undecisive

I realise I used the word "rebalanced" without necessary context here.

The context I'm presuming is that governments have to step in when deaths increase, to mandate certain responsibilities that individuals or corporations might otherwise seek to avoid.

So in an increasingly vehicle-centric world, the number of deaths puts a weight on one side of the scales, and we have a number of branches on the other side of the scales. On one branch, we could change the speed limits; on another branch, we could introduce car safety devices; in other branches we could limit the number of cars on the road or increase car death punishments or embed random nails in all the roads to turn them into obstacle courses. Any of these could reduce the number of deaths and rebalance the freedom side.

I'm not saying that freedom necessarily has a balance within itself, but is always balanced against responsibilities. A country without any responsibilities could exist, but probably not for very long. We could set a cap on responsibilities and allow almost-infinite freedoms, but as technology improves and society complexifies, I believe that would have the same end result.

So all that is to say I guess I am in favour of constraining freedoms, proportionate to the new freedoms that naturally come into being. If personal light aircraft become cheap and readily available, such that more in-air collisions occur, I would expect and support the government in restricting the freedoms of where light aircraft can fly and the training required to operate them. If small blocks of uranium started falling from the sky, I would expect and support the government in restricting the freedoms of what people could do with these chunks of uranium far more drastically.

Sometimes - rarely - responsibilities rise on their own. In the current pandemic, it is appropriate for the government to promote and in some cases mandate small impediments to our freedoms. Hopefully these will be short-term, and it is up to us to ensure that the government doesn't use these dark days as an excuse to curtail people's freedoms indefinitely.

Because with all this said, I'm totally against unnecessary forms of tracking, biometric surveillance and other use of new technology to remove freedoms we historically have, especially when the government uses deceptive moral arguments to justify them or paves the way for future immoral regimes.

I definitely don't see face masks or seat belts falling anywhere near that category though.

Absolutely.

Putting on my hypotheticals hat, part of it will be:

- not being in the room where it happened, and presuming that the only impetus for change is evil, which feeds into our own deep-seated resistance to change.

- not knowing which voices are being paid to speak (news media, social media, etc) and which voices are completely under-informed - compared with knowing which voices are definitely being paid to speak (government mouthpieces, propaganda) and conflating "don't know whether to trust" with the much simpler "don't trust".

- knowing that sometimes Governments do good things for good reasons, but even then they often end up producing terrible unintended side-effects, or end up being polluted by less-than-wholesome agendas as a price of getting enacted.

So yeah, I totally get that it's hard work overcoming all that to get to a point where you trust anything the government does.

The real irony is that it's often government inaction that we should be more suspicious of - it's the status quo and anaemic half-arsed reforms that more often feed into the pockets of the powerful while giving a veneer of progress.

I would be interested to see a speed-limit map from parallel universe where there were no seatbelt laws. I suspect that freedom would rebalance itself.

Also - and this applies to vaccines too - this definition of "freedom" is an academic one. There should be a competing measure of valuable freedom, defined as how much your freedom helps you to take advantage of the benefits of the world.

We then need to work out why so many people are so fiercely wedded to their Zero-value Freedoms...

I think the point is that Humans are stupid. Very few people nowadays think that seatbelts are a bad idea, or that smoking should be encouraged, or that lead in your makeup is the best way to make your skin look like porcelain.

And often we only really realise that with 30-40 years of hindsight - sometimes more - once the smoke has cleared, once the big companies have stopped their misinformation or lobbying (though I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was still some low-level lobbying for relaxing car safety laws).

> To prove how futile it is to resist government power

I guess the real question is, what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their own bottom lines?

Because as this pandemic has shown, given anything even slightly inconvenient, people will quite happily hoodwink themselves. Personal liberty is king, social responsibility is treason.

(I'd welcome any examples of small inconveniences to help our fellows that did NOT illicit massive backlashes. I can't think of any ever - no matter how obvious the benefit or small the inconvenience.)

Afraid Netbook and Notebook are two very different categories.

Had a couple of netbooks in my time, they were pretty good for what they were.

But no, I'm talking about full-blown 15-17 inch laptops that were so poorly built that if you tried to rest them on your lap, the trackpad would stop working, or keys on the keyboard would randomly press, and repeated lap-use would make it worse over time.

Was the last update for Cosmo not in April? [1]

And isn't the point of Open Source that if someone distributes tweaked binaries, you can always demand the source code - do they not do that?

But this was kinda my point - I'm aware and resigned to the fact that to run linux, I will need to do a bit of work myself. I would hope that the "premium price point" products of the original post would guarantee to do the heavy lifting for me.

And if I'm honest, I'm part of the target market that likes a reason to tinker every so often. But I appreciate the heads-up.

[1]: https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Linux_for_Cosmo

I think I'm gonna go for one of these: https://frame.work

Pretty unproven pastures, but have heard nothing but good reports. Worst thing I've seen said is the audio bass was a bit underwhelming!

I suspect you are absolutely right!

It seems a glaring omission not to mention the Astro Slide [1] which I seriously hope will be shipping in the next month, or even the F(x)tec range of phones[2]. The former has options for linux or dual boot with android, comes with a slide-out physical keyboard. Not top of the line processor, but not far off. Not the most stylish design (if that's even possible with a slide-out keyboard) but not far off. And definitely not a "luxury" pricetag.

It's good that these devices are starting to appear - it's a shame that many of them are either so niche that they can justify the markup, or likely to require a large amount of skill to perform and manage the linux install.

One day, we might meet in the middle.

[1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... [2]: https://www.fxtec.com

Reminds me of the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.

I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)

Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.

Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this! It's like someone wrote the article designed solely to test bias confirmation. At the end of the article, I still don't know what apple lost, or what the author thinks that apple will have lost (other than "the war"). It didn't tell me what apple did win - other than "exactly what everyone knew they would win" - gee, thanks for that one.

I can't see what people are downvoting on this comment.

Basically, you cannot read that article without any bias on this topic and expect to have learned something new. Maybe if I followed all the links in it, that might explain the situation - but the links are:

- a series of tubes

- [the next battle of] Apple v. Epic.

- just maybe

- they need to say

- given the Japanese settlement

- continues

- real reforms to the App Store

- they’re a lot smarter

... etc. There is absolutely no context to this non-article, and no hints where to go to get the context.

Sorry. I usually try not to rant about the content that people put on the internet, but please HN community - you're usually much better at filtering the bull than this.

I'll be boring and ignore the straw man if you don't mind, and continue to focus on the theme of "people here are commenting without having any clue as to what they are talking about"

> then I install a package from the Alpine repo

You might want to do some research - from the readme: "The current installation method for these packages is to pull them in using wget or curl and install the local file with apk" - https://github.com/jeanblanchard/docker-alpine-glibc/blob/ma... <- That dockerfile, for example, installs curl using the normal Alpine repos, then uses curl to download the signing keys and the packages for the glibc package.

But yes, if someone builds a chrome package that completely screws up other packages in alpine, to the point that the Alpine maintainers are being inundated with bogus support requests then yes, ONE SOLUTION is to recompile the project in a way that means that the package is no longer a problem. You have solved the problem with a fork.

The other solution is to make it very very clear in your naming and documentation that this is not a supported alpine image, and that bug reports should go to the maintainer of the image, not Alpine themselves.

However, either way, you could be argued to have created a new "distribution" of software that is no longer truly Alpine linux, but is based on Alpine linux. Including Alpine in the name is not necessary, and in this case it seems, not desirable.

Even if your codebase is not a fork, you have "forked off" from the original distribution.

Thanks for your "clarification", however I don't think you've fully grokked the situation yourself.

I think the thing that was referred to as a "fork" was the docker image, which uses the package you mention, and afaik is the primary way that people are receiving that package and believing it to be blessed by the Alpine gods. In the sense that the container is a distribution in its own right that deviates from the roadmap of the Alpine makers, it could be considered a fork of sorts. And given that the package naming is far less confusing than the dockerhub naming, I feel like that's what most people on HN are attributing the confusion to.

Note that the article doesn't mention that it's the container that is the source of confusion until the very last section, where it points out what they want to rename. The package itself is called alpine-pkg-glibc and as the author of that package has pointed out, the reason it is called that is to follow alpine package naming conventions, and they have mentioned on this HN convo that they are completely open to changing that name if asked.

But regarding the docker image, I'm well aware that this isn't technically a full fork; I was mirroring the language used on the parent poster - however, since your clarification does not do justice to the complexity of the situation either and implies that you have less clue about what you're talking about, maybe tone it down a bit. Especially since one possible solution to this situation is indeed for the frolvlad/alpine-glibc authors to produce a full fork of Alpine linux with glibc and call it something else (I wonder if Himilayan Linux is available?)

It's a tricky one, certainly.

There is probably a graph somewhere showing how much effort to fix is too much effort, vs how much bad will in the community this project is inducing, vs how much value this project has.

So no, Apple's system being jammable is a great "booby prize" right up to the point where Apple fix the algorithms, or the chinese government start reporting these false positives as bugs and saying that Apple must fix the bugs before their devices can be sold in China.

And so, one has to assume that if the algorithms can be fixed, they will be fixed. If we can DDoS Apple's human checking capability while it's still young, we might be able to prevent more resource being sunk into it - though I agree, that's unlikely. If we can do all that AND make it clear that this is going to cause nothing but bad will, and if we can get enough governments to regulate against it, then there may be hope.

So your question was, why do people think this software isn't going to work, and the answer is we really hope it isn't going to work and really hope that enough people get onboard with the efforts to subvert it and really hope that the message sinks in to Apple that this was a doomed project that they should abandon for good.

But with enough money and time, there is no problem that can't be overcome. So even if it is a currently jammable child protection system, in the future is will almost definitely become a robust human rights violation system. In the space between those two points there is hope. Slim hope, but hope nonetheless.

> Alpine is free to provide a solution to the problem then.

Alpine is also free to _not_ provide a solution to the problem.

Alpine is free to say "This is not an approved use of our name"

As you point out, the way to convey that you are a fork is to change your name in a non-confusing way, and provide attribution to the original in your readme or licenses.

I guess it depends on the government. Many have some kind of "you can't operate here unless you meet certain criteria" rules that require implementing special software. Usually those rules center around copyright (e.g. must allow moderator deletion to respond to DCMA requests) or safeguarding or other kinds of government-mandated moderation. But it is certainly possible for any government to force any company to develop any software as a price of doing business in that country.

So yes, now that the technology exists and they have proven that it can be integrated with their system, the damage is kinda done. Of course, if Apple now has to publish a different version of their software for, say, the Afghanistan market than they do the surrounding areas, that's a big red flag to people in Afghanistan that Apple have done something shady, likely at the behest of the current Afghan rulers. If that spyware is distributed on every iphone globally, and it's merely picking up on geolocation or some kind of network indicator, there is no smoking gun - so the first time people will know that this has been tuned immorally is when people start disappearing.

That's why a lot of the battle should probably now be "Make this software illegal in your country", because then the countries distributing "custom" versions are likely to be infected with this spying capability.

Ah, nice. Couldn't see that. Still can't find it linked to on their site, so appreciate the link!

It's a good question, and unfortunately you're probably right.

It boils down to this: If you can prevent [some organisation] from potentially destroying civilisation, how much effort would be too much effort, and how much uncertainty is too much uncertainty?

For most, there's a trade off. If someone believes that the technology is sufficient for any country to implement a brutal civil rights destruction campaign, and that this is 50% likely, and all you need to do is upload some harmless images to your icloud to thwart it, why wouldn't you? For example, maybe a certain political party could regain power in a massive way and start doing away with gay rights, locking up anyone with pictures of men kissing each other on their phones. Of course, other countries have other types of extremists that look like they might take over government, or have already taken over governments. In those countries, tools like this are already in place, and this new one could be very powerful.

So if you could upload some innocuous images and save hundreds of lives in 20 or more countries in the world, even if you don't fear for your own country, would you?

Assuming you said yes, the question is, could everyone who agrees give Apple enough false positives, force enough human moderators to have to inspect the images, that the whole scheme becomes financially un-viable on Apple's end?

Of course, the only thing we could do here is slow this "progress" down. Maybe we can use that extra time to share the message that "this kind of technology is not ok" and that being naive about what this tech will be used for is almost guaranteed to kill more people than it saves.

But while so few people are thinking of it in these terms, or if everyone believes the attempt to be futile, it can't work. It's like anything - by the time people realise there's a problem, it's often too late to fix the problem.

Given how much mudslinging has gone on with Snopes over the years, and how little I know about Buzzfeed News' journalistic integrity, I really wish there was a factchecking page about this on an established factchecking website...

The issue here is one of scale, not necessarily intentional complexity - though admittedly one often leads to the other.

In a world of single servers - or even multiple servers load balanced over a single database - you only have a single point of failure. And while that is often touted as an terrible thing, once it goes down it's game over... in some ways, our scaled up distributed systems have a worse problem.

The issue is we envision our distributed systems optimistically - as isolated little bubbles that receive and emit clean, efficient, fault tolerant packets. When one goes down, only a few others get affected, and the broken module can be easily re-deployed with very little fuss.

In reality, the people with the vision quickly become horrified with what is produced. The authentication system touches everything. The stock management system gets hooked directly into the homepage. Suddenly, every single part of your system is hinged on at least 5 servers, and if any of them go down, it's game over until one of them gets brought back up, and by that point the job management queue is so backed up with critical tasks (that should probably have never been entrusted to a background jobs queue) that it takes hours for the organism to re-balance itself.

And so, these systems go down more often, because instead of one single point of failure, you have 5 - while telling yourself you have none.

The question is, how can we do this better? I've seen big teams and small teams similarly struggle with this. I guess Netflix with their chaos monkey strategy wins on this, but even that is not infallible - as you say, the 1000 layers of abstraction (and goodness knows how many unique combinations of interactions and potential simultaneous failures) something is bound to be missed from time to time.

So I don't think the problem is we're moving faster or breaking more things. It's just that we don't know how broken our systems are until they break.

I see a lot of people trying to compare its "machine learning" to human learning.

Let's use this thought experiment: Imagine that Github's Copilot was just a massive array of all the lines of code from every github project, with some (magical automated whatever) tagging and indexing on each function, and a search engine on top of that.

Now imagine that copilot simply finds the closest search result, and then when you press a button, it inserts the line from the array, and press it again and you get the next line, etc.

Now hopefully nobody here thinks such a system would fulfil either the spirit or the law of any half-restrictive license. Yet that is a perfectly valid implementation of Copilot's aim - and it sounds like it's not that far from what actually happens, maybe with a bit of variable name munging.

So my question is this: If you could build a line between the system I describe above and the system of human learning, where a human learns the patterns and can genuinely produce novel structures and patterns and even programming languages that it has never seen before.

At what point along that line would you say that Copilot is close enough to human to not be violating licenses that require attribution?

I'm a software developer. It has been years since I did anything even remotely scientific.

I do not like conspiracy theories. I do not adhere to any that I'm aware of.

Yet after reading the abstract, I'm left despairing. Just between the sample size and the glaring discrepancies in the sampling methodology before and after - so massive that they had to be mentioned in the abstract, and I'm left wondering who this is supposed to convince.

Sometimes conspiracy theory fighters are their own worst enemies.

I desperately want to agree with this, but something sticks at the back of my mind:

This is not acceptable behaviour.

The way we define acceptable behaviour changes from circumstance to circumstance. What's acceptable for Steve Jobs isn't acceptable for the guy at the window of McDonald's (either side of that window). That's maybe just the way it is - but it probably isn't right.

But what if everyone around this guy got together and said: There is a minimum behaviour you must conform to. We won't accept you shouting at us, we won't accept you belittling us. If you do it again, we will say "You need to calm down or leave the room please". When you're told that, those will be your only two choices, or everyone else will leave the room. And we may not come back. Because this is not acceptable behaviour.

It no longer becomes a question of training. It becomes a question of priority, of data. He can see that he is hit with this phrase day in day out, and he can understand that his behaviour is toxic. Eventually either people will stop saying it because it isn't working, or they'll stop saying it because he is getting the constant negative reinforcement. If it's the former, at least someone has tried. My worry is that with too many people, the individuals are too scared (or scarred) to try.

I also worry about the concept of "a path around him". If part of your job description is the instruction of students, you need to learn to deal correctly with those students. If good behaviour is not part of your skillset, then you do not have the skillset for the job, and that should have repercussions.

I guess there's an issue with the concept of tenure. But I don't feel like saying "You have the option of entering into this abusive relationship" is the right solution (even if it was that bluntly worded from the outset, which it absolutely should be). And I certainly don't think you should be told "You've tried the abusive narcissist, now that you've suffered you're welcome to escape"

If he truly cannot change, then that is sad for him. It should not be the source of damage for yet more people around him though. And looking at the apology, he clearly hasn't understood the effect he has on the people around him.

The logic in this article is astounding.

One way to make a virus is to splice some genes together from different viruses. This virus was not a mismatch of different viruses, therefore this is not a man-made virus.

It's a bit like saying one way to chop down a tree is with a chainsaw. We didn't see a chainsaw, or chainsaw patterns on this tree stump, therefore this tree must have naturally broken in half.

(Not that I have any particular beliefs on this one way or another, nor do I think this is even an important question on any level - I imagine the Wuhan lab will have upped their security processes regardless of whether they were at fault. But at best this is weak evidence for the conclusion given)

It looks pretty, but has some fairly substantial problems.

- Data collection: Generally feels nasty these days, especially on something self-hosted. The opt-in-by-default newsletter checkbox might even be illegal in Europe. Don't know what else it might be calling home about without checking the source.

- Deceptive data collection: The HotJar survey popping up starts making you think maybe it needs to know where you host images so that it can handle image uploads... but no, it just wants to collect data and dial home

- Docs say that the docker instance starts on port 8080 - it isn't, it's on 5000

- Email and password validation: it's a little thing, but that should be at least configurable. Valid emails can contain "+" character.

- Couldn't work out how to connect from one docker instance to a second docker instance mysql database. Might need some kind of docker-compose setup though, I didn't look that long

- Couldn't create a new database either. It said it created, but then wouldn't let me add a table, just errored. No idea why on that one.

And that's kinda where I gave up.

I tried this method, took a screenshot but it didn't appear on the screenshot. Do I need to use a permanent marker instead?

> If Facebook delete a video the author is not being punished because the author has no claim on money they haven't earned yet. It's just the end of a business relationship.

By that token, if your government decides to deport you, you are not being punished because you have no claim on citizenship you haven't lived yet. It's just the end of a citizenship relationship.

Hopefully you can see how that argument isn't helpful or useful. Would it be any more true if the Government delegated citizenship management to a corporation? Or three?

In an online-only world, where speech (and such livelihood being contingent on access) is controlled by companies, and nation states have no requirement to provide a different mechanism, it could be reasonably argued that a company giving everyone else a platform but denying you a platform has free-speech consequences.

The fact that it isn't managed that way, and that the law doesn't currently see it that way, doesn't change whether we should change our thinking as society changes.

In summary, a rocket body and an old weather satellite want to have a nice big hug. At high speed. Producing a cloud of 4 million fragments. 400 of which will bigger than 20cm.

Except that they'll probably miss (by about 10m). Probably.

Really interesting how much of this is statistical probabilities, and how much we can model about this. Right down to particle sizes.

And yet, I still have so many questions. Mostly involving the maths from https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ and whether we could push either of them out of the way...

So I've had a question running around my brain for a while.

Has anyone tried using docker-compose files to deploy direct to separate cloud machines?

By which I mean, given some config with user creds to AWS or Digital Ocean or Hetzner or whatever, running:

    dockerless-compose some.address.com up

could spin up servers (ec2 instances, droplets, maybe some kind of hinting in the docker-compose.yml file to show sizes), maybe set up a virtual network if the hosting provider supports it, set network aliases in the /etc/hosts, set some.address.com to be the gatekeeper (the system would need to install SSH on your boxes, but it means that it could set up an ssh authorized key from the gatekeeper box)

And then, maybe it doesn't need to be actual cloud servers. It could be bare metal. It could be chroots. It could even be a single host with docker (a bit pointless, but maybe useful for proving parity with docker-compose)

Essentially, suddenly we have a replacement for the likes of terraform in many organisations. Your local developer setup becomes exactly the same as your production setup.

Am I missing something? Is that where we're headed with this, or would this be a complete nightmare?

Really? Is the purpose of a combine harvester to kill people? Of course not. Yet people have died in combine harvester accidents.

Is the purpose of the electric car to make CO2? Of course not. Yet for a long time (not sure whether this has changed yet) more CO2 was wasted in their production and transport than they could ever hope to save in over 10 years of operation.

Is your purpose to make blaisé, ill-thought-out over-generalisations on the internet? Of course not. I imagine you lead a full and fulfilling life offline, spoiling orphaned kittens rotten and brokering peace treaties in your spare time.

Just because a person (or, if you prefer, a system) produces an unintended side effect - whether by accident, ignorance or bad publicity - it does not make that their purpose, or even reflective of the kindness in their core being.

And sometimes, these things can be fixed with education. Sometimes these things can be fixed with holistic reporting and good PR. Sometimes, other people need to learn to do their own research to understand and accept the context in which things are said.

But alas, the internet will never learn these things. Because the purpose of a system is what it does - and what the internet does really well is spread hate and division.