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"but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way"

What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post that is arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from another person, is that acceptable to you? Is it only acceptable if it's mechanized?

One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is basically plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course, oversimplified in the case of GenAI, but hoovering up other people's content and then producing other content based on what was "learned" from that (at scale) is what it does.

The ecological impact of GenAI tools and the practices of GenAI companies (as well as the motives behind those companies) remain the same whether one uses them a lot or a little. If a person has an objection to the ethics of GenAI then they're going to wind up with a "binary take" on it. A deal with the devil is a deal with the devil: "I just dabbled with Satan a little bit" isn't really a consolation for those who are dead-set against GenAI in its current forms.

My take on GenAI is a bit more nuanced than "deal with the devil", but not a lot more. But I also respect that there are folks even more against it than I am, and I'd agree from their perspective that any use is too much.

Isn’t “visually challenged” (or similar) a useful term for people who have visual impairments, but aren’t technically blind?

Do you have the same objection to, say, “visually impaired” if a person is trying to talk about all people with various vision problems, up to being fully blind?

If those are unacceptable, what would you use in that case?

The FHS 3.0 doesn’t reflect current practices, such as the /usr merge, nor the /sys directory. There’s other ways it’s either no longer followed or missing developments from the last 10 years.

Author here: It was abandoned. I linked to one of the former maintainers who said as much. The current effort is by a few people who asked the LF to take out over, and have (so far) done little after an initial flurry of activity. That, too, is covered in the other article I wrote about the FHS recently.

Prior to the group who started an update effort, it had not been touched in about a decade. That’s not slow-moving: that’s abandoned.

You don't understand, or don't agree with the complaints. Those are two different things, and I suspect you understand why people are complaining and instead disagree with the complaints.

People are complaining because something was available, they adopted it, then it was discontinued. Apparently with little warning, and after they'd been encouraged to adopt it by the provider of the images.

As it happens, I agree with the general idea that if folks are not paying for the convenience of builds, then it's on them to work from source. However, it's better IMO if a vendor or project start from that position rather than what's seen as a rug-pull.

Of course, it's part of the playbook: when something is new and not widely adopted, the vendor goes to great effort to encourage adoption -- then the vendor starts looking at the paid vs. free usage and sees "huh, we have a 10000:1 ratio of paid to free users, including ten megacorps that show up grabbing binaries every 10 minutes for their CI/CD farm, and asking questions in our forums, but aren't paying a penny toward development and our investors are getting pissy."

Try to identify companies making heavy use of $thing and use that as leads.

Perhaps, but they all have to be exchanged for cash to be of real value to a thief. Unless they just really want a laptop, etc. And all those things are traceable - granted, odds of getting caught when trying to sell those are small, but not zero. Cash is hard to trace.

I often buy a hard copy and then find an ebook online or check it out from the library on Libby. I’m all for supporting authors, but I don’t want to funnel money into books that I don’t really own.

The Johnny Cash song, “One Piece At a Time” along those lines is a classic.

Sure, but the motivation was "I want to get out of this place." A job just helped to facilitate that. I mean, I was in that boat too -- though I moved for college, not a job -- and never seriously considered going back. I would've loved to have stayed where I was after college, but there were no great jobs there, so I moved for a job -- but that meant parting with my then-girlfriend and other friends.

I'm not sure Americans wanted to move for jobs so much as we were resigned to the idea. If you wanted to work in specific industries, you had to go where those jobs were -- which is still true if your job depends on being in a specific location, but less true for a great many jobs that are knowledge work that can be done from anywhere.

I had a good friend in college who never utilized her degree because she was not willing to move out of St. Louis. She wanted to be close to her family more than she wanted to get a job that made use of her degree. Today, she might've been able to find a job that better used her skills and still got to be around for her niece to grow up.

The choice of "family or job" sucks. It's always sucked. (Well, unless you're looking to get away from your family...) Now people have more options.

It's real hard for me to conjure up "good" uses for, say, mustard gas or bioweapons or nuclear warheads.

"Technology is neutral" is a cop-out and should be seen as such. People should, at the very least, try to ask how people / society will make use of a technology and ask whether it should be developed/promoted.

We are all-too-often over-optimistic about how things will be used or position them being used in the best possible light rather than being realistic in how things will be used.

In a perfect world, people might only use AI responsibly and in ways that largely benefit mankind. We don't live in that perfect world, and it is/was predictable that AI would be used in the worst ways more than it's used in beneficial ones.

I think "tried it on _what_?" is the question -- which distribution, etc.? I've been using Wayland on Fedora for years and don't have any complaints. My primary laptop/desktop has an Intel graphics chipset, but I've tested it on laptops w/NVIDIA and not had problems.

I've been running niri for months now on my primary desktop, I wrote about it for LWN here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/

"Normal" tiling WMs / compositors just don't work for me, but the tiling model does. Before niri, I used PaperWM and GNOME -- but a GNOME extension can only do so much. I wish the folks doing COSMIC would add scrollable tiling, but unless/until they do I'll probably stick with niri.

How’s it frustrating? And, more importantly, how’s it stopping people who prefer the n100 route?

The negativity about a $200 Linux computer just baffles me. Nobody’s forcing it on you.

So. What you called “Biden’s push” is, in fact, an internal FBI memo from one field office that it’s unlikely Biden even heard of, much less read or endorsed? Misrepresent much?

I spoke too soon, I think that IA is having some intermittent problems, but I was finally able to get to Biden's "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrororism" here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210617103741/https://www.white...

At least in the broad-strokes PDF I see no mention of "radical Christian" anything. If there's some citation, I'd be curious to see it if it can still be found and if it mentions specific groups.

Ah, yes, the old "don't do _that_, then the Republicans will do it too" -- as if this administration has been in any way constrained by the limits of any previous administration.

I'd ask for a citation of what Biden/Biden's admin actually did, but the Trump folks have been so busy disappearing things that the policy that I think you're referring to is now gone from the WhiteHouse.gov site and doesn't seem to be available via Internet Archive either.

Once again, in harmony, and louder for the people in the back: the both-sidesism is utterly misguided, plays into the Trump camp's hands, and just entirely fails to recognize just how not-normal and dangerous things are right now and they are just getting worse by the day.

How’s it too much? I’m baffled. If I had a kid between 10-18ish that needed/wanted a non-gaming computer, I would find this to be nearly perfect. $200 is not a ton of money for a computer, and it seems to be just powerful enough I wouldn’t worry about general tasks being frustrating.

Came here to see if anyone recommended that clip. I watched it just last night, it never fails to crack me up, especially CJ's reaction. "You can't do that!" "Why not?" "Because it's freaking me out!"

Effective scene, too -- I've thought a bit differently about maps and some other things ever since, things that might not have ever occurred to me before. It's not a bad idea to expose people to different map projections / configurations to shake up their view of the world.

Immutable systems such as this one and Fedora's Atomics and CoreOS/Flatcar have their uses. Whether they make sense for you or for general desktop OSes is another question, but there are many situations where the approach makes a lot of sense.

Really, I don't see a lot of difference between immutable desktop OSes and Android or iOS. That model is not necessarily a bad one when you're rolling out systems that you don't expect the user to need to fiddle with the system management tasks you refer to. If I have 1,000 laptops to manage for a corporate environment, say, or for non-technical users who are not going to fiddle with drivers but might want to install Inkscape (or not).

“We use them and don’t contribute anything back.”

This is not, strictly speaking, true. The example projects saw contribution in terms of code, testing, documentation, and - most importantly - marketing and evangelism.

These projects are not things put up on GitHub as a convenience that people just happened to adopt: the companies in question spent great sums of money encouraging adoption, usually with developer evangelists on staff who’d preach the technical advantages and talk about benefits of the licensing to convince people to use them.

It’s naive at best to position that as simple “gift culture” and claim it’s biased to call it what it really is: a rug pull.

In the case of Redis the company promised explicitly it would always keep the license for Redis core: until it didn’t. That’s a rug pull, plain and simple.

Accepting code and other contributions, encouraging other FOSS projects to rely on a project and then relicensing? Rug pull.

Show me a project that was not aggressively marketed for adoption using open source as a selling point and I’ll agree that’s not a rug pull. If Acme Corp just happened to have a GitHub repo for something under a FOSS license and people organically found and adopted it, okay. I’m not aware of any such examples, though.

In one case, none -- extrepo carries a PPA for Trinity desktop: https://salsa.debian.org/extrepo-team/extrepo-data/-/blob/ma...

Generally, these are repos maintained by the upstreams themselves, e.g. Docker, Tor, Armbian, Dovecot... my guess (and it's just a guess, I haven't used Ubuntu PPAs much lately) the PPAs are maintained by not-the-upstreams. Or perhaps some of the upstreams are maintaining both a PPA and their own hosted repo.

That's odd... I had no problem installing Firefox.

I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.

If you didn't laugh, I would say "not funny".

I didn't find it funny, myself, but I did find it to be a pretty good takedown. It's not funny (to me, anyway) because "humor equals tragedy plus time". It'll be funny in 10 years if/when we're not living in an AI slop hellscape and being constantly bombarded with AI marketing/having it shoved down our collective throats. Right now it's just "ugh, so true".

You've added two conditions not present in the original comment.

Some people may "abuse" such things, but I'd say most people legit have days when they're under the weather and feel fine the next day.

Also, if you have kids in daycare or something? A cold twice a month is pretty much the norm as I understand it. I love my nieces, but there's a 50/50 chance each time I see them I'm going to wind up with a minor cold. Toddlers are awfully efficient at spreading disease...

Um, why?

The other day I had a killer headache. Just couldn’t shake it. I did everything I needed to that was time sensitive, then went AFK. I don’t see any reason to be suspicious of others if they do similarly—we all have days when we’re just not at our best for some reason.

The population of NC has grown about 30% in the last 20 years, but staffing has been capped. Wait times to get a license are ridiculous. https://www.wral.com/consumer/5onyourside/ncdmv-long-waits-d...

Citation sorely needed. Take the both sidesism somewhere else.