Posts by ethindp

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

I use Win 10 IoT LTSC so haven't yet really seen these (thankfully). I will NOT be upgrading to W11 though, I see pretty much no benefit from the sound of it, and don't want some AI on my machine "trying" to be "helpful".

FLTK hits 1.4, arrives speaking Wayland and with better HiDPI support

If XFCE does move to FLTK, maybe that will incentivize the FLTK devs to add accessibility to the toolkit? (Or maybe not?) As it currently stands FLTK apps are completely inaccessible to Orca.

Fedora 41: A vast assortment, but there's something for everyone

I refuse to use Wayland until the accessibility issues with it are addressed and they start requiring it as a part of core Wayland instead of excluding it from core for "security", because we all know that Linux malware that wants to hook your input devices will go straight for the jugular and hook right into Udev instead of ever going through the compositor. Wayland seems nice and really cool, but actually using it with Orca (the Linux screen reader) is, for me, a horrifically bad experience. I know that there are some others in the works, but since Wayland doesn't allow the kind of keyboard access that these screen readers need (after all, it's for security!), they have to go through Udev. So I'll happily stick with XFCE or LXDE or Mate for now. Anyway, rant over. Lol

Fedora 41 looks like a very good release. I really need to switch to it on bear metal...

Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 after FOSS-iness drama

100-percent agreed. I'm glad that they're that open. For me, if the sales guy cringes, well, why should I care? I'd rather have a brutally honest company that wants to be blunt and direct about their offering when they're trying to sell me on their product (especially when they're protecting my data!) instead of a company that gives me lots of word salad that sounds and tastes really good but turns out to have incredibly toxic ingredients in it. (Bad metaphor, I know, I was never good with those...)

I was about to set up vaultwarden or Proton Pass. Hell, I even had imported all my passwords into Proton Pass (but sadly it didn't import my passkeys). I'm very glad to see Bitwarden not being the typical company that does these bates and switches and that they actually give a damn about something like this. I don't mind them making closed offerings in the future, that's one thing, but I do mind when they take an open-source offering and make it closed.

Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

Is it even legal for them to "pre-sign" agreements like this? Particularly when it's on behalf of a business? I would think that it would be easy to argue the agreement isn't valid if the business doesn't have a record of the agreement being signed or a copy of it.

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Re: Report to full disclosure in three weeks??

These are routers. Are we really going to hope that their print servers aren't on the public WAN? I guarantee you they are, we all know where security is on the list of priorities of most routers, sadly...

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

> "Senior software engineers stopped being developed in the US around 2012," Blake said. "That’s the real story. No country on Earth is producing new coders faster than old ones retire. India and Brazil were the last countries and both stopped growing new devs circa 2023. China stopped growing new devs in 2020."

I don't think this is true. Not really, anyway. I think that the surveys show that companies just *don't* want to hire junior developers who could become senior devs if trained. I'm 25 and have been actively job hunting for 4 years now and still haven't been hired -- and that's after going through lots of resume revisions. But of course, Companies love their automation, and they keep making it harder and harder and harder to get past their stupid applicant tracking systems, so of course they "stopped producing senior software engineers". Maybe if they stopped using ATSs (or reduced how strict they are) they might get more talent, but noooooooo, that's too much to ask for. Oh no, devs in India and other countries where labor laws are practically non-existent are somehow better than people right here in the US. The irony is, of course, that if you ask around, companies will swear up and down that there isn't anyone to hire here, yet there are at least 6 million people who want to be hired generally. Yet they can easily find someone to hire in India. Talk about absurd...

/rant

AI to replace 2.4 million jobs in the US by 2030, many fewer than other forms of automation

Yeah, I highly doubt this. AI has been in research and development for decades and it still can't display any actual form of intelligent reasoning. It's just a fancy statistics prediction algorithm. That's it.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Well

Yes, Ada won't save you from your own stupidity. But Rust doesn't either. Literally all Rust did was reinvent a bit of Ada and call it something different.

If you want memory safe and secure software, use ada. Simple as that. Rust only offers memory safety; Ada and Spark offer that and, if you want, correctness and provability. Absolutely no contest. (And before anyone complains about the lack of libraries: that's because not many people use it; if more people used it, it'd get more libraries...)

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Nothing to hide? Really? Do you tell your friends all your credit card numbers, identity information, passwords, etc? Yeah, I didn't think so. So much for nothing to hide....

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

This is pretty much the problem with apps and companies everywhere. Accessibility is always an afterthought. Rarely have I seen a company think of it and incorporate it during the design process, and then continue developing it as the product(s) evolve. And whenever we try to pass laws to get these companies to give a damn, the companies manage to get the laws stalled. I'd be all for just ramming laws through to improve this without giving companies any time to lobby or stall anything.

Accessibility (needs) to be, like, something that is over-emphasized in UI design courses, books, etc. Dedicate like half the course/book to it. It isn't something that you can just implement afterwards (trust me, I've tried it, and I'm blind, and it's far harder than you think, and it never feels entirely complete because, at the end of the day, it's usually just a huge number of hacks); it needs to be thought about and deeply incorporated with the rest of the apps design and functionality before development even begins.

GNOME 45 beta: Less buggy, more colorful, and still not your grandma's desktop

I can't use Gnome because the accessibility is shit. Orca can't read the desktop, the overview panel is retarded, the supposedly "new" text editor crashed whenever I tried to use it, the terminal had this weird output duplication problem.... I have no incentive to go back to Gnome. Wayland has little accessibility to speak of because the developers are still concerned about security (among other problems). KDE works, sort of. But I just go with XFCE now. It has only one accessibility problem that I know of, but eh, what else can I do when accessibility is currently ruled by Gnome and Gnome seemingly doesn't give a shit about it unless they're forced to take notice? I mean, half the time they just ignore us disabled people anyway, thinking they know best, so.... Yeah, I'm definitely not going to use this release.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Re: AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy

Accuracy might not matter now, but I'll be laughing when businesses who are jumping on the AI train realize that everyone the AI "hires" is highly unqualified and unable to perform the duties assigned to them, or they're unable to get the AI to do what they want, so have to hire people who will tell the AI what to do because... The AI isn't actually intelligent, as much as OpenAI would like you to believe that it is. Or, even worse: a business does something monumentally stupid like putting an AI in charge of finances and suddenly the corporation is investigated for fraud because the AI "decided" to do something unlawful.

One problem with America's chip ambitions: Not quite enough staff

I'm pretty sure that's the case, yes. You wouldn't believe the number of "entry-level" jobs I've found that require 5-10 years of experience. A job that requires that much experience is not an entry-level position at all. I can only see two possibilities for that: either HR is writing the JDs and requirements, and has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and they aren't actually communicating with the employer for that position; or the employer is incredibly incompetent and magically expects a fresh college graduate to just "somehow" acquire a decade of experience. (I've also seen jobs that require 2-4 years, but that's still bad -- how is a college graduate supposed to get that?) It's even worse though because there are many jobs that I've seen that indicate that experience in college doesn't count as experience. The vast majority of internships are either unpaid, require you to be actively seeking a degree, or both, and I, for one, would like to be getting paid for my work and would like to avoid trying to get a job every 3-6 months, particularly since I already have a degree.

Maybe if the employers were the ones writing the job descriptions and posting them instead of HR, these foundries might have a lot of applicants. But instead every corporation is pretending like we're in a recession when we aren't, and HR is writing job descriptions without actually understanding any of the technical terminology. Well, and many companies want gods for employees and are throwing out unrealistic job reqs. I have absolutely zero sympathy for these companies. Maybe if they wanted realistic things they might actually get somewhere.