Gentil

Yes. Of course. But why do you expect people are directly conversing? Anyone around interested but presumes me as gay wouldn't even bother asking.

I don't think I can clearly explain this.

> Uh... I've had people ask me my sexual preference many times, sometimes in gay clubs. Never once seen it offend anyone, it's more like asking someone for their pronouns.

Thank you. From where I am, people have only relatively recently been open about this. Like I said, experiences vary.

But certain actions eventually would make people think a straight dude gay. Then the people you are interested in "romantically" won't be interested in you cos you're thought as gay. It's so hard to explain this. It's a bunch of things. If it is a one off, it is not an issue. But otherwise it is complicated.

This is why dudes are soooo expressive with their buddies in a closed environment they are comfortable with. Shit is completely different when you are outside of that.

One of the biggest BS I have come to realise is people saying ignore the world and the society. If you have nothing to lose, sure. Else YOU ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY. And there are norms.

Just like people accepting gay people are new thing, the society learning to differentiate who is whom is a new thing as well. Just imagine a woman/man for instance going to a someone and saying - "you are not gay right?". That would be explosive. The first reply could be "what if I am?" in an angry tone. This is tricky cos everybody is learning.

It's just difficult. Now imagine the same happening in an asian country or somewhere where it is relatively new about this. You won't have the same luxury of being given a benefit of doubt even if you mean things in a good sense. Cos the LGBTQ+ community could be going through shit already. So they are by default defensive.

PS: Just sharing my perspective based on things I have experienced and seen. Not hate towards anything or anyone to be extra clear. :peace:

Apart from the UX, I also meant that how long should we run from the fight? Both the App store and play store definitely needs to be regulated more. But the user of the comment to which I replied seems to mean to find refuge in web and ditch mobile stores. But how long is the web safe for?

The browser market is crazy monopolistic with chromium based browsers. The only legal reason why google would like to pay for Mozilla is because they don't want to be crucified for being anti-competitive. But edge being overwhelmingly successful browser means they don't have to worry about that anymore. They can just stop paying Mozilla cos there is another browser in the market. So they could say, "we at google are not being anti-competitive".

With the pathetic leadership at Mozilla, I don't see how long we will see Firefox compete. I mean reckless payment for the CEO while ditching teams and being hated by their own community. So what will you do then?

Running away won't help an indie dev or a small company. :shrug:

Google also is dominating the browser market. Not to mention, I see Manifest v3 as something in this direction. They just don't have the exact amount of control they do in Play store is all. So my question is, how long are you gonna run?

Then keep them all up to date available in at least a single format is a problem. Not to mention some books would only be available in epub, some only in pdf and some are just txt files. And users would want books to be available in certain formats too.

Keeping that number of books up to date from a librarian's POV (like internet archive) is really hard. The formats, the software etc. This is why they counter the marketing of publishers that says "digital copies are forever". They are not. There is server, hard disks, then the software of it all and a never ending dependency hell and issues like that. Just add security to the mix and then boom, it's already crazy hard.

Another intersting thought would be, can you try to keep all the digital books you own Into a multiple formats? Everything! The free ones you downloaded like the pdfs, the epubs and all the formats including probably the technical books you own. Try doing that. Then during a sale, you buy books from humble bundle and some books are only in pdfs. Uff. Now you need to make all those pdfs into mobi format so that you can read them in your kindle.

This effort for dealing with this and software needed for that should paint a good picture. Now scale it up to the whole world with multiple languages and bizillion editions and so many more complexities. :D

PS: I am not arguing. Just thought you might have overlooked the context. If I misjudged, my apologies. :)

Last I read, Zoho was working on solving some Japanese village's issue. Forgot exactly what it was about. Interesting guy and company who are solving problems. Kudos to them.

Damn you Anonymous #136!!!!!!!

Everybody went back to WA after FB's stunt on retracting the privacy policy. I am back to square one on who all are using Signal around me. I don't think there is going to be a better chance than what we got with WA policy change.

Signal had the funding, they had the tech and folks. The momentum, people, media and even people like Snowden, Jack and Elon Musk were with us. They chose something completely different and irrelevant to what would've helped make Signal a standard. What is the point in having this now? Majority of the users who were going to use it are already back in WA. This feature will be used only by a minority.

Another fascinating learning from the whole journey was that a lot of "loud" privacy folks use privacy through obscurity (like security through obscurity) to keep themselves private. They jump ship when their tool gets popular. And these were the loud ones during the whole discussion in Signal forum with respect to Stories. With AI advancements and big corps, we need more folks in the privacy space using private tech. If we don't accommodate non-privacy folks as well, this will be a harder fight than it has to be.

While I don't know the technical side of things now, Manjaro was great as a product. It was far more stable than Ubuntu which was unstable and had older packages. Manjaro's community was awesome and they used to listen to the community as well. The forum was one of a kind. I learned a lot and made good online buds there.

Things started to change when they jumped into business and wanted to make money. They started becoming ignorant of requests and complaints from community. They also stopped doing the original way of things with respect to the distro. That is, they started violating the 2 weeks thing with packages. They sometimes for selective packages went directly to upstream devs ignoring the arch repos. KDE and Systemd are examples IIRC. This means the advantages of tested arch packages arriving to your system 2 weeks after was not there anymore. This borked a lot of systems and brought new issues issues as well. Their excuse was they wanted latest packages. But KDE was connected from a git repo if I remember it correctly. I am not sure if that was stable releases but from development branch of KDE (please verify this specific part, I might be wrong about this as I don't remember well. I don't want to be spreading fake news). Also, systemd. This meant directly going to upstream dev packaging without arch's testing or whatsoever. I remember increased borks after this started happening.

Then just like the blog post mentioned, Jonathon who was handling community and loved by the whole community was thrown out of the team because of the money problem. He was the glue between community and devs. He always tried to help the users. And once that happened, I started became very skeptical.

To make things worse, they had an issue with forums and it went offline. Instead of recovering from backup, they created a new forum where we all had to re-register. The old forum had all the conversations about the money issue which ended up with Jonathon being kicked out. And all the old users from beginning who have been there from the beginning. Their excuse was they wanted to start fresh. They did bring the old forum back in a different URL and put it in read only mode. But I always found it the most effective tactic to kill things slowly. Not bringing back the old one would be extremely criticized. They lost a huge chunk of old users who were frustrated for varied reasons then. They mostly left frustrated. And most new users wouldn't know or ever come across the old conversations. Most old users didn't join the new forum. And all the conversations was smartly hidden away this way. They can wash their hands off by saying - hey! It's available to read. We are not hiding anything. The worst was that they made the new forum bloody strict. This meant no more questioning the team. That was my tipping point. I installed arch and been happy. I saw Jonathon in Arch. Not sure whether he is working with Arch team.

They messed up a perfect system. They could just continue with the old way. Manjaro could've helped arch a lot. But they don't. They did revolutionise things like Manjaro Hardware Detection (MHWD) which automatically installs all your drivers including the graphics card in single click. You could install multiple kernel versions and switch between kernels. This was all nice at the time. But they borked it for some cash. Glad I moved on. Looks like they messed it up technically as well in the last 3+ years.

I have 16GB RAM and even then I feel the hog with Discord, Slack, VS Code, A note app taking up too much memory. Then there is unnecessary security risk of bringing all the browser issues along with it.

People shouldn't have to buy an expensive Mac books to use normal apps. That should be for MLOPS or other processing heavy tasks.

Also, an Electron app uses anywhere around 150+MB to 400ishMB ram on normal cases. For one app.An app like QOwnNotes uses only a small portion of it. 50MB-100MB max. So when you you add just 10 electron apps, the number just blows up.

I feel like whatever progress with performance we are making with processor is just cancelled out with things like Electron. That is just sad.

So no. I don't think this is a good example of loud minority scenario.

I mean, everyone knows tech is moving fast. Especially the JS ecosystem. So now why are you talking sh*t based on your experience like 3 or 5 years ago? At least just go around and read more before you comment.

First of all - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Read the guidelines. This is an unproductive useless comment which isn't encouraged in HN.

Also, others buddy! Others care. He didn't submit this. Others who follow his work did. I just knew this alias "spf13" until today. Not the person or his whereabouts. I run my website with Hugo. So while I didn't care before, NOW I DO! This is how you learn about new stuff. If you don't want, just move on from HN!

Why is this kind of unproductive comments cropping up again and again? Haven't these folks read HN guidelines? If you don't care, move on! Why comment anything at all?

Context - Github copilot license violations.

Two things..

1. This is not some vigilante hacking groups you are talking about. This is MS - a humongous corp. They know doing this is wrong. So it shouldn't matter. It is still illegal and making a proprietary software product is exactly the reason why these things exist. Don't you think?

2. Already public unintentionally. AFAIK, any code that I produce is automatically copyrighted to me. This means if I write something in public and not provide a license, IT IS LEGALLY under the copyright protection provided to me by my country. At least that is the case in US and India which are home to a huge portion of OSS. Do correct me if I am wrong. Putting it like that in public would be just plain stupid for sure. But legally it is still mine. Reproducing it and remixing my work would be illegal. It is just my PITA now to prove that in court is all.

> Whether doing so violates the licenses is probably up for courts to decide.

I am yet to see any attribution to ANY OSS code that it is trained on. The PII and secrets is enough to find out the license of a repo which would make it easier to prove whether they violated it or not. Don't tell me all OSS that copilot has trained on is only public domain stuff. Even ISC license needs attribution.

> Human programmers can do this with search engines.

OK. CAN. And that is wrong too. So when they do, we should incriminate them as well if evidence is out there or if a matter such as this comes to light. How does that change anything I mentioned? Very curious.

1. How do you know Co-pilot violated OSS licenses?

> The aforementioned PII and secrets emitted. And IIRC a support personnel said they even copied GPL licensed code. So there is nothing stopping them from copying MIT licensed ones. Which is still a violation without attribution. So no reason for the benefit of the doubt.

2. Humans copy code all the time. So why can't an AI? Or something along the lines of it...

The answer is 2 parted.

1. A human can only copy so much. Most of them are not in bad faith. And those who are in bad faith are not a humongous portion. An AI just scrapes the code in mass scale which is impossible for a human even with automation. It's also easier for it to learn from this training data compared to someone scrapping the data and maintaining a DB. This is such a common sense thing. None of the laws, policies or systems are made for AI in mind. So it is just a careless thing to say.

2. If are not adhering to OSS licenses then YOU ARE in violation. So if you are not called out or punished, DOESN'T MEAN you are right. Just means you are getting away with it.

This is just a PR exercise for MS. They already have the data and the product. A nobody has the balls to question them. The normalization of these bad behaviors with their good PR being "the guardians of the OSS" is literally taunting the entire OSS community.

This is where I hoped FSF, EFF, SFConservancy or any other group would step up. Nothing so far. Just yelling into the void hoping MS will suddenly do the right thing.

Also another similar podcast episode was BSDNOW 455: Ken Thompson Singularity - https://www.bsdnow.tv/455. The interesting part about Ken Thompson is a small portion if I remember it correctly.

Really good episodes.

Remember the Internet Society planning to sell .org? - https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_sha.... ICANN and Internet Society has been under the spotlight for shitty behavior since a very long time.

W3C is also heavily lobbied by companies like Google for instance is abusing it's browser market share against to make the internet less private. Then there is Manifest v3 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz....

This article is about things like that. The infrastructure privatization and lobbying. Not individual business privatization.

While I didn't like the author's website's patterns, that shouldn't change the fact about what the author is trying to convey.

Thanks for taking the time to share your POV.

Cos I am very serious about having proper lighting on the room I work in. But always thought the screen should be dimmer than the room for some reason.

Then give an option to link it with the firefox account so as to link the Thunderbird desktop and mobile! Just like it works for firefox now. :mindblown: (Obviously Isolate the email app + calendar portion and the RSS + IRC client part.)

That would be a killer app!

Yeah. But with the current geopolitical environment every country is thinking about this. But like I said, ONLY IF they have the motive. Which I also mentioned that the world won't have so as to completely take Taiwan out of the equation.

> RISC-V is still years from matching ARM performance or cost, and by the time it does, a lot of it will likely be getting manufactured by TSMC.

You are probably right. Also RISC-V is used as a support module with Nvidia cards already if I am not wrong. They just are not used as standalone processors. And with M1, I meant ARM in general. But RISC-V is very promising. Like I said, who knows about the future?!

> TSMC is really good at making chips, and really good at learning how to make new kinds of chips, so any change will have to come from other fabs getting equally good.

I don't think me or any country for that matter disapproves that. But with China as it's neighbor, it's just stupid for the world to think everything will be sunshines and butterflies. It's always a good idea to deter from putting everything in one basket.

While the EU, US, India, Australia are all trying to change this semi conductor status quo by building their own manufacturing facilities, it is not easy as I understand it. Am guessing it would take at least 5-10 years to have full fledged production facility in the scale the world demands if this needs to be changed. That is if really wanna be Taiwan free with semi conductors. Which I doubt the world will do. But hey with M1 and RISC-V, there is a whole new future waiting for the semi conductor industry. So who knows what will happen?!