rlpb

And yet we we all use human written software even though we can be confident that the next severe software vulnerability to be found in it is just round the corner.

I think the law needs to change. Statutory damages for any initial refusal that is later overturned, whether by a court or by the company themselves. Treat it as breach of contract.

This is is to change the economics so that there is a cost to a business for automatically denying, just as there is a cost to the claimant when the business automatically denies.

> Home/auto insurance will often give you a black hole for claims; the adjuster won't get back to you for months at a time. But if you keep calling them enough to be annoying, they will usually eventually pay out.

Fortunately I live in a more reasonable country, where I don't have to keep chasing them; I can simply claim through the court system instead. I think the system works here - I haven't heard that to be a problem here.

I certainly want the gate. I just acknowledge that some kind of relationship with the hardware manufacturer for the benefit of the ordinary consumer is the best that the technology industry can offer right now.

The trouble is that we haven't figured out a trust model that works when we do exclude that relationship. The traditional Windows "run setup.exe" model is terrible for modern expectations of security. The alternatives available today are still very far behind the safety that ordinary users get today when they do enter a relationship with the manufacturer. Unless you're an expert and not a typical consumer.

> I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer.

I think it depends on the device. If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple), not the store I bought the phone from.

With a TV, I suppose it depends on whether I want to install media apps like Prime Video or Netflix on it. I understand that there will be people who don't want that, in which case I agree with you. But others want to be able to run this stuff somehow, whether it's directly on the TV or via some HDMI device like a Chromecast or a Fire Stick. At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.

It does give you some more RAM for free, as Linux can park allocated but rarely accessed memory and use the freed space for other purposes.

> The busses lock down with a PIN when they get out of the seat (generated that morning at the depot)...

How do drivers remember their daily PIN?

I had a similar experience but with the Fairphone 2. I never swapped out any parts because performance hardware upgrades never became available and it was superseded by the Fairphone 3. I've not invested again in a Fairphone since. I've no interest in paying extra for repairability I'm never going to use since they have the same obsolescence/replacement model as any other phone.

I think there's a distinction between attribution and linking to something nobody else can necessarily access. Placing a path to my local build is something I'd avoid because it's irrelevant to everyone else. I think the same applies here.

It's established that exposing children to bad things causes harm. This isn't specific to technology. "Free speech" isn't a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children.

> but we know we have it

Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.

Didn't Google work very hard to avoid any GPL in Android, apart from the kernel? What is in there that is GPL?

It sounds like you would be in favour of Choice 5.

A lookup table of normative specifications for every API call is Reference material. But a tour of API concepts is not (that would be Explanation). Nor is a Tutorial that introduces the API.

A lookup table of normative specifications of CLI arguments would also be Reference.

So they are not synonymous.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for navigation that must always have this structure in cases where it's redundant. I think people should do what makes sense. But I think it is nevertheless useful to not mix the different categories.

> ...where I'm still left wondering "what's the difference between a tutorial and a how-to guide?"

I don't find this question difficult. Without looking anything up, a tutorial exercises a contrived example for learning purposes, whereas a how-to guide provides instructions suitable for real world execution.

I disagree. I see shell syntax as an “inversion” of normal quoting rules. Normally quoting is the default but to achieve anything special you have to use an escape. Conversely, in shell, quoting is not necessary but any special character will likely have unwanted behaviour unless you quote.

This is handy for quick scripting as a natural extension of a command line interface. A counterexample might be an equivalent script using the Python subprocess module. For a simple script, the required extra quoting overhead is not worth the trouble. For something complicated it’s essential and a shell script is no longer suitable. For something in the middle, a carefully crafted shell script (eg. one that passes shellcheck) may be the most suitable solution depending on the situation.

Both cases have their place. It’s about using the right tool for the job.

One consolation is that you can use proprietary cloud based AI to make software that you can run locally and then depend upon. As long as you ensure that the software meets the quality standards you had before this revolution in terms of (non-AI-based) maintainability etc, you are in no worse a position than you were before, and your software development is massively accelerated as long as the proprietary cloud based solution is available and without lock-in.

> Notable are the endorsements, which are balanced over all three options...

I don't think this is notable. The process requires five seconders, so you're just seeing the set of people who seconded asynchronously before there were obviously enough that others didn't bother. The culture is to avoid unnecessary noise and leave it for the vote.

Email seems like an odd choice for sensitive messaging where you're in the position to manage the technology on both ends. Private XMPP or Matrix with E2EE has better privacy properties.

That's interesting, thanks. For me this feature is mandatory, and I won't risk buying a car (second hand usually) unless I see it working with my phone first. I drove 200 miles to buy a car once and walked* away because of this. The seller acted surprised.

* drove

Please could you share the name of the manufacturer, so the rest of us know who to be wary of?

> Revocation should come with full refunds.

That's not enough. If I purchase something, I expect to rely on being able to keep it. Its value to me could well be much higher than just the purchase price.

Revocation should come with consequential damages together with the cost of recovering them.

If an attacker can do that, they could also do that with my real birthday had I used that. My birthday isn't a secret against anyone who wants to look hard enough. Therefore this method doesn't provide any kind of security against attackers gated only on knowing my registered birthday. I never claimed that it did.

I like using a date of birth of 1 January. It's plausible but also hopefully suspicious how many people seem to be born that day if others do the same.

What if you have young kids? It might be worth the suffering for their benefit.

I think this is a backwards way to set up VMs. "Installing a guest" is the wrong concept. Use a VM image pre-prepared from your favourite distro to skip that step. cloud-init is the standard way for it to specialize to your use case.

Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time.

As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.

> For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build.

Apparently it ages out though and becomes unsafe when it does, resulting in a scandal in the UK:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66686864

"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) as building material or system. Many buildings from the 60s and 70s built from many materials are now having problems due to inadequate maintenance, and old age."

I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean. I've never heard of this problem with regular brick or concrete structures.

Copyright law is an artificial legal construct, not a moral code.

I think appropriate attribution is a moral code, but I am not able to attribute every idea I have to all those who helped me develop the general intelligence that I use to develop such ideas.

I don't pay for my mind to absorb the world's information, either. And when I publish to the Internet, or give a talk, I also typically don't charge. Even when I publish under some kind of copyright restricted licence, that restriction has never (by law) extended to restricting transformative use that you might perform using your mind.

This idea that absorbing information requires paying a toll needs to change. It was never the case in copyright law anyway (and the courts are beginning to agree). Even if it were, copyright law was founded on the basis of encouraging creativity by creating an economic incentive. Appeal to "compensating the rights holders" therefore needs to be based on the economics, not just some principle about "rights" that never applied to this case anyway.