite the same thing being available for free elsewhere, or if you provide something else on top of it that people are willing to pay for.

That severely limits the possibilities of making big bucks by just selling free software developed by others.

Perhaps the community is philanthropic to the point of providing free software for other people to sell. But the community or the authors of the licenses aren't naive. The possibility has been known from the start, as was the fact that it's after all quite difficult to charge a lot of money for selling something when free downloads are also almost guaranteed to exist.

I'd be a lot more concerned about how volunteers assume active maintenance burden and responsibility for software libraries that are used for free by just about every software company on the planet.

I don't see anything about trinsic2's (or anybody else's) promoting Linux or installing it on customers' computers that would be in contradiction with open source, even morally. I certainly don't see how a "license" could be required for doing so when the individual licenses of each included piece of software already permit commercial distribution. The only way he might need a separate license would be if he installed a distribution that's actually not entirely open source and bundles proprietary components that are not freely distributable.

On their own devices, lots of non-power users probably just accept whatever Windows suggests. Enterprise versions of Windows either don't have a lot of the crap or they allow it to be disabled by company IT.

Techie users might just find tweaks online that allows disabling dark patterns on their devices.

I don't know how people who care but aren't techie enough to install workarounds (or to tell good ones from bad ones) deal.