MrBingley

I am going to disagree with almost all of the advice about studying abroad or joining a club. Those are well-intended, but they are addressing the symptoms, not the cause. Judging from these descriptions:

> I’m socially anxious and keep to myself

> small talk tends to bore me

> it’s exhausting always having to text them to hang out, if I don’t then we never talk again

It's highly possible that you have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I say this because I am reading a book right now about ASD[0] and a lot of this is ringing true, especially the part about being confused why friends are dropping you. Speak to a psychologist and see what they think (or read the book first, and then speak to them). I am 30 now and am just cluing in that I might be on the spectrum, and oh boy do I wish I had caught it when I was younger. (It's also possible that you don't have ASD but some other condition like avoidant personality disorder, but whatever it is, it is so much easier to solve it once you've figured it out.)

[0]: https://www.isthisautism.com/

> life-changing generational wealth

By that measure, the people who had their life savings in FTX (and Celsius and Luna before that) have certainly succeeded.

Investing in total-market index funds is the single best strategy for the average investor. (In fact it's so good there's a proof! [1]) If you invested $10000 in the total US market in 1992 (30 years ago) and never touched it again, your inflation-adjusted balance today would be $72452 [2]. That's an insane 7x of real growth that requires absolutely no effort on your part. Even if you did a more conservative mix of 60% stock and 40% bond (VBMFX) you would have 4.5x real growth.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

[2] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio

Recently I've been reading Vasily Grossman's A Writer At War, which is a collection of his journals from the Eastern Front, and the depths of Stalin's brutality are staggering. In the Battle of Stalingrad he forbade that any citizens flee the city since he thought it would motivate the troops, and special battalions were set up behind the front line to shoot any who retreated. In the battle itself Soviet snipers targeted the German water carriers, and so the Germans bribed children with food to fetch water for them, who were promptly shot since any collaboration with the enemy was punished with death.

I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these will sadly limit the appeal of this distribution to enthusiasts-only, which is unfortunate since Guix probably has the most advanced package manager of any Linux system.

Apple only cares about privacy insomuch as it makes them money. In the West privacy is marketable, and in China it's not. It's as simple as that.

The Turris Omnia and soon-to-be Turris Mox are the only ones that I'm aware of. I know Linksys has a special line of WRT "open source ready" routers that are supposedly OpenWRT compatible, but the Amazon reviews are completely trash. They're a little more pricey, but my next router will be a Turris.

https://www.turris.cz/en/turris-omnia/

> From a public relations standpoint, Apple had always been on the side of privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

Oh give me a break. Apple only cares about American user privacy, and only then because it aligns with their business interests. Where is the oh-so-noble Tim Cook protesting the heinous civil rights and privacy violations in the business they do in China? Nowhere. Apple only cares about user privacy so much as it makes them money - in the US that means resisting the government, and in China it means hopping into bed with Big Daddy Xi.

Edit: For example, Snowden leaked an NSA slide saying that Apple had given in to cooperate with Prism, but Apple denied-denied-denied as soon as the news broke. It was only post-Snowden, when privacy could be monetized, that Apple suddenly started to care.

... because doing so will hurt their competitors and not them. I'm glad for Apple's focus on privacy these days, but let's not chalk it up to altruism.

Even with secure boot disabled you can't install Linux on the internal SSD. Installing Linux on a Mac has already been very flaky for the last few years, but now is impossible.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/463422/how-can-you-...

I am deeply disturbed by what we are seeing in China. The Great Firewall, massive concentration camps in Xinjiang, a new "social credit" system - I think the dystopia of 1984 is becoming a reality. I am afraid that as a society we have the complacency that the "good guys" - democracy, human rights, freedom - will always win. Stalinism and facism eventually fell, but the Communist Party of China is still going strong, and seems to be more than able to extend its grip to the 21st century.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

What liars. Apple has done this before as well, when they said they had "never heard" of PRISM, despite a Snowden leak showing the exact opposite.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

This sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy. There is no official definition of "open source", so taking what the words literally mean, "open" and "source", ie the source code is open to view, is an acceptable definition.

That is incorrect. There is no trademark on "open source", and the OSI has no monopoly on what it is supposed to mean.

https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

> However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings. Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them. Already, this behavior has damaged open source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business.

The issue is that large companies can free-load off open source projects and make millions while contributing nothing back to the developers. The OSI has certainly known of this problem since its founding in the late 90s, and as far as I can tell has no intention of helping solve it. For example, most recently Kyle Mitchel developed License Zero [0] as a way for open source developers to make money from their work, and presented it to the OSI for approval. It was rejected. Here is one of the comments from Bruce Perens [1].

> > What does an economically viable open source look like?

> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.

[0] https://licensezero.com/

[1] http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

> This approval means patients living with severe allergies who require constant access to lifesaving epinephrine should have a lower-cost option, as well as another approved product to help protect against potential drug shortages.

I live in Canada, and there are already drug shortages. You cannot buy any EpiPens in Canada. Period. For whatever reason, we are all out. I had an allergic reaction this week, and took a gamble to go the emergency room before the anaphylaxis really kicked in, because I only have one (expired) EpiPen left and want to save it until I'm really desperate. Each EpiPen costs $35 to manufacture,and I have no idea how a multi-billion dollar company like Mylan can have a manufacturing shortage of a life-saving drug, especially given their 17x (!) profit margin. I'm usually not a religious person, but I can only hope there's a hell so those corporate executives can rot in it.

> I’ll predict the inevitable downvotes, which really only proves the point: debating human causes of climate change is akin to debating the existence of Jesus Christ.

Which is somewhat ironic, considering that in both cases there is near unanimous agreement among the experts (climate scientists and biblical scholars respectively) that both exist.

> The allostatic load hypothesis posits that SIDS is the result of perinatal cumulative painful, stressful, or traumatic exposures that tax neonatal regulatory systems.

If true, this would mean that babies can literally be "stressed to death". Wow. I wonder what the age is when this begins to taper off.

Also, circumcision for babies and children should be outlawed. All freedoms are subject to limitations, including religious ones.

> They excuse this nonsense by saying that it's necessary for encryption, which is blatantly false.

I don't see how this is false. Protonmail encrypts all user emails on the server, which can only be unlocked by the user's password. SMTP and IMAP would require transmitting the password to the server for decryption, which makes it prey to interception a la HushMail [0]. This is why they have the bridge, which runs its own IMAP server on the client and performs all authentication and decryption locally. Of course, the bridge isn't open source yet, so we can't be sure it isn't sniffing your password anyway, but that is orthogonal to the issue of supporting SMTP.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

I absolutely agree. Adding an array type to C that knows its own length would solve so many headaches, fix so many bugs, and prevent so many security vulnerabilities it's not even funny. Null terminated strings? Gone! Checked array indexing? Now possible! More efficient free that gets passed the array length? Now we could do it! The possibilities are incredible. Sadly, C is so obstinately stuck in its old ways that adding such a radical change will likely never happen. But one can dream ...

The problem with the first example is that `int` and `unsigned` are not the correct types to be using for array indexing. As we saw, they were 32 bits wide on a 64 bit platform, which lead to an additional sign extension and (in the case of `unsigned`) truncation instruction. However, this can be avoided by using `ptrdiff_t` and `size_t`, which are defined to match the platform size and avoid the extension and truncation altogether. The fact that signed integer overflow being undefined allowed the compiler to elide the `int` truncation is somewhat irrelevant, since using the correct integer types leads to even faster code that doesn't rely on undefined behaviour at all.

Good. It's quite clear that WikiLeaks is in cahoots with the Russians after the DNC hack, and their collusion with the Trump campaign to try to show their "impartiality" is despicable. I used to have some respect for WikiLeaks, but they are just Russian pawns. Snowden I respect, but not Assange.

> effective vim users ^z out of vim and use Unix as their IDE.

As someone who used to do this, I can tell you it's not very effective. For example, build systems. I work with a lot of C++ code, and after making changes I used to ctrl-z to the terminal and then `make` manually ... only to get blindsided by lines and lines of error messages, many due to a lot of trivial syntax errors. Using YouCompleteMe may not be very minimal or "Unixy", but having error messages inline with my code and being able to correct them as I work is invaluable. Maybe your experience is different, but I couldn't get it to work for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's a good point. For copyleft licenses, reciprocation does not occur through payment, but by users open-sourcing their code. In that case it's fair not to expect reimbursement.

I read your license, and I like the idea. It does seem a bit complicated, but I guess that's inherent in having to wade through payments and private licenses and such. I'm curious, was the LR-0 approved by the OSI? I can't find it on their website.

> My usual answer for this is that if you have to ask how you're going to make money, you're the wrong person to make Open Source. Nowhere in the mission of OSI is any mandate to provide authors with a viable business method.

Indeed, it is a principle of open source that people can freeload off your work. As soon as an author restricts their work to non-commercial use or commercial-with-a-fee (which is entirely reasonable), it is no longer considered "open source".

> We are asking of you only one thing. Go forth and use your license. We are not stopping you. Just don't call it Open Source.

Go ahead, call it open source. The OSI has no trademark over the term, and the idea that their narrow definition is the only "official" one is a load of crap. There is plenty of room for what constitutes open source that doesn't fall underneath their umbrella.

Edit: I understand this opinion is controversial. If you disagree, please comment and explain why.

Absolutely. Last year Google was tracking the location of Android devices that used its push messaging service (so basically all of them) even when privacy features were turned on. Installing a Google-free custom rom is the only solution to prevent this. I have been using LineageOS without Gapps for the past month, and it's worked superbly.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...

Looking at the comments in this post, I'm resigning myself that there simply is no correct solution for copying or concating strings in C. Null-terminated strings are a fundamentally broken concept. I think the long-term solution is simply to move to a different language (Rust, C++, D, Go, whatever) where we have the benefit of hindsight and have (pointer, length) string types, which solve all the problems null-terminated strings introduce.

And OpenCL too. This is terrible. I was thinking about adding GPU support to a numerical simulator I am working on, and I was planning to have nice cross-platform support with OpenCL. Whelp, that's no longer the case. My code is in C++, and I refuse to use proprietary, vendor-locked, Objective-C-only Metal. If people want GPU support, they'll just have to use Linux, which doesn't artificially constrain you with corporate frameworks.

Petitions don't pay bills; GitHub is bleeding money. The solution is not signatures, but for developers to start paying for all the free hosting GitHub has given them. The open-source community itself is strapped for cash, so this is an excellent time for all the users of that open-source software (especially companies) to start chipping in for hosting and development costs. However, the cynical side of me says that ain't going to happen. :/

Fool me once, same on you. Fool me twice ...