Posts by AdamWill

Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Re: Note: Changes aren't decided by community vote

"You ask if others have simpler clearer models. It's a non sequitur. *Everyone* else has a simpler model, because they don't have a model, because nobody bloody cares."

I mean, this seems unlikely. "Most distros are just a bunch of people, putting something together and putting it out there" is a very reductive description - but it equally applies to Fedora. Governance is just the *details* of how that "bunch of people" decide what "thing" it is they're putting together, exactly, and how they're going to "put it out there".

If "nobody cares" about these kinds of details, then this is a complete non-story: from that "nobody cares" perspective, *literally nothing happened*, did it? The only things that happened were the things you say nobody cares about - the details of one specific "bunch of people" deciding not to do a thing.

So if this is a story, well, that implies governance and community processes and all of that stuff *matter*, doesn't it?

Re: Note: Changes aren't decided by community vote

Regarding documentation - the Change process is documented at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/changes_policy/#_change_process .

I don't think anyone could "write a short explainer on how Fedora governance works", because it's quite complicated. In my experience, governance of anything of significant size tends to be somewhat complex unless it is run entirely by a dictator (benevolent or otherwise). Even in that case, once it's sufficiently large, the dictator probably needs to delegate *somehow*, and the details of that also get complex.

Is there a non-dictator-led distro whose governance you'd say is simpler or clearer to understand?

Re: Note: Changes aren't decided by community vote

Well, my comment intentionally didn't ascribe anything to any person. That was intentional, because I'm fully aware that headlines and subheads are often not written by the author of the article.

Liam, I like you and think you write good articles, that's why I read them. Adding an explanatory note is not a criticism, either personal or journalistic. You'll note my comment doesn't call you an idiot or mention your name at all.

Note: Changes aren't decided by community vote

The subhead and this text may give an incorrect impression:

"The change was rejected, and for now this won't happen. The margin wasn't huge, though. At the time of writing, it was showing 51 percent "Strongly opposed," plus another 15 percent "Opposed, but could be convinced.""

Changes are not decided by community vote. The vote is purely informational. Changes are voted on by FESCo, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In this case the Change did not come to a vote because the proposers withdrew it.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

mm, well, details

"What all this does is accelerate the day when AI becomes worthless. For example, when I asked ChatGPT, "What's the plot of Min Jin Lee's forthcoming novel 'Nightshade Market?'" one of the fake novels, ChatGPT confidently replied, "There is no publicly available information regarding the plot of Min Jin Lee's forthcoming novel, Nightshade Market. While the novel has been announced, details about its storyline have not been disclosed.""

I'm not sure that's model collapse, though. Did you try asking it "What's the plot of Min Jin Lee's forthcoming novel 'The Price Of Fish'?" I expect you would've got the same result. Just because you used the name from the Sun-Times supplement doesn't mean ChatGPT actually assumed the book existed because someone had set it up to use RAG with that data as input. It could just be the usual "naive AI assumes the question you asked doesn't have any lies in it" hallucination.

AI ain't B2B if OpenAI is to be believed

terminology

"but far from the kind of ex-Oracle sub-boss"

Ahem. I think when they work for Oracle, they're called "mini-bosses".

AI can't replace freelance coders yet, but that day is coming

Re: The limitations

The introduction has all the meat, really. To summarize: they saw that OpenAI had done a fairly realistic study where they took *actual* real-world jobs from upwork/freelancer, and tried to get LLMs to solve them. They saw that the LLMs didn't do very well: "the top-performing model in OpenAI's study solved only about 26% of the independent coding tasks and 45% of the management tasks".

So they decided they'd do a much worse study which would give the LLMs bigger numbers. I am not making this up.

"In this paper, we propose a new evaluation approach that draws inspiration from SWE-Lancer but emphasizes automation and repeatability. Instead of using actual freelance projects that require human evaluation, we leverage a publicly available dataset of freelance job postings to generate synthetic coding tasks with ground-truth solutions. In particular, we use the Freelancer.com dataset by Oresanya et al. (2022), which contains ~9,193 job postings in the data analysis and software domain. We filter and process these job descriptions to create well-defined problem statements (e.g., data processing tasks, scripting challenges, algorithm implementations) that an LLM can attempt to solve. Crucially, for each task we provide a set of test cases (input-output pairs or assertions) so that a solution's correctness can be validated automatically, without human intervention"

so they took real freelance jobs and massaged them into AI benchmarks, then said "look! the AIs did quite well!"

Good lord.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

That was below the belt, El Reg

"Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that"

Please skip the insulting stereotypes. A lot more professional programmers have arts degrees than you might guess, and a lot of us are perfectly good at it. And there are plenty of computer science grads who can solve the travelling salesman problem all day long but are terrible at writing real-world software.

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Both things can be true. This can be "just the standard hoops", and Google can have been quite conscious that the "standard hoops" would have the effect of restricting competition with its cloud service. Certainly the facts that Nextcloud has been trying to get a sensible response for several years without success, and that Google is conspicuously refusing to return El Reg's calls, are not insignificant.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: FFS

well, I spent like three days this week reading the last nine months of the upstream git changelog for openQA, in preparation for updating Fedora's package and deployment of it. It's important to do this so I spot any changes which need to be accounted for in the package or the deployment config.

Today I got curious, so I fed the entire changelog into Gemini (2.5 pro; 2.0 flash absolutely choked on the volume) and asked it to summarize it for me, first for a sysadmin, then for a distro packager, highlighting important changes.

It, uh, did a pretty good job, I've gotta say. It was fairly concise, organized, and found the most important changes. It didn't make anything significant up (it got the name of one script wrong, but still explained the change to it accurately), or get anything obviously significantly wrong. Did it get every little detail? No. But then after three days my brain didn't remember every detail either, it just had a vague sense of the most important areas of change. I'd say the results of both approaches were pretty comparable, but one took me three days, the other took Gemini a couple of minutes.

I hate to think how much carbon it burned to do that, but hey, I'd definitely characterize it as *useful*.

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: Really?

The problem with this is you can absolutely cause gigantic security issues while you're doing the herding, notably with variable expansion.

You certainly cannot *fully* check everything a shell script does by statically analyzing it, but you absolutely *should* be checking *as much as you can* of what it does with an analyzer. Like shellcheck, which another commenter pointed out has been around for years. I've seen a definite encouraging trend in the last few years towards incorporating shellcheck in CI workflows, which is nice.

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Re: everyone's doing it

No major distributions has actually used sbin for that purpose in years, so nothing of value was lost. Fedora has always gone with the 'sbin is for privileged binaries' definition, but that got so fuzzy over the years that it became more or less arbitrary.

We are not going to start statically compiling some binaries in order to provide an ad hoc rescue environment within the distro, so there's no reason to have a separate sbin. The rescue environment for Fedora is provided externally, you can boot into a rescue environment from any Fedora installer image. It has functions to automatically find and mount an installed Fedora system so you can fix it.

everyone's doing it

so-called "conventional" distributions are doing this too, just from a different direction.

if you look at a current Fedora system, /lib is a symlink to /usr/lib , /lib64 is a symlink to /usr/lib64 , /bin is a symlink to /usr/bin , and so on: this is the 'usr merge' from a while back, and other distros are doing the same, e.g. Debian in https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge .

In Fedora 42, /usr/sbin is a symlink to /usr/bin . So /sbin , /bin , /usr/sbin and /usr/bin are all the same directory.

On an F42 install, the only real directories at the top level are /boot , /dev , /etc , /home , /mnt , /opt , /proc , /run , /sys , /tmp , /usr and /var . Of those, dev, proc and sys are kernel interfaces, so really we just have boot , etc , home , mnt , opt , run , tmp , usr and var.

There are clear purposes there which I don't immediately see replicated in the gobo design. For instance, multiple levels of configuration. It's becoming increasingly common to have a clear separation between upstream/distro defaults (which are in /usr), system-wide site configuration (which is in /etc), and per-user configuration (which is under /home). This is a useful concept, and having the files in three clearly different locations makes it easy to know what's what, transfer around the things you need, and keep a clear distinction between system files (which can be immutable) and local customization (which cannot be).

there's definitely more that can be done here - it would be lovely to get rid of one out of /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 at some point, for instance. I'm not convinced we really need /opt any more, certainly not by default. But everyone's rowing in broadly the same direction.

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Built-in Javascript engine?

Note it's really the *desktop shell* that is implemented in javascript. It sits on top of a library called mutter (which itself sits on mesa), which is where any really heavy graphics rendering-related work is done, and that's written in C.

The official explanation for writing the shell in javascript is: "Gnome-shell is written in JavaScript because it allows for quick prototyping and development cycles. The difference between javascript and other dynamic languages (python, ruby, php, etc...) is that javascript doesn't depend on a specific platform. Gnome-shell can than run it with its own platform (Gjs)."

AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites

Re: AI is little more than cloud/hosting providers ruining the internet in new and unwanted ways

It's not the same. There are more of these AI scrapers, and they're more aggressive. (And yes, lots of them ignore robots and screw with their user agents, and change IPs frequently).

Search scrapers mostly only bothered with 'normal' web pages. The problem for a git forge is that these AI scrapers want the code, not just the web UI views of issues and stuff. They are cloning every repo the forge hosts. That's massively more traffic than a search scraper generates.

not just sourcehut

This is also an ongoing nightmare for pagure.io (a forge used mainly for Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS-adjacent projects, for weird historical reasons). It's getting absolutely pounded by AI scrapers. I think on Sunday we had to just ban Brazil. Sorry, everyone in Brazil who isn't an AI scraper.

I'd imagine every git forge is dealing with this mess.

CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox

Ours is older

"and Bodhi packaging system. (I'm not sure if anyone at Red Hat knows or cares that there's been a distro called Bodhi Linux for some 15 years.)"

Our Bodhi is older than their Bodhi.

First commit to https://github.com/fedora-infra/bodhi was e26dacbb680bb65ffee0b82679e3f48a982ae4a1 was dated Jan 15 2007. The second was dated the next day and says "Initial import from CVS to Mercurial", so it wasn't even new then. I don't honestly remember when it was introduced.

The Wikipedia page for Bodhi Linux says its first release was on March 26, 2011. So our Bodhi has been around way longer.

(Also note this doesn't have much relevance to your "Red Hat people are arrogant" hobby horse - RH per se doesn't use Bodhi, Bodhi is specific to Fedora. For RHEL, RH has an entirely different thing called errata tool.)

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Re: Linux is forever?

Just don't buy NVIDIA. This has been the appropriate advice for Linux forever and remains so at least until nvk is fully ready.

nvk is now probably more or less workable if you have the right hardware ("Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later"). It's still missing raytracing, which is kinda a big deal for high-end gaming, but it's much less of a pain to work with than the proprietary driver.

Yes, this is a problem if you want a really high-end gaming system, as AMD doesn't have anything that competes with NVIDIA at the really high end (and, as noted, nvk is not fully equivalent to the Windows driver yet). But for anything AMD covers, just buy a fricking AMD card, it will just work with none of the proprietary driver PITAs. (Or at the lower end maybe one of the new Intel ones, they seem to be actually good!)

NVIDIA does do the same thing on Windows: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/nvidia-winding-down-support-for-older-gpus-including-the-legendary-750-ti-and-1060/ and https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-drops-kepler-windows-7-8-8.1-support/ . I think the cutoffs are actually quite similar - basically anything before Maxwell is on a legacy driver, on Windows and Linux. On Windows, the I can't quite tell if this is done more aggressively on Linux than on Windows, it's hard to figure. It seems that for Linux the 'legacy' cutoff is currently Maxwell - Maxwell and later are supported in the current driver, anything before Maxwell is in a legacy driver.

However, it does seem like they keep the legacy driver available for newer Windows releases, to some extent, which is significantly different. Though it looks like Windows 11 cuts off support for anything pre-Fermi: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/o7ymr9/nvidia_gpus_that_will_no_longer_work_on_windows_11/

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

well...

"As an example, they cited how Devin, when asked to deploy multiple applications to the infrastructure deployment platform Railway, failed to understand this wasn't supported and spent more than a day trying approaches that didn't work and hallucinating non-existent features."

I mean, to be fair, have you met some junior engineers?

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

In case anyone's wondering why they're still making 767s...

...US couriers are still buying freighter variants, apparently, as there's no 787 freighter variant yet.

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

it *was* reviewed, but...

It went through a ton of review. The version that got merged was version 7.

The complaint is that it got merged in the end without "the x86 people" - i.e. AMD's and Intel's kernel folks, mainly Boris and Peter - explicitly approving it.

(I had fun with this one, because it also caused a weird bug where Fedora installs would hit a kernel bug and hang during bootloader install. Took me two weeks to fully investigate and bisect it. Whee. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219554 )

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

Re: disagree!

It doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong. That's what "irrelevant" means. It's never necessary or appropriate to talk to someone like that even if they are, in fact, entirely and unambiguously wrong. It doesn't help anything. It only causes trouble.

disagree!

"Overstreet's post is over 6,000 words long, but in The Reg FOSS desk's opinion, he does in fact make his case fairly well."

Um. Really? I disagree *heavily*.

As a general principle, I'd say that anyone who can't manage to make a simple apology for writing "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." when asked to, but *can* bash out a 6000-word self-exculpatory blog post full of entirely irrelevant technical detail, is probably not someone I'd want to have to deal with at work.

If you do something jerkish, own up and say sorry, then move on. If you spend weeks or months, and thousands of words, on "actually I wasn't being a jerk but also I was right and lots of other people historically have been jerks so why am I being called out?! It's unfair! I'm the victim here!", um, that's a bit of a red flag for me.

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

anaconda is developed and tested to work at 1024x768. I do check it on 800x600 occasionally and it's mostly fine. This is some kind of specific issue on the Miracle spin.

Re: no RISC-V? Yes, that too

riscv is in a kinda bring-up phase atm and is building in a completely separate space from mainline Fedora, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V . but yup, it's there and it...kinda works? maybe?

A sit-down with Ubuntu founder Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth

Re: *makes bitter face*

Also:

"There's a big pool of free users on free products who get updates but no actual support, no guarantees"

You don't get "guarantees" of "support" for Ubuntu if you don't pay for it either, do you? I mean, just like Fedora, if it's broken, you get a 100% refund! If you need help, ask in the forum, and you might or might not get an answer.

If you want actual "support", you pay for it - https://ubuntu.com/support

Re: *makes bitter face*

Mandrake/iva already had this exact approach. It wasn't philosophically against anything non-F/OSS (in fact selling you non-F/OSS stuff was more or less the business model). It tried as much as possible to work on as wide a range of hardware as possible (ahh, the literal days I spent sifting through graphics card PCI IDs and wishing I had never been born) and be entirely GUI driven.

Of course, this being the early 2000s and the whole thing being run on a budget that might have bought *half* a shoestring in a liquidation sale, it didn't always succeed. But the idea was not new.

Re: *makes bitter face*

"The thing is that the paid-for-edition-which-funds-a-freebie thing still means there's a two-tier system: there are freeloaders, and there are Proper Users, the ones who paid for it, the real guys with the real product. Usually there is something else going on here, such as paid users get access to the support fora or something."

Well, sure, if you want to look at it that way, but...I didn't make any argument or claim about which approach is "better", that's not my point at all. My point was only ever frustration at Ubuntu acting like no kind of desktop Linux existed before they came along. If you want to argue that desktop Linux a rich guy gives you for free is "better" than desktop Linux with some kind of business model, sure, go ahead, but it's not an argument against my point, AFAICT.

I would just point out that the "rich guy gives it away for free" model has an obvious built-in flaw, which is that at some point the rich guy gets bored, or dies, or the big pile of money runs out. Canonical being a private company it is impossible to know a lot for certain about how this looks from the inside, but from where I'm sitting, it looks a lot like they've been cutting back on investment in the desktop side of Ubuntu for a while, and trying to come up with *some* kind of sustainable business model. There was a lot of noise about shopping it around to outside investors a few years ago, though I don't know where that went in the end, or if it's still going on.

(Liam knows this, but for anyone else following along, I now work for Red Hat, so am of course the furthest thing from an unbiased observer. Eat this comment with as large a pinch of salt as you like.)

Re: *makes bitter face*

"I did pay twice for Mandriva I think, but I think Mandrake and later always had free downloads too."

Yeah, to Liam's point about F/OSS principles, Mandrake/iva I think always (it's been a long time and we tried a lot of equally doomed business plans, there might have been some brief time when this wasn't true) had a "free" edition, which was 100% F/OSS across 3 CDs, and free of charge. The paid editions were more discs, but all the F/OSS stuff on them was available from online repos if you ran the Free edition. The only bits you were really *paying* for were proprietary things - principally NVIDIA drivers and other proprietary hardware drivers which were relevant at the time, also stuff like Flash (long time ago, like I said). I think the Free edition also came out (at least officially...) a bit later than the paid editions.

So Ubuntu didn't even really innovate giving away a F/OSS desktop distro for free. It innovated giving away one *with proprietary stuff in it* (especially the NVIDIA driver) for free. And mailing it to you if you didn't have the bandwidth to download it (another thing that was a consideration at the time).

Re: *makes bitter face*

ooh, another one I forgot. I kinda think that one had gone by the wayside by 2004 (also: Corel Linux!), but IMBW, it's hard to remember the exact dates 20 years later.

Re: *makes bitter face*

But...the title of the blog post isn't "20 years of Free-As-In-Money Linux on the Desktop". It's "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". It starts out "Twenty years ago, I had an epiphany: Linux was ready for the desktop" and then tells a little story about how he'd go around with Debian and Knoppix CDs and all the problems he had trying to deploy a desktop using those, which makes an obvious implication that there was no better desktop Linux option available at the time. That paragraph concludes with "With GNOME 2.0, I felt that Linux was ready for the desktop. It was just really hard to install. And that could be fixed.", again implying that nobody else was already *doing* that. Which several of us were. The blog later says "When you have a good idea, it’s probably because this idea is already in the zeitgeist of the time", but then goes into a long story about UserLinux, as if that was the *only* other case of anyone else having the same "good idea" - again utterly failing to acknowledge that several companies had already been trying to make the same "good idea" work for several years at that point.

If the blog was about how 20 years ago he'd been fortunate enough to run into a guy with a giant pile of money who was willing to burn lots of it on giving desktop Linux away for free, I'd have no objections. That's essentially what you said in your comment, too. And hey, there are much *worse* things zillionaires could choose to use their giant piles of money for! On the whole, Mark doing that with his giant pile of money was good for a lot of people. I just wish they wouldn't constantly present it as if they invented desktop Linux from a blank slate in 2004, cos they didn't. They just - as you said - made it free. Using an approach nobody else could use, because nobody else had a giant pile of cash lying around, they all had to find *some* way to pay their workers.

(Also, insert 1990s diatribe about the different meanings of "free" here. The "free" in F/OSS is not "free as in cost". I disagree that making something available for zero dollars is a fundamental part of "the whole FOSS ethos".)

*makes bitter face*

"The early years are described by Lionel Dricot in a blog post entitled 20 years of Linux on the Desktop"

....urgh.

As I never knowingly miss an opportunity to chew on these sour grapes: some pretty typical Ubuntu revisionism, there. Much as they'd like to pretend they invented Linux on the desktop, nope. There were plenty of desktop-focused Linuxes around long before Ubuntu. I worked for Mandrake. There was also SUSE (mainly aimed at the desktop at the time), Red Hat (which had been aimed at desktops for a while before and was in a sort of transitional phase at the time), Lycoris (yup, that was a thing) and probably some others I'm forgetting, it's been a while.

Ubuntu's primary innovation was to bring in a pile of money which was used for marketing and giving the product away for free. Everyone else had to charge money because, you know, they needed to figure out a way to pay people to work on it. Shuttleworth handily had a giant pile of money lying around, so he didn't have that problem.

Here's a random Mandrake 9.0 review from 2002 to make the point. Which was part of a week of "Linux on the desktop" reviews that also covered SUSE, Red Hat, Lycoris, and Libranet (which I'd entirely forgotten about). https://www.extremetech.com/archive/52240-review-mandrake-linux-90

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

Then Wimbledon would just go to one of the other ELC providers. There are several.

No. In the many tournaments that already do this, the player can ask for the video to be played, just so they can watch a reconstructed ball hit or not hit a reconstructed line in the way the electronic voice based on the same reconstruction already said it did. They quite often do so, and you can analyze the psychology behind that at your leisure! (Sometimes they just do it to buy ten seconds to get their breath back).

Re: What a shame

I mean, we already know what the implementation is. Wimbledon has had it for years, it has just used a challenge system rather than using the ELC for all initial calls. Many other tournaments already use ELC for all calls, including the US and Australian Opens. There's nothing terribly novel here, it's just another tournament joining the list, albeit a big one.

Re: Why?

Well, it's not replacing the umpire. It's replacing somewhere between six and nine line judges per court. The umpire is still there.

But no, it's not entirely about the money, ELC probably does cost more than humans indeed. Tournaments are going to ELC because it is substantially more accurate than humans, and players overwhelmingly like it because it removes what feels to them like a subjective, possibly-biased part of the game. They can just accept the 'objective' automated call and move on. Even if they think the robot maybe got it wrong, they don't feel like the robot might be unusually poor at its job or biased against them, because to them it feels like a robot. (There are actually quite a few humans behind the scenes in a typical ELC deployment, but the players don't see them standing on the court yelling "OUT", so it's not the same).

It's a bit late to get up in arms about this, since two slams (Australian and US Opens) and most other high-level tournaments already went to all-ELC anyway. So far just about nobody thinks it made things worse.

There *is* a money angle, but it's not the one you think: it's all about gambling, like everything in sports lately. See https://www.theverge.com/c/24225103/tennis-ai-electronic-line-calling-hawk-eye-sports-betting-gambling for a very deep and somewhat fascinating dive on that.

That's not how Hawkeye works, it's not trying to capture the split second of impact in a single frame from a single camera. It captures the entire flight of the ball (and the movements of the players) using multiple cameras, and determines from that exactly where the ball landed.

AFAIK, every test they've run has come out with ELC systems performing substantially better than humans. They are not perfect - Hawkeye's claimed margin of error is 2.2mm, independent researchers say it can sometimes be up to 10mm off - but humans are substantially *less* perfect. The numbers you figured out apply just as well to an extremely fallible human trying to see where the same 130mph serve landed from several feet away, with two eyes and one shot at it. They absolutely don't always get it right. Certainly not when it's within 10mm of the back of the line.

CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

We do also *write* a lot of the free code in the first place. Then we "take" it, build it all, test it all against each other, and put it through about a zillion government/third party validations you need to have to deploy it anywhere serious. easy stuff, really!

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions

While HashiCorp plays license roulette, Virter rolls out to rescue FOSS VM testing

Re: VMM

There's a + button to create a snapshot, or there is in mine, anyway.

Re: VMM

"On the minus side is that VMM doesn't create or delete snapshots in the GUI itself"

Yes it does. The furthest right button on the toolbar, a picture of a monitor with the Play symbol in it, with the tooltip "Manage VM Snapshots".

If you don't have it, must be something off in your deployment, I guess, but it's there on a stock Fedora deployment.

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

Re: This btrfs malarkey

It's a universal default, it doesn't depend on how big your disk is. We figured people like having more space, so long as it doesn't break anything. So far, it hasn't (we turned this feature on in F34 and I can't honestly recall a single bug related to it, amazingly enough).

Re: "A Few Small Repairs" are needed.......

By all means feel free to install https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/41_Beta-1.2/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-41_Beta-1.2.iso onto ext4 if you like, using the custom partitioning in the installer.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

Re: What about the WARN notice?

Looking at the requirements, this likely doesn't count as one.

"A mass layoff is defined (under the WARN Act) as a situation where one of these criteria are filled:

500 employees: At least 500 employees lose their job during a 30-day period at a single employment site

50 employees: 50 employees are laid off (if the laid-off employees make up at least 1/3 of the workforce)

33% of the workforce: At least 33% of the workforce loses their jobs (excluding part-time employees) at a single employment site during a 30-day period."

seems fairly likely they're not laying off 500 people at any one site, or 33% of the workforce, and they definitely have more than 150 workers.

Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line

Ellison isn't a tech bro, because even the tech bros hate him.

First place they should install one is in the office of his plastic surgeon, cos some crimes have certainly been committed there.

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

"The Reg FOSS desk's degree was in biology"

That's one highly-educated desk!

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto: Japan's bullet trains to ditch drivers

Re: Just to clarify a point

All the fully-automated systems in the world (including Skytrain) were designed to be such, though. It's much more complicated to retrofit an existing network to be fully-automated because of issues the OP mentioned, like the train and platform design. Skytrain stations are all dead straight and the platforms and trains were designed from the start so there is always no gap or height difference from the platform to the train. (And of course it's a closed-loop system with no interaction with any other train line and no grade crossings). Building a new system from scratch to be automated is a fairly simple thing at this point, that we know how to do and have done lots of times. Taking something like the original lines of the London or New York undergrounds and making them unattended would be harder.

The unique challenges for the shinkansen system, reading between the lines of the post, are all related to the bit where it *goes really fast*. That's where all the stuff about detecting unusual vibrations and things comes in.

Re: Just to clarify a point

the main practical limitation with drivers isn't cost, it's...drivers. if every train has to have a driver, it's very hard to run very frequent trains all the time (because not many people want to drive a train at 3am on a Sunday). with an automated system this is not a concern.

The mass transit rail system where I live is fully automated, which is a big reason why it can run very frequently (often every two or three minutes). if they had to find a driver for every train that would likely not be possible. the salary costs wouldn't be that much, it's more the sheer availability of people who want to do the (very boring, since you're not really doing anything) job.

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

I've got one

"Linux kernel types can do that with their niece's Steam Deck and their astrophysicist brother-in-law's supercomputer galactic evolution model. Find another job like that."

Plastics engineer.

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

Re: Dual Root.

"However, if that is so obvious, why nobody thought of that before? Shenanigans afoot. And compare to running VMs that can in theory already do that (or should be able to, upon the hypervisor itself?)."

Plenty of people have. Android phones have worked this way for several years, they have two separate boot chains, A and B. When you "install an update" it installs it to whichever is not currently active, then reboots to that one. If the boot is successful it then installs the same update to the first chain; if not, it rolls back to the first chain and removes the update from the other chain. See https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab .