aa-jv

>Why do think they deserve to be thanked?

This is the way cults are formed, and from cults, culture.

There's nothing wrong with acknowledging people for their great contributions - unless you're rabidly anti-cult, in which case, nihilism.

Fair enough, but Adobe was an upstart at some point in its life .. I remember the days when the Photoshop set were considered rebellious monkeys who didn't play well with the rest of the print industry .. until they came along and ate the print industry's lunch.

I'd go one step further on Gibsons' statement that the street find its own uses for things, and state that everything starts on the street before it becomes corporate, and then it returns to the street, eventually ...

I think this is yet another case where Linus is leading the pack and showing the industry how to adapt to new technology, and indeed, adopt standard best practices for its application.

I'm in the "AI is great!" optimist camp myself, which is how I felt in the very early days of "this little crappy hobbyist Linux kernel thing that'll never go anywhere important" minix-list flamewars.

Once again, Linus demonstrating that those who understand the code, own the code.

Earthships are awesome, yeah, that'd be a great way to get into the bunker. ;)

Converted school bus? Well, the issue is, I don't wanna pay for gas, man, mmkay... ;)

Lua is the ultimate ricer tool. I've put it in all sorts of places and it has pretty much always been a productive boost to the timetables of the projects.

Its also very flexible and allows a great deal of coding styles. I like the declarative API!

My favourite tiny home is a sailboat. My second favourite tiny home is a solar powered boat (a pretty interesting one recently came to an unfortunate end, however), and my third tiny home is a deep, underground bunker.

Dunno why, I do love all the land-surface homes too, but I dream of having any one of the above to live out my latter days ..

I'm lucky enough to have received one of Grace' nanosecond wires, when .. as a fresh young squib .. I attended one of her lectures and got one handed to me by the Admiral herself.

She was a huge influence on me - as a white male tech nerd - and I have long had a huge interest in women in tech, from Grace to Margaret Hamilton to Jeri Ellsworth and Anouk Wipprecht and more. Jeri's demonstration of her self-made transistors and work rebuilding a tunneling electron microscope were fascinating and rank among the most entertaining things I've seen in a hackerspace this century. Anouks' mad fashiontech excursions are positively exciting. There are many other women technologists who deserve our interest.

So its pretty unfortunate that GCH won't happen this year. I hope there are budding young squibs out there who won't see this as de-motivating with regards to their entry into the technology worlds.

It is standard practice in many industries to do hardware audits, including random controls of chip supplies.

These industries are just not sexy enough for the crypto folks to want to learn from, or about.

Yes, that is true.

Yes, Taiwan is the biggest exporter of chips. Have you audited your chips today?

The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.

There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.

Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.

THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.

Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.

This is what the web is for, kids. An excellent contribution to the understanding of ones fellow human beings.

This is happening across a lot of different industry types ..

In the music technology world, people are having an absolute field day vibe-coding alternative firmwares for devices which have long since been abandoned by their manufacturers.. and it is GREAT!

There is a very exciting revolution happening with the M-VAVE FM1 synthesizer, which has been reverse engineered - and now folks are producing firmwares for it, at a rate of 1 or 2 each week - which radically extend its functionality and give it features NONE of us expected.

For a $60 device, this is phenomenal - and it is fair to say that the M-VAVE FM1 is probably the hottest ticket item in the music technology world, today - putting a lot of manufacturers on notice that either they properly support their locked down, closed-garden products, or the users will.

Truly phenomenal.

And, there are many more such examples: a new firmware for the Arturia MicroFreak, for example, which adds more and more synth engines not considered by Arturia for inclusion (for whatever arbitrary reasons), but definitely shoe-horn'ed into place by MicroFreak users. See also the quite revolution happening around Behringers' firmwares, which is teaching them quite the lesson. I predict either Big Music Tech is going to embrace this trend - and start releasing devkits and SDK's for their systems - or they are going to go the other way and start encrypting their firmware such that AI kiddies can't gain access .. but for the decades of stuff thats already out there, its fair game.

(Details here for those interested, in general, in how music tech is being hacked into oblivion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDmAvZKtqq8 .. and for details about the FM1 and all the amazing firmwares being produced for it by vibecoders, reverse engineers, and hackers alike, check https://old.reddit.com/r/MVaveFM1/)

I still have a drawer full of OpenMoko. A couple Creative Labs Zii Eggs. Some OpenPandora, and even a hacked up FairPhone, donated to my parts bin, non-working.

I sure wish the Zii Egg had made it out of prototype stages. It showed the most promise - a bare-metal Linux OS, multiple cores, very, very easy to write apps for it - just plain C/C++ really.

Linux phones never happened because the distro's constructed for them were overly complicated, unnecessarily encumbered with 'smart features', and just generally (imho), sabotaged by the cult of collective development. Its the sort of project that requires a BDFL pushing things forward - none of the failed Linux phones ever had that.

These days, I'd rather see someone produce an ESP32 phone with LoRA and maybe SDR, and leave it at that.

But, there is another issue. The modems. It is always the modems. Until someone courageously open sources the modem chip and its firmware, there is no hope.

Not really, I'll try to remember to set one up though ..

Add a 'high-water' configuration option which, if reached during a file create/copy operation, prompts the user to Authenticate with 2FA and approve the extended budget.

I'd be okay with this feature if I got a 2FA alert that something 'big' was about to happen, and could approve/deny it in realtime when it happens.

That's great, I seem to remember seeing something about that in the news, way back then.

Happy to know a fellow paper crane enthusiast. It really is a unifying symbol.

I was in Amsterdam for the weekend and it was freezing. I'd underpacked and didn't have a proper sweater, plus it was one of those days where shorts seemed appropriate in the morning, gloves and mittens in the afternoon - so in a frenzy I searched for something warm.

There it was, in the window of some boutique .. a sweater composed of two sweaters, cut up, re-assembled so that the colour swaths represented an origami paper crane.

Gregarious perhaps (I'm a shy white guy), but warm nevertheless, so I bought it.

That one sweater has gotten me more compliments, and random approaches from strangers, than any other device in my life. To the point now that I keep an eye out for the origami paper crane symbol wherever I go, and now have a small collection of badges and embroideries and so on.

The world wants peace. The paper crane is a great symbol for that. I've worn that sweater in very hostile environments (Palestine vs. Zionist demonstrations) and have, categorically, made friends on both sides with that symbol, alone.

If you haven't learned how to fold one, I highly recommend it. Leaving it for the bar help or waiters always brings a smile ..

I'm not trying to rationalize this, but have you really never encountered someone who is inconsolable when they hear someone cuss?

The reason a lot of social network sites censor swear words and other words describing violence, is because they get inundated with complaints from fundamentalists who get offended by language, as if there is some spell being cast on them from afar.

And what I mean to say is, this is the motivation behind the censorship - because fruitcake butterflies think language is going to hurt them.

AI is a big stick: for example, how will the men in boots identify the Scientologists, if they don't first read a bit of Scientology, eh? Ah, they get an AI to do it, so that they don't need to invest the effort to understand the subject.

>Last thing I want in the hands of the Verfassungsschutz authorities is more fucking surveillance.

German culture has a long way to go to rid itself of authoritarianism; the surveillance of the state is a symptom, not the cause. German cultural paranoia ends up manifesting the very thing it seeks to resist. I'm sure there are individuals in the Verfassungsshutz who also identify as anti-fascist - its the methods, not the motive.

A lot of it has to do with religious fundamentalism too, though. There are religious groups whose members believe they are participating in sin if they read words describing that sin.

Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.

For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.

The article from The Space Review comes pretty close to providing some actual evidence.

There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.

I'd like to see evidence which supports the claims and not have to rely on a call to authority fallacy[1] in order to agree with this collective-derived reality.

I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.

None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.

Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

I see a lot of fear-mongering reports from sources claiming authority.

I don't see any evidence.

>fairly strong evidence

Got some?

I do LFS every year, just to keep the chops sharp. It has been an immensely invaluable means of keeping informed with the way things are rolling in the Linux world.

Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?

There are plenty of white papers the human race seem unwilling to want to read on this subject, though ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson

Yes, copyright does protect a work - but you would have to see the point of view of the originator of the work, not the consumer.

Of course it does, don't be myopic.

There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.

That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.

I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.

A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.

The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.