dijit

I’m aware of this (consciously) but I would really do my job if it was unpaid, in fact: many do (and did) in the form of side projects and volunteering and FOSS.

I was always weirded out by the “only in IT for the money” crowd, which is a lot more than the people in it for passion these days it seems, and I might be an extreme case, but consider that while I run an IRC community- I do not write open source software.

but there are many people who passionately believe gay rights is bad.

Or, abortion is bad.

Or, apostasy is bad.

Or, drawing a depiction of Muhammed is bad.

They don't consider them opinions, they consider them facts.

I'm sure a couple of people who are supporting this government ID initiative genuinely believe that it's the only solution to an actual problem: because they don't have the technical acumen to figure out a solution that preserves privacy, ensures freedom of dependency from a single nations duopoly and actually solves their issue.

I'm impressed that you know everything that's good and bad to be so resolute that you are the person who knows it all, it must be pretty incredible to be the one person on earth who has no doubts at all about what objective good and objective bad is. Maybe we should get you some place safe so we can have you judging humanities actions.

What's your position on military spending? Because if we don't spend then our countries get invaded (see: Ukraine) but if we do spend then we're taking money from starving families.. hrm..

I personally have a really hard time, since unfortunately I can empathise with the motivations of others, and everyone has a point, even if I don't agree with it.

The thing is, that I'm aware that everyone thinks they're the good guy, the hero, or the "necessary evil for the greater good", and I find it more interesting to understand why they think what they think is better than what I think.

The alternative means I've already factored the entire populations needs and circumstances, which, for my tiny meat brain which can only empathise with one person at a time is practically impossible.

How did you manage it?

you mean the things you think are good, are good.

And things that you think are bad, are bad.

Everyone feels this way about their things.

Literally opinions.

idk what kind of fascist you are, but a free society doesn’t stop talking about something because certain leaders don’t like it.

In order to get legislation you want (say: gay rights) you have to risk legislation you don’t like, for some, that would be gay rights too…

I think rejecting proposals from MEPs on the grounds that "it's against EU interests" would be very undemocratic and fuel the very anti-EU sentiment that it would supposedly combat.

No head of government is going to come out against what the government itself is doing, they have to defend every initiative, which is why they seem pretty ungenuine all the goddamn always.

I used to track the voting history of UKIP members, the site "VoteWatch Europe" used to make this easy, but it shut down in 2022.

UKIP were constantly voting for things to be discussed (when they bothered to vote at all), and then when they were discussed they would thump chest in the media about how the EU was talking about doing the thing they had voted to discuss (with the verbiage to suggest the EU would definitely do it, against the will of the British- forgetting entirely that we had a veto anyway...).

It's very commonly the anti-EU politicians who inevitably get into EU parliament (due to representative voting, ironically more democratic than the FPTP system we use in the UK, despite all the wailing about democracy) who endorse such obviously stupid ideas, as a way to undermine the credibility of the EU.

What's frustrating is that it works really well, and occasionally they get something truly stupid through- which goes a long way to whipping up anti-EU sentiment, but then they're forcing their countries to actually do the stupid thing... Nobody seems to call out this self-sabotage.

Realistically, maintainers are strangers on the internet to me, and crucially, it is common to add unofficial repos, as well as use non-platform package managers like npm, cargo and pip.

It’s all strangers stuff

Cool theory, but the same reason I pull my shoes off by standing on my heel and pulling, despite it saving me no time (I will have to untie them anyway when I put them on again).

Humans are short sighted, want to solve the situation immediately and will do the laziest thing possible to accomplish a given task.

> No, I'm sorry but who on earth installs random software from random strangers, without a single step of validating before giving it access to (presumably) the same computer you do banking on?

That would be every day that I run apt-get, pkg add, brew install, or download a random .exe/.dmg to update my machine.

A decade of telling people that if they don't update constantly they're at risk, also affects us computer people.

Being able (and willing) to inspect source tree is the exception here, not the standard.

"40 hours" in his context here is actually a work day, so 7-8hrs.

He says "40 hours" because he feels like he's managed to do 40 hours worth of work in this time, but then has to spend another "40 hours" (actually: 1 day) just going around kicking tyres.

Obviously the implication is that it's a net gain of some kind, but he's unsure if he caught everything.

(sorry to reiterate the GP, but I feel like you missed the important nuance that it's not a real 40 hours of time).

> did you not even review the PKGBUILD or anything else before installing stuff from the AUR?

I'd venture most people actually don't review pkgbuild; especially on upgrades.

The other issue of course is that, the devils in the details. Fetch a binary as part of the installation (or, just fetch a binary itself, no compilation) then you're boned.

You can even hide nefarious code in the compilation/build steps, Jia Tan style.

Yes, its really similar and unsurprisingly its still inflammatory.

My girlfriend mentioned that this year is an election year in sweden, which made me realise how bad the propaganda was in 2016- but its all the same stuff.

I'm conflating multiple things over 5 years, my memory seems imperfect. Apologies.

What I've mixed together:

1) The "Alex" bot, which was opt-in and seemed to be everywhere. [0]

2) The "inclusive-coding-bot" which was not opt-in and just inserted itself into everything (which came out later). [1]

3) Github disabling a popular repository for using the word "Retard". [2]

Neither of the first two were actually endorsed by github, I just conflated them because of the "WebM for Retards" controversy and because they'd been very public about other inclusive things like not interviewing white people [3] or calling white women "some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women". [4]

[0]: https://github.com/get-alex/alex

[1]: https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

[3]: https://i.insider.com/56b3d2f12e526555008b505e?width=791

[4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whi...

I’m still mad that Mozillas persona got no adoption.

I’m sure it was imperfect, but in theory it was easy to host and easy to implement. :(

this is the first emoji I see on HN at all, they’re filtered out in comments.

Github is opinionated.

I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request.

They also worked very hard to change the default branch name for everyone, eventually compromising.

Github definitely has opinions, they might align with yours, for now.

> I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually.

Same.

The “discoverability” of github is two things:

1) Recognition of the name; so if I cannot find the source code and I believe something to be open source I will google the product name with “github”.

2) I can reasonably expect everyone to have an account, so getting issues and PRs is less effort than with other forges.

But I’ve practically never discovered some new FOSS from githubs social features, and I actually look at my friends activity feeds.

storage has also increased (thus, its management overheads).

And, to be honest with you, I’d prefer phones that are battery powered get the 3nm process node and these kind of devices lagging on 7nm or whatever, since they have the capability to be powered from the wall, and you can have less consumptive cpus taking a larger spaces making a bit more heat/power per cycle: but since you need less you can get away with it.

Not everything can be 3nm or lower, the yields aren't good enough.

What I care more about is ECC.

Sure, but then shouldn’t they have a lower power CPU?

I’d be worried about starving my storage need for CPU (ZFS can use a good amount of CPU power) inadvertently.

Running some small services is nice, to avoid having more devices, but I think people want “server with storage” and not actually a NAS, which on the face of it is growing out from nothing more than an SMB share.

I'm british.

The way that gambling companies target the poorest of society feels disgustingly predatory.

You can often tell the average income of an area based on how many betfreds and paddy powers there are on the high street.

> ... a solved problem if people are willing to give up sex with untested strangers

It's wired into our DNA to do this, and while we can be socialised out of it, you'll never get anywhere close to the near 100% you'd need.

at some point you just take your lumps.

Most people don’t have boundless time or energy and just want things to go away.

… ironically this fact is used a lot in gaining confessions by police.

Yeah, obviously.

Greatest minds of our generation couldn’t possibly invent fast profile switching.

Lost technology.

“I don’t want to be seen agreeing with someone who combats obvious bad faith arguments with sarcasm - please think of me as being better than that, even though we would end up in a pissing contest about nuance or a digression away from the main point”.

Bit of a mouthful though.

Ah, I guess it's impossible to have a quick enable kids mode then.

We should just give up and give random individuals access to everyone's camera roll.. no other way.

I agree, and I agree with the enthusiasm on which you bring in.

I've long since considered that the efforts for online child safety should be pointed at educating parents and spearheading some kind of certification of compliance for child safety of software and websites.

[this product is certified to adhere to EU:CSA]

Then you can block everything not certified, and the software that does the blocking would also be certified, the two major prongs you need (endpoints and sites working together: else they're blocked). The rest of the money goes to education for parents about this fact, and the dangers of not doing it, and how to do it.

This is super "easy" (when comparing to the effort it would take for putting backdoors in everything).

Which is why I think that the reason is definitely not child safety, and more about crime control.

Me talking about UK blocking people unless they ID themselves in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979295

Me talking about how its disingenuous because we have superior technical solutions to this particular issue last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010902

"is this device for you, or a child" is one of the first options when setting up an iphone.

I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.