orra

In GNU utilities, option arguments can come after (or between) positional arguments. Personally I find this small convenience invaluable, because I'm used to it.

This is bad news. But it doesn't tell us that washing with detergent is unable to remove the pathogen from scrubs. Nor does it tell us that that washing at high temperatures no longer kills it.

Indeed, it'd be wonderful to see polio eradicated. Eradication has been a decades long program; they originally aimed to do it by the year 2000, then ?, then 2018.

Even if the last stage of eradication is stubbornly slow, we have obviously been quite successful at limiting the number of cases.

That's a good observation. Plus, you'll get black bars anyway, if you resize the window to not be the same aspect ratio as the video.

I'd love to know the answer to that. This is fantastic work, but it'd be a shame for it to be scunnered by rounded corners.

> On paper, Sam Altman would have made everyone on the board billionaires.

I know OpenAI in recent years forgot it's a non profit with particular aims, but:

> The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.

> What's the subtext?

Not certain, but IMHO the last paragraph almost recognises that OpenAI has become something self contradictory:

> OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the core mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI restructured to ensure that the company could raise capital in pursuit of this mission, while preserving the nonprofit's mission, governance, and oversight. The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI. While the company has experienced dramatic growth, it remains the fundamental governance responsibility of the board to advance OpenAI’s mission and preserve the principles of its Charter.

Not an expert, but unfortunately I think you're right in identifying a potential attack vector with the Flathub maintainership model. Even if flathubbot is being used, manual changes can still be made by maintainers.

And I think there are far more maintainers to trust, than for say scoop or winget. The difference is, Flathub has one repo per package (and hence allows more maintainers).

> Maybe. The CI rules should be made public in that case, though, surely? Maybe they are?

Agreed, but thankfully they are. The PRs link to <https://github.com/flathub/flatpak-external-data-checker>. That said, it'd be clearer if the flathubbot 'user' profile also linked to that URL.

> The enormous amount of value the distros bring [...] is audit of packages (and packaging).

Yes, auditing against supply chain attacks is good! But there's also a risk in running outdated software. I don't have easy answers. But if automation leaves more time for the hard part, great.

> One thing I don't know about (which maybe somebody can inform me/us about): the wiki states that PRs are reviewed by Flathub reviewers, but I see no sign of human review on e.g. https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/pull/167 (or others in that repo). What's the actual process?

In this case, I think the lack of human involvement is mostly a good thing. Flathub was criticised for having outdated packages[1]. Using automation to automatically update packages is mostly a good thing.

Obviously, we want to see thorough review of new packages, but that's a separate issue.

[1] I thought I read this in an LWN article, but I can't find it. But see e.g. https://github.com/flathub/org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser/issue...

> You want to install a calculator app? That'll be multiple gigabytes of download. Mere mortals now have to wait half an hour to get the app.

The SDKs are shared between applications, just like a traditional package manager. So this is a fixed cost.

Also I think the sum of GNOME and Freedesktop SDKs is closer to 1GB, than multiple gigabytes.

You're right the basic support's been around a long time. However, originally you always had to use Task methods. The pleasant async/await keywords didn't arrive until C# 5.0, in 2012.

Admittedly that's also a long time ago.

MonoVM lives on in the .NET Runtime repo. This is used for non-AOT WebAssembly (or at least it was in .NET 5).

Arbitrary semigroups clearly don't describe the real world. Nor does this prevent us using particular groups to describe particular quantum fields.

Video encoding and decoding is complex, but can in principle be done by hand. An electronic computer is simply faster and more accurate.

Don't forget that the first computers were teams of humans.

> The idea that math is "discovered" instead of "invented" is bullshit.

Nope, not to mathematicians. We routinely talk about the existence of mathematician constructs. These things exist and can be discovered, just not physically.

Ports to modern systems is a very practical benefit, which they achieved.

IIRC GOG runs the DOS version of Dungeon Keeper on DOSBox, because the Windows version doesn't run on modern Windows. This means users miss out on the higher quality graphics mode.

> So if someone asks, you have to produce proof of ownership

I mean, I don't think EA can barge in and demand you prove you bought a copy of Dungeon Keeper back in the day (or since), just because you're running KeeperFX.

I think the practical matter is mainly that KeeperFX can't redistribute the artwork and levels themselves. So, as another user said, you need to copy over the files from GOG or a CD, etc.

You no longer need the original executable. However, the artwork is from the original game. As are the levels (although there are also original levels available).

Fair play for keeping the software open source.

Although CLAs are asymmetrical, this is a far better outcome than choosing a non-open source license yet acting like it's open source

> h.264 is from the 90s, so of course its fast after ~30 years of use.

If only! Then the patents would have expired. But H.264 is newer than MPEG-4 Part 2.

But you're right: H.264 has had the advantage of time, to gain fast hardware support.

> libc is unstable between major releases of Mac OS

Really? I thought Golang on macOS switched from direct syscalls to linking against libc, because the former is unstable but the latter is stable.

In the UK, Openreach FTTP is heavily asymmetric. Network operators aren't entirely at the whims of asymmetric standards: network operators want asymmetric services.

I didn't know about Blu-Ray being relatively prompt. But I still think HEVC adoption was slow in broadcast TV, which I would have thought was a shoo-in market.

That's important context! Adoption of HEVC was so slow that I honestly thought it was released around the same time as AV1.

Interesting. Thankfully, LibreElec think the Raspberry Pi 5 is strictly better, despite shifting to software decoding:

> BCM2712 supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding. It no longer supports H264 in hardware. This might sound odd but it removes the RPi4’s 1080p restriction on H264 decoding and the 4K H264 test media we have has played. The big increase in performance from the Quad-Core A76 chip means RPi5 can software decode AV1, H264, VC1, VP9, and more at 1080p with ease

https://libreelec.tv/2023/09/28/rpi5-support/

Winget just runs installers and uninstallers. I don't think it wrangles dependencies. That is, it won't install a dependency as its own package, nor will it uninstall a dependency when the last dependent is uninstalled.

It appears legit, in that vim and transmission link back to it.

Right now the "foundation" is run by the SignPath company. But TBF they say they hope the foundation will eventually scale, and become independent and community run.

Always having the right version is nice. However, you can get similar benefits with a shorter bootstrap script. Personally I prefer this because there's less third party code duplicated directly to your own repo.

> you always get v1 when you install (which I never understood)

Yeah, they really wanted you to install yarn's source to your repo, which is why they don't let you `npm install` yarn v2 (or higher). That's maybe great for monorepos, but personally I find it ugly.

Thankfully now you can use `corepack`, which is shipped with npm. This way you can specify a version of yarn in packages.json, in the `packageManager` field. That is, without committing yarn's source to your repo.