kbal

joined 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 96 points 3 hours ago (10 children)

I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn't like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:

He enjoys the arguments, it's nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.

It's more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don't, and that's okay.

Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he's optimistic about it.

The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.

There aren't many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it's going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.

If you make your own he's looking forward to seeing it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

If most pirates are the kind who sail around drinking rum and chasing booty, patent trolls are the kind of pirates who blow a big hole in the side of a supertanker to steal a few barrels of oil and let the rest drain into the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

It might contribute in some small aesthetic way to deterring them, which seems a much better ambition.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

If that is a big problem, one alternative is to get a post office box.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

2017 and 2021 it stayed mostly stable at 190 million users

Interesting that they almost managed to stop the decline for a few years there. In 2024 after the recent string of nonsensical decisions it's down to 158 million.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Mozilla 2012: We're winning the browser war and saving the web. You're welcome.

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

Mozilla 2021: Through inclusiveness and the power of positive thinking we will facilitate leadership towards in-depth studies of what we can do to improve social media.

Mozilla 2024: Running a small mastodon instance is just too hard, we give up.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?

I do! Hadn't thought about it in at least twenty years. Thanks for the reminder, creepy chatbot that inspired this post. Thinking that an LLM could develop "its own sense of desire" was naive and seems ridiculous today, but I suppose their intentions were honorable as well as erotic.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

1984 was written in 1948, after fascists had already demonstrated that capitalism is quite compatible with totalitarianism.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Larry "privacy is dead, get over it" Ellison.

 

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

 

First time since March 2023!

 

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.

 

Update available! This version is very old.

Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn't had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?

1
(fedia.io)
 

you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock

I loaded a page on reddit due to a search result and found out that I'm among the chosen few. Message sent yesterday. They must've gotten fewer takers than expected on the first round of invites if they're now offering shares to people who haven't posted, commented, voted, or done anything else on the site for the past 8 months.

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