Posts by demon driver 173 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2020
a decade's worth of changes?! At some time a user has to say "this is about done, I don't need to undo and redo through years of changes any more"
It's not that simple. It's not just about being able to get back ten years into a file. It's also about that one system file you modified just once, after setting up the machine ten years ago.
Since I started letting AI assist me in understanding, improving and extending existing code that I sometimes have to work on on my own, I have learned a lot, not only about that specific code, but also about best practices for all kinds of tasks that I hadn't been aware of. For me, it's more like a search engine, or like what search engines should have been for some time, because after all I'm just searching for existing knowledge that can help me in what I'm doing. Or like asking coworkers who know more than I do about the project and the frameworks and libraries used. Being a fairly seasoned developer myself, I also can easily judge whether an AI answer is good or not.
I fear that in the case of potentially world- and/or humanity-destroying activities, a threat to hold those responsible responsible through criminal prosecution even including substantial jail time will not be enough. We know all too well that even death penalty does not prevent the crimes that prescribe it.
Anthropic themselves, like many public figures around the world, have been calling out for strict public control over the technology.
Which I would agree with. And many more things that are traditionally in the hands of corporations should be under strict public control. The problem there might be that, even in those countries which can be called democracies, all too often public control is exerted by minions of elected moronic villains.
And, "AI models don't kill people – people kill people"? Really? Isn't that one of the phrases gun nuts use in campaigning for a right for everyone to bear deadly arms?
... when some of the great folks of former Star Division, after the 1999 acquisition by Sun, presented a full-fledged, fully-functional, multi-user capable (if I'm not mistaken), browser-based StarOffice (which, back then, offered substantially more functionality than Open/Libre Office does even today) named StarPortal on an OS/2-related fair I visited. Already back then, it ran to some parts on the server, to some on the client. It also seemed to perform well. On the hardware you could buy then. More than a quarter of a century ago.
What do they call this? Progress?
The more difficult and/or expensive (not just in money, but also in something like causing problems at the workplace) it is in a country to consult a GP, let alone in a timely manner, and there I've not even started to talk about specialists, the more those AI offerings will be used. Not necessarily because they were good, but just because they're there, because there available, and that at no or little cost. And those responsible for that same health system will say, brilliant, then we can cut our healthcare expenses even more.
I wish my employer would give me this instead of the big, heavy laptop I have to lug back and forth between home and work, since I frequently alternate between working from home and the office—often commuting by bike or on foot. (A mini PC might also be an option, but they’re usually still thicker and heavier.)
That comment doesn't deserve downvoting, despite its shortcomings.
Regarding the shortcomings: Give me the world in which those concepts you want us to consider could even just be imagined being wilfully adopted by those governing the means of production (which, just to make sure, are not the governments, let alone the people), or them even just forcibly made to adopt, without resistance so fierce that the cost of making them adopt might be unsustainable. And give me that world *before* we let generative AI as-it-is loose on humanity and planet...
"Hate implies mindless judgement" – sometimes, maybe even often, but not necessarily always. Sometimes, mindfulness might judge a specific manifestation of hate to be rightful. Like, for example, when it is directed at mindless hate which itself targets things, or, worse, people that absolutely do *not* deserve it.
With my dual-GPU laptop I'm still looking for a comprehensible, usable way to run Windows in a VM in a way that it reserves the 'good' GPU just when it runs, or, even better, when I want it to run it with proper GPU support. It's more or less the only thing that still makes me run Windows natively...
Since I moved to Linux Mint a few years ago I've been using btrfs (that's presented as a boot FS option during install) without any hiccups except once, which wasn't nice but not as spectacularly bad that I'd still remember the details. It allows you to use Timeshift with system partition snapshots which can be really helpful. And subvolumes are a nice way to separate things...
I do remember that there used to be major issues with running VMs with big virtual drives on it due to its copy-on-write nature, but that seems to have been fixed.
Regarding ZFS, I'm using it on some (Debian based) Proxmox servers (PVE and PBS). A whole new world of possibilities. Proxmox comes with a custom kernel, though, that includes ZFS...
I can only agree.
I've used any of the three existing Mint flavours at some point in time and I like all of them, and anyway it's an absolutely great achievement in UI design and theming that all of them look almost identical. In the end I stayed with Cinnamon only because I find it even a little bit more straightforward in usage than the others – and for quite some time even rather lowly hardware has been more than capable to run it, too.
I've actually just recently noticed that the Linux Mint folks offer several options for donations, one of them being a monthly payment through Patreon.
That doesn't seem typical to me... For about three and a half years, a lowly Pentium N5030 laptop with 8GB RAM and a non-NVME SSD, which may not have been quite low-end in 2022 but rather is in 2026, running Mint Cinnamon, was by far my most used personal computer even for a little bit of software development in Eclipse and IntelliJ, and would still be today had it not succumbed to the physical hardships it was subjected to under my care... (The only thing I couldn't properly do was running Windows in a Virtual Box VM, but that was more due to the limited RAM than anything else...) And for many applications, even 4 GB would have been sufficient, as long as not too many things were run in parallel.
If it isn't both, it isn't free.
The old and still unanswered question is how to keep it free – even if just for everyone except those few who both profit greatly from it and have tens of thousands of times the funds it would need to fully finance its development and its developers.
I suppose separating things to different drives is indeed the way to go... When moving what I need from two PCs, one Linux, one Windows, onto one new dual boot laptop, I was lucky enough to have two SSD slots and so I could separate the two OSes. After I heard that the 25H2 Win 11 upgrade deleted a Linux partition somewhere, I decided to remove the Linux SSD before starting the upgrade just to be safe. But Redmond was faster; the upgrade was kicked off in the background before I did. But it left the Linux drive alone; the Laptop even continued to boot into grub...
For me, the 'feature bloat', if we want to call it that, doesn't get in the way. Most features can be disabled or even are by default. Also, at least for me, "basic stuff" works as well as in any other browser; and like almost everything, the open-new-tab behavior is configurable. So is address field autocomplete. Here, Vivaldi isn't slow in any way, either. And I cannot even remember when I last saw the VPN button.
This is one of the best synopses of the essence of work and workplace as it pertains to the worker in the prevailing economic system that I've yet seen. Should be required by law to be printed, framed and hung on the wall in every office, cubicle cell or wherever someone works in dependent gainful employment.
I don't subscribe to the notion that more travel is better for keyboard keys, but this device is a great idea for people who work in a frequently changing, alternating office/home office scenario, are only allowed to use their employer-provided computer, and prefer to commute light because they walk or cycle. If the alternative is to carry a full-blown laptop to the office and back, I'd opt for this keyboard thingy any time.
There are also scenarios, such as voluntary home office situations not prescribed by the employer, in which the employer, depending on the legislation, is not required to provide all the workplace equipment. And if they can replace full-fledged laptops with something like this, far fewer laptop screens or screen hinges will break...
Again, your claims are complete BS.
And you need to learn to read. I defend nothing; I explain how things are.
You obviously are no lawyer and have no idea what you're talking about, thinking that your personal opinion on what should be law could replaces knowledge of the subject and what actually is law. I suggest you talk that through with a lawyer specialized on international law in general and EU law in particular. I've had enough. Have fun.
Bla, bla, bla.
1. While I would agree that it is, but that's just me, the opinions within the EU regarding whether the measure is "totalitarian" are diverging.
2. There is no law and no institution that would have stopped the vote, no matter what German officials would have said. There is no office German officials could have gone to that would or could have stopped the vote.
3. Calling a vote, even on this subject, even if it is correct to be viewed critically, 'terrorism', is a declaration of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy. Even if it is under different auspices and with different goals, it is not much different from the US 2025 republicans' calling everything 'terrorism' that opposes them.
4. I don't defend anything, and I don't like it significantly better than you. I just inform you that it would have been structurally impossible to achieve what you demand.
German anti-fascist here. You're completely off the rails, as everyone here has been patiently trying to explain, no matter how much off-topic text you spout. I have no sympathy for the political party that acted here because in many cases its distance to fascism and the new German neo-fascists is not large enough, but in this case, for once, they're doing the right thing, and there's nothing they could have done to prevent the voting from coming up apart from invading the countries in support of chat control. This is called democracy.
If supply and demand of job vacancies and job seekers were distributed in such a way that job seekers in all professions could choose from as many jobs in their area as employers can normally choose from applicants, when-you-work-for-the-man-you-work-for-the-man style employers would have eliminated themselves long ago. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case. Nevertheless, those who act like this will lose many more good employees to others than, well, others, and that is of course a good thing. Too bad they tend to neither notice nor learn. Which is also one of the reasons why we need more, not less, workers rights and unions and work councils.
> I have never met or talked to Torvalds, or T'so, or Overstreet, or most of these people, but I read lots of verbiage about how KO is abrasive and nasty and mean and doesn't play by the rules. This is a misrepresentation and it's unfair.
I agree with a of a lot you're saying here and I'd wish as much as you that bcachefs would quickly become and stay a fixed part of Linux, but I have read lots of Overstreet's own verbiage and the impression remains that too much of it /was/ "abrasive and nasty and mean" enough (and, within the confines of Linux kernel development, for the bits I imagine to have at least slightly understood including the criticism from others, wrong enough) to justify at least some of the reactions.
If we're looking at the clashes we've seen there, enough of it would – for good reasons – justify dismissal in a workplace environment without any works council having the means to stop it.
The 'punk' attitude to not respect your elders just because they're elders is perfectly ok, but if the world wants open source development in general, and Linux kernel development in particular, to continue to thrive and be attractive to today's and coming generation of developers, it must adopt and, to some extent, guarantee an acceptable way of interacting with each other. Whatever one might say about other participants, too, in the long run I'm pretty sure it will prove more valuable to have delayed even a very important project than to let unacceptable behavior slide.
Objectivity is an illusion. All 'summarization', all attempts to 'categorize', every 'list of [...] impacts', every 'weighting', every 'score' tends to be – at least partly – subjective and often also incomplete. Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't even try, but we shouldn't overestimate what it actually is that we're doing and achieving.
... where part of stage 1 was websites trying to suppress even the most trivial bits of content being spelled out in search results so that they can harvest more clicks. Like they also stopped linking to other websites just because they might lose visitors before they otherwise would be done clicking around. Both already was the beginning of the end of the web as we (well, some of us) once knew it...
It's funny that search engine AI is now attacking the state of the web after the ad-commercialisation which was the first great wave set out to kill web functionality and usability, i.e. the core of the web.
Of course, because this world is built on commerce and commerce alone, this attack in itself is just a next stage commercialisation attempt, another fun part of which is that its principle is to damage what it lives off. A classic parasitisation process.
"Nor am I aware of anyone still making 486 instruction set processors new" – I never thought that would come to be a criterion for whether Linux should support a processor or not. When I started to become interested Linux, one of the reasons that actually did make it interesting was the fact that it supported a plethora of old and new architectures and processors some of which I hadn't even heard about.
I have a feeling that AI is what's going to make the capitalist market economy finally show its true face to everyone, not just to those billions who already have been and continue to be suffering badly from its inability to humanely distribute resources and goods across the planet, let alone in a peaceful way. Art is only where this starts.
When I made my full (or as much as possible, I still need to keep a Windows machine for some basic photography related things) move to Linux, I started with Ubuntu MATE, knowing I didn't want Gnome, which looked decent enough, but lacked usability. When a major Ubuntu version upgrade broke some things, I took my time and tried a lot of distros, but none convinced me. When I was half ready to give up and go back to Ubuntu MATE, I tried Linux Mint, which I had left out, thinking at its core it was just another kind of Ubuntu flavour anyway. I immediately saw I was mistaken. Mint – no matter which of the three DEs – was the first distro I tried that out of the box 1. didn't hurt my eyes and 2. looked like it would offer decent usability, meaning wouldn't get between me and what I do in any way. And so it's where I stayed and where I'm still happy, and that's at least 50% thanks to "the artsy types" in the project.
That said, I don't applaud every design decision they made, and that includes this new Cinnamon upgrade. On my mixed dark/light desktop setups, the new rounded-corners dialogs which pop up for the usual confirmations look alien and pushy to me, now being bigger and pitch black instead of light. It's one of the rare occasions where I'll be wanting to tweak the settings a bit.
"It seems a little naive to me to think the US will have another presidential election" – indeed, it's a pity that not even the USA as the longest-standing democracy in the world has effective measures against hitleresque seizures of power.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, in Germany, the young democracy of which the Germans are so proud is in danger of being torn apart by a new neo-fascist party (officially classified as right-wing extremist in large parts by domestic intelligence), against which they also have no effective measures even after their early 20th century experience. How difficult can it be to make fascist endeavours a punishable offense along the lines of high treason? What the German established political parties are now doing instead is adopting some neo-fascist policies themselves in a pathetic attempt to draw voters from them.
I get the impression that while he obviously needs help, the more important aspect here is that the world, the people around him and the project in question need help against him. In a better organized world, it would be impossible for people like him to have power over a project of any importance, or even over a single other person.
"Assembly. It's the language the computer understands. Everything else is made for your convenience."
Actually that's not correct. Beside what others already said: binary machine language is the language the computer understands. Assembler, its mnemonics and other stuff that is not machine language already was made exclusively "for our convenience". Some assembler languages (like for some mainframes) actually look like high-level languages compared to machine language. And obviously "our convenience" is the core purpose behind the concept of "programming language"...
The most prominent difference between Torvalds' two example sentences – (1) 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' vs. (2) 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..' – is not that between passive and active, but that of the subject, actually a question of meaning. In (1), the acting subject implicitly is an unnamed person, a someone who did the fixing, in (2) it is the pull request with its code that does the fixing. Simply transforming (1) into active voice would make it something like 'In this pull request, we fixed the Xyzzy driver error handling to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' – which wouldn't be that much better than the original, either ;-)
"This is a good thing, no?"
No. Only when seen isolated.
"Greenhouse farmers already knew this because they pump terrifying levels of CO2 into greenhouses."
HAHAHA! Because what's good locally must also be good globally. Thank you for this brilliant example of the quality of deniers' arguments. Everybody move on, nothing to see here.
