Posts by tekHedd 442 posts • joined 9 Aug 2011
Telemetry shows that:
- all the features I use daily are unloved
- all of the annoyances I have disabled are popular
- the next version will force the annoyances on me while removing the features I love
- people like icons that are indistinguishable monochrome squares
- I need a beer
When roundabouts started appearing everywhere in CO, I researched them. What I learned:
1. The only documented benefit they offer is that they slow down traffic
2. Incredibly dangerous for bicyclists
#1 I assume is the great appeal. I won't disagree that most other drivers slow down considerably when entering a roundabout. ("Wheeee!" *squeal*)
However, here in "bike friendly" Fort Collins I don't understand why this trumps the problems of #2...
Those of us who run a Google-less Android don't have the Play Store TM, and it's actually quite nice to see an official download of the APK available. I mean, yes, if you're running the play store, you'll want to get apps there because hackers!
I mean, for this app it's largely a moot point but still.
"...doesn't Primary and Secondary also confer superiority..."
BINGO!
Don't forget, these are the same people that say "meritocracy is racist." They want to ban all hierarchy, even the hierarchy of excellence and achievement. It sounds ridiculous but these types would be happier if you actually changed your system architecture to be purely P2P based at every level. I'm not even joking I guess. :(
> I suspect it's because the origin of the term "grandfathered" is to do with expressly racist US voting laws following their civil war and abolition of slavery.
I had completely forgotten this. Which raises the question, is it good that we should forget this happened? Quite the opposite, erasing all memory of the sins of the past is a prerequisite to repeating them.
And, it's hardly like this use of the word celebrates the past. I mean, when's the last time you were *glad* to have to support some legacy systems that were "grandfathered" in? Most often they're systems or features you'd really love to get rid of but which get a free pass. I get the feeling this term was included just to make the list longer.
People have nothing to do with their free time.
You discredit your own cause by using flawed examples like these.
I'm not saying I disagree with the underlying goal of this argument, but the "fire in a crowded theater" example is a terrible one. It's not an example of the free speech issue in any sense, and only survives because people on both sides of the issue are too lazy to think for 5 seconds.
"Cancel Culture" is... simply a phrase to be avoided because just using the phrase puts you in an instant flame war. It should specifically be avoided when discussing actual deplatforming unless you are deliberately trying to to alienate or troll the very people you are trying to convince.
I mean, I can't believe I'm writing this but...starting to get the idea that some of my friends don't seem to understand that communication starts with words that have an agreed-upon meaning.
init option in sixth birthday release
"ALSA is an ugly carbuncle stuck on the side of the kernel source tree, and its configuration language is nearly incomprehensible -- and mostly undocumented"
IMO, PulseAudio would not have happened (the way it did) if ALSA had been properly documented, maintainable code, because the unfathomable, undocumented style of the ALSA project makes devs run as far away as possible from Linux audio subsystems.
Perhaps the developers didn't want anyone outside their team to understand the system. More charitably, perhaps they were so deeply immersed in the code that they didn't realize exactly how awful it is. I mean, it works great, but... when I wanted to port my windows audio drivers to linux, spent a few hours getting to know the ALSA code, and literally ran away screaming. Literally.
Beware the truly brilliant programmer, because they will write code that nobody else will be able to maintain.
Yes, something _like_ PulseAudio will always be necessary for "happy little user apps," but I believe the byzantine ALSA code has repulsed good developers away from the audio subsystem and left a developer vacuum the shape of PulseAudio. :(
Blocking pulseaudio works pretty well--I run a pure Devuan/ALSA system for DJing and Bitwig. Some "happy desktop end user" apps will choke without pulse but... well... TBH if I want to watch youtube videos I grab the old now-useless-for-pro-audio-because-slower-with-each-release Macbook Pro.
Pulse Audio still sucks. There I said it. Not sorry.
Was thinking the same thing: On the one hand, we have a fairly small program (I have larger throwaway internal utilities) written by at most two or three developers, possibly backed by a somewhat larger deployment testing team. On the other hand, we have... the fingerprint of 1000 developers?
Pull the other one, it has 200 bells on, according to our analysis.
And why bother? With only a handful of companies owning all of the media networks, it would be fairly easy to subvert the information sources without alerting the public, branding any remaining sources of dissent as fake news.
Of course I speak hypothetically here, and certainly do not suggest that this has already happened.
I'm afraid this entire article is moot. Would have been interesting three or four days ago, and it's important reporting, I guess. Some people still care about RedHat, the same way some people still care about... what's that other RPM-based distribution that used to be a thing that I can't remember the name of? It doesn't matter, I can't remember the name of it for a reason.
It's getting so that you have to refresh mirrors every time you install a new package.
"Amazon are continuing to provide their fork under the AL 2.0, so they are benefiting the community by keeping their fork available..."
Gosh yes so kind of them. Nobody else could possibly fork the project and make it available publicly. If only there were some sort of service where you could go to provide a fork of a Git project, perhaps a centralized location or "hub" or perhaps a place where you can continue to merge Git patches like in a science "lab". Gosh I'm so sorry I'm rambling crazy talk now. Such a place would have to provide continuous integration servers, issue tracking, all kinds of stuff, and it'd have to be free. Thank god for Amazon!
Regarding the "Analysis: social media companies should be doing more to censor content." tag at the end...
The problem of moderation is a tricky one.
Experience suggests that if we demand solutions without simultaneously offering specific suggestions, they'll fix things in the most ass way possible. Keep this in mind when whining that "something must be done."
DoH was first because it was easiest to justify. "Think of the poor children in oppressed regimes!" they said, but we know it's low hanging fruit. It's an easy sell AND DNS-level is the easiest way to block tons and tons of crappy flashing ads.
I used to only manually block the worst ads, but it turns out 1) all ads come from the same handful of servers, and 2) there are very, very few ads that aren't "worst." So, starting with a fresh ABL install, I find I'm blocking basically 100% of ad content by the end of the week anyway. I genuinely tried to leave "nonintrusive and interesting" ads in but there simply are none.
Well, capitalism without any form of moderation or oversight /will/ eventually devolve into monopoly. This is hardly news. Periodically leveling the playing field is a good thing. The problem, of course, is that once the monopolies have enough leverage to control the government, this "leveling" is performed deliberately badly.
In the US these days, frequent manipulations of the playing field are performed, and sold to us as being a leveling of the field, but are almost always for the benefit of the monopolists.
But the news still made me cry, just for a second. Not so much for the loss to science. We've lost one more symbol of the things we can achieve when we really want to. Never mind that it's mostly because "we," at the time, were really scared of the dirty commies or whatever. It's still impressive in a way that smart robotic minefields never will be.
I've been running a google-free Pixel phone for about 6 months now, and it's great, the only problems being the lack of an app store and the (trying very hard not to shout here) need to compile the OS myself from sources. Otherwise it's fine.
Hope they survive until I break/lose this phone; /e/ just rose to the top of my smartphone options list.
I realize that at this point we've dismantled most of the institutions in the Executive branch, but am I the only one who think it's weird that DHS responsible for *designing* the H1B visa program's caps and thresholds? Maybe it only looks that way because they're the ones enforcing it, but... still weird.
I pretty much had to stop reading at "opt in" because I couldn't stop laughing bitterly while fighting back nausea. Glad it's friday because I *really* need a beer now.
We can "opt in" to this the same way we "opt in" to Microsoft's document formats, Apples end-user agreements, and Google's location tracking.
I've heard similar stories from engineers going back to the days of mainframes and core memory. MiB's show up (or call or contact a manager) and say "you will use *this* algorithm in this piece of core system code," and then disappear again. Not second-hand stories either... once you hear enough of them you stop questioning whether it's happening and just assume everything is backdoored.
Some of the bigger players talk a good privacy game, but nobody says "no" to The Man.
...and as we all know, a random politician's privacy is important, whereas mine is not. :P
I know it's just whining, but even El Reg echoes the attitude that "the privacy of the plebs is not important", which does not help when we're trying to defend strong end-to-end encryption for the masses.
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