jzb

Debian uses a tool called `strip-nondeterminism` to help with this in part: https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/strip-nondeterm...

There's lots of info on the Debian site about their reproducibility efforts, and there's a story from 2024's DebConf that may be of interest: https://lwn.net/Articles/985739/

There's a page that includes reproducibility results for Debian here: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/bookworm/index_...

I think there's also a similar thing for the images, but I might be wrong and I definitely don't have the link handy at the moment.

There's lots of documentation about all of the things on Debian's site at the links in the brief. And LWN also had a story last year about Holger Levsen's talk on the topic from DebConf: https://lwn.net/Articles/985739/

"If anything, I'd suspect that he'd keep the channel open as long as he could."

The real story is that he was added to the channel, so it doesn't surprise me that he didn't try to lurk indefinitely. I'm guessing these things are also ad-hoc, so perhaps the well was already dry after the attack?

But this is some truly amateur-hour shit. I've seen better communications discipline from volunteer open source projects than this.

Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.

"They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this."

They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.

My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.

IIRC Red Hat now just ships the Firefox ESRs and does not support a single version for the entire life of a RHEL release. You probably wouldn’t want a 10-year old browser anyway. And, in RHEL 10, they have stopped packaging Firefox in favor of a Flatpak.

I do, though it's been quite a while. Hope all is well with you!

It’s a custom CMS built using Quixote.

Well, different people are fascinated by different things. :) I hope both products are successful, they've been (so far) a force for good in the industry as far as I can tell.

Oh, that's far more interesting to me than the desktop thing. I have a 13" Framework now, but a 12" would be super-nice as a travel laptop -- and the tablet conversion might let me use it as a on-the-go ebook reader.

There is no light you can shine on this that makes it look good. None. It's corrupt to the core. You can want a government organization or whatever to be run more efficiently and still find it horrifying when a private actor runs amok in that organization with obvious, blatant conflicts of interest and no oversight.

You are right about one thing: Musk and Trump are the enemy. You may mean that as snark, but it's the truth. This isn't "oh, Musk and Trump are Republicans, so anything they do is bad" -- this is "Musk and Trump are mask-off fascists tearing down government to serve their interests to the detriment of almost everyone else".

"Would probably lead to notification fatigue."

Probably true...

"Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?"

There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head. The institutions aren't anti-democratic - they were put together by democratic processes, and each speedbump is usually there for a reason. Sometimes a long-forgotten or no longer good reason, and it needs to be dismantled, also by the same type of processes that put it there. Yes, I want people who won't be easily and summarily dismissed for following the law and regulations even when they're not popular. I want regulations and guardrails that can't just be swept aside by an administration that rotates out every four to eight years. (I'm generalizing a lot here, of course...)

*Really much less than 51%, given that a large percentage of the population doesn't vote, another percentage of the population's vote is suppressed, and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote...

I wonder if Signal should expose linked devices directly in the UI at all times. Something like a small icon that indicates "You have 3 linked devices active" or similar.

BFF's first album was in 1993, and Jamiroquai was formed in 1992, I think. Both of those were well after the term was muddied beyond recognition. I'm skeptical of the claim that Jamiroquai was being tagged "alternative", same with Cherry Poppin' Daddies (also 90s, IIRC).

Note that by the mid-90s, if not sooner, a lot of 80s alt-rock was seeping into AOR / classic rock / hard rock playlists. (Source: was a DJ on a classic rock station from 1995 through 1998. Played R.E.M., Pearl Jam, bunch of other alternative/grunge stuff alongside 60s/70s/80s classic rock. And a little bit that wasn't technically on the approved list since I was usually working midnight to 6 a.m., but that's another story.)

"It's a useless genre"

Today, sure. It wasn't always. Alternative in the 80s was pretty much "rock, but too weird and smart to be played on the AOR/classic rock stations, and not on a major label". That might sound like "dumping ground" as you described, but it wasn't really -- it was a fairly coherent genre for a while, until everything started being called alternative if it wasn't pop or mainstream hard rock, etc.

Classic rock stations would play Guns 'n Roses, Def Leppard, but not R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde, and certainly not Rollins Band, for instance. There were no alternative rock stations, at least in/around St. Louis, excepting the college station (KDHX, 88.1).

Legit alternative: R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, The Replacements, The Smithereens, The Smiths, B52s, XTC, Concrete Blonde, Echo & The Bunnymen, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, plenty of others. In the late 80s and early 90s, after R.E.M. and others had commercial breakouts, the genre was muddied beyond recognition. Especially with the advent of grunge and more accessible industrial music like NIN.

"Monster" is the only R.E.M. album from the Bill Berry era that I never listen to. Not quite sure why, but I gave it the requisite three listens when it came out and shelved it. Nearly wrote R.E.M. off at that point, but "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" brought me back. Was disappointed when Berry left and they didn't break up then as they had always said they would. (They'd said many times that if anybody left, it wouldn't be R.E.M. any more and they wouldn't carry on... but then they did anyway.)

Got to see them live on the Green tour in 1989. Still one of my top-five concerts of all time, and I've been to more shows than I can count since.

I don’t think he ever wanted out of the deal. It was a way to keep the acquisition from being scrutinized too much.

Listen you…

I do - bought it as soon as it was available. I used that as an example because I know its availability and because it's a bummer my friends can't easily watch it on my recommendation if they wanted to. (See also, "Soap" and "Barney Miller".)

There's Plex, but also things like Kodi that just turn a PC into a media center. We're in the midst of a move right now - when we settle, a Mini PC is going to replace the streaming box.

"Starts"? We crossed that a while back. We're signed up to several services and it's basically the same price as cable used to be but with the added inconvenience of trying to navigate different apps and remembering "wait, was that show on Hulu, or Apple TV, or Netflix?"

To say nothing of the fact that, despite having access to what seems like an endless supply of content, it's really common to be unable to find a service that carries the movies or shows we'd like to see. I have a lengthy list of movies and TV shows that either have never made it to streaming, are only available for rental, or only have a partial showing. (e.g., only the first season of WKRP is available, it seems.)

Add to that the shit like Amazon adding ads even to the Prime subscription... eff that. Piracy is a lot more attractive if I can't even pay to get rid of ads.

1986 qualifies as “old movies” now? Time to fill out that AARP paperwork…

"I have not directly contributed to the X.org server, but have to the "wider X ecosystem". I will have to rewrite some of that. This is the case for many people."

This is a fair point, but the quality of Wayland isn't really at issue for this -- Wayland could be much better than X by all accounts and it would still require you to rewrite software for it. (Assuming XWayland doesn't suit your needs, anyway.)

Initial release of X was June 1984, and Wayland was first released in 2008 -- so it won't be until 2032 that Wayland is the same age. When people complain about Wayland being mediocre or "as good as X was" what they often mean is "Wayland doesn't support $very_specific_feature" or "my video card vendor's proprietary drivers aren't well-tested with Wayland and it makes me sad".

Approximately 99.999% of those complaints are uttered by people who 1) are not doing the work, 2) are not interested or capable of doing the work, and 3) do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that the Wayland and X developers are _mostly the same folks_ and they _do not want to work on X11 anymore_.

I don't really have a stake in this argument, except I'm bone-tired of seeing people whine about Wayland when they're using software somebody else gave them for free. There are enough Wayland whiners that, by now, they could've banded together and started maintaining / improving X and (if their complaints and theories were correct) left Wayland behind.

Strangely -- even though X is open source and eminently forkable (we know this, because XFree86 -> X.org) it gathers dust and none of its proponents are doing anything towards its upkeep.

When someone shows up with "Wayland isn't as good as X, so here is my modernized fork of X anyone can use" -- I'll be quite interested.

I'm not seeing a lot of entitlement or anger. GRRM is not obligated to finish the series--but, neither is he free from people giving him shit for not finishing the series. If you start a book series, foster a fandom, sell the rights to it for a TV franchise, and then fail to complete it... yeah, people are gonna give you shit when you not only don't finish it, but also move on to a totally unrelated activity!

But I think most of the commentary here is just in fun. I'm not angry at GRRM, but TBH if I knew him I don't think I'd be able to pass up "so, George... how's the book coming?" every time I saw him -- or "dude, you'll do _anything_ but work on the book, huh?"

(Also: I am a writer. I know all about procrastination... best way to focus on writing is to have something else I don't want to do.)

The franchise seems to be alive and well. My daughter really likes the prequel series. But season 8 definitely dulled the show's impact on popular culture. (Obligatory: Don't name your kids after a series' characters until it's done. So sorry to all the Danaerys's and Khaleesis out there...)

TBH, _if_ he finished it, he has a golden opportunity to capitalize on people's dissatisfaction and publish an ending to the series that people will like. Then they can reboot the whole TV series and he can buy a few islands...

I use Hugo for my own site, now, but it's not a WordPress replacement for a lot of use cases. A single techie's personal blog? Sure. A small company that has five or six people who have to post to a website? No. An organization that wants to integrate a sales cart and such, without a full-time developer? Absolutely no.

Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.

Not the OP but I have migrated to Hugo as well. There's a number of tools to convert to Hugo from a WordPress XML export. I used wp2hugo, IIRC: https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo

Dead easy. Took an afternoon to do everything, including fiddling with DNS and trying different themes, etc.

Is really being "under fire" if it's just accurate reporting?