parasense

I think the issue here has historically been something like... the government should not be in the business of mandating taxes, and then preparing taxes... as that could be a conflict of interests. But that seems like classic FUD to me, but it's an issue we should monitor.

Obviously it's in every US taxpayer's self interest to pay as little tax as legally possible. If a government run system can achieve that reality, then fine. If however a government run system doesn't have a fiduciary duty to optimize the return, then it's probably not great, if not unethical

> Guys I bought a huge vanity building noone is using anymore plz help me avoid the consequences of my own actions

While there is potentially a point to be made here, your argument about the sunk cost of empty facilities is misplaced, and has nothing to do with measuring productivity. If managers are able to measure performance & productivity, and see a general decline with a remote workforce, then that rational stands on its own merits without any discussion about filling expensive buildings.

The point is (some) people are measurably less productive while working remotely, for whatever reason. Most folks are slightly more productive at first....

""" Hey look at me, I'm working from home, see how busy I am(?)... I'm super productive, let me show you how productive I am... yadda yadda... """

The first few days and weeks of WFH are magical for most people, and it makes sense why people want to continue to have the privilege. But gradually over time many fall into the trap of working from home; once the novelty wears off, the drive & motivation to be productive fades.

It's the usual nonsense. Old media, newspapers, television broadcast, etc... would like to extract tax from Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc... who hyperlink to media on their websites. They would very much like the courts to determine, in their favor, that a hyperlink is effectively re-publication of their copyrighted materials, thus entitling them to compensations.

Similar.

Used to run flagship phones, replaced them on the yearly, ran various Android builds on current phone and/or older phones....

At some point I simply stopped caring, started to get the pixel-A phones, and lived happily ever after. I think my Nexus 6p was the last flagship phone I owned, and I probably swapped the battery in that like ~5 times before I got the boot-loop of death. These days I won't be bothered to replace a battery, unless there is a compelling reason. Just get another phone, and move on.

> The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.

Even omitting the "criminal" implication, that sentence has a big problems.

> The origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.

Let me rephrase that:

> The origin of cryptocurrencies is not checked by cryptocurrencies services.

The idea is ridiculous at face value.

However, it does illustrate the best & worst part of blockchains -- everything goes on the blockchain. The government loves that audit trail. But how is an ordinary person to know some wallet addr is a pedophile, or terrorist, or druglord, or whatever? I mean that as an honest question. Is there some public crypto-wallet watch-list everyone is supposed to be referencing prior to doing p2p transactions?

Like you, I wonder how this person could be prosecuted? In the free-world, writing software is considered free-speech, at least in the USA, but I'm not sure in the Netherlands or wherever this person was apprehended? There are of course exceptions... like writing malware or viruses, etc.. So like you, the situation seems to entail something more.. like perhaps running an operation with clearly articulate facts indicating criminal activity. You know, the old saying goes "it's what you know, and when you knew it". So like, if the person was aware of criminal activity, taking part in criminal activity, etc.. I suppose an argument could be made.

Yeah, Docker the company is funky.

Docker the software is also funky.

I would imagine a $500 dish, plus installation (which can be done oneself) is much cheaper than digging trenches for fiber or copper lines, or hanging lines on utilities with obnoxious right of ways. For the cost of the dish to be cited as a blocker is mysterious, it's actually cheap compared to the prices quoted to truly rural folks to get fiber pulled to their remote locations.

It's a political move against Elon, just like the previous EV TAX incentive where the strings-attached involved having factories with union labor. Sure $500 is costly, but it's better than nothing.... that's the point.

> This is the core of the issue. A user will genuinely come to the platform for those features and then is locked in. The lock in will sometimes even cost the user more than the value of the free stuff over the duration of the collaboration by virtue of not being easy to leave.

In the context of RHEL/CentOS examples, the situation is a bit more nuanced.

I believe Red Hat was already offering a generous free subscriptions for developers, and whatever stuff like folks running labs, or trying-before-buying. Then during the CentOS Stream drama they decided to expand the free-tier to straight allow smaller "production" users, which apparently (supposedly) represented the majority of the ballyhoo'd CentOS community.

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...

But there were certainly large-scale CentOS deployments, who probably wouldn't qualify for the new "free-tier" terms, so perhaps they had legitimate grief? If a legitimate grief includes the right to complain for something they receive for free?

> On the other hand the companies put in the freebies with the explicit intention of attracting a critical mass of users, and most of the times with the expectation that they will be removed once that target is reached. Then some creative "moral" accounting disregards that for those freebies the users also provided something of great value - they supported the platform in rising to wherever it rose. The platform may have extracted more value from the user than the user extracted from the platform. Each one of those free users probably brought a few more with them.

And that's the nuanced part, at some point Red Hat quietly took over CentOS, paid for the copyrights, and started paying it's core team a nice salary to continue doing what they were doing. The rumor was the project was on the brink of ending, or something like that... due to not having any funding, the whole "free-tier not being profitable" problem being discussed here.

Apparently CentOS wasn't getting much in the way of donations, besides folks hosting mirrors, or donating old hardware, or sometimes even rackspace in a data-center for build-hosts used for RPM builds. Supposedly the CentOS community was really cheap, or attracted folks with those personality traits, alongside other folks who were there purportedly for the perception CentOS was extra extra stable, something along the lines of lagging behind RHEL, the thrash'n'churn would somehow be less impact. You might characterize those as the neck-beard "get off my lawn" crowd, and they are difficult to engage.

> So while to a point I understand the "you didn't pay so you didn't lose anything" mantra, I'm also completely aware that this was part of the long term strategy of the company and it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free". A more honest and transparent strategy would be to set the expectations from the start, people can choose to take the freebie for a time knowing that at a predefined point they will cost.

The weird part is CentOS became the upstream for RHEL, and continues to exist, and is in many way a better choice (besides being free-tier) due to having fixes first, etc...

> And the statement that "you don't like it build another one yourself" is very biased. From the ones being at the top of a mountain supported by users who have to pay to get out, to the ones who'd have to compete with the mountain when they can only start with a hill. It's what FB will tell you when you object to their questionable practices.

But ultimately that's the point, By putting CentOS stream ahead of RHEL, the so-called black-box, or whatever Red Hat secret sauce for building enterprise Linux... was revealed to the whole world. Now, anybody can audit this work, reproduce the results; all the things... before then it was not so easy.

> - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.

A legitimate example of free speech. Zimmerman published his code in the appendix of scholarly book, in addition to posting online in source & binary form.

> - Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically

A terrible example, and not comparable to your first example. Swartz gained physical access to a network room he was not supposed to be, inside a building he was not supposed to be, connected a laptop to a LAN he was not granted access.... When you say programmatically, you must mean the parts where he proceeded to download JSTOR using his laptop? Has was criminally trespassing, accessing a network he knew he wasn't allowed to access. The tragic outcome was due to... hate to say it, he had well known mental issues that amplified the stress he felt when being indicted for a crime he knew he was guilty.

So I get what you're saying, but you might want to limit your examples to abjectly reasonable ones that withstand scrutiny. Otherwise it might look like a bandwagon, generalization, or even false dichotomy.

> Up until now, it was at least marginally possible to state "But I didn't know it was illegal. TornadoCash was doing the exact same thing for years and never got into trouble".

Oh I totally get that, but...

I reasonably believe in good-faith that it hasn't been categorically proven to be illegal. The reasons for this may seem obvious to many, but just it's not for anybody else then I'll give at least one persuasive argument. Illicit activity happens through legitimate financial transactions. For example, if I trade somebody a pizza for $10, how am I to know that $10 wasn't used in a criminal activity, ever, in the total existence of those note's circulation? And further, by using cash at all, as a concept insofar that cash is not rigorously tracked while in circulation, that the whole cash money system is illegal... Cash based economies to a great extent protect the privacy of participants. Those machines that make change, I suppose that's money laundering, and I would suppose they are laundering money for someone, but also... they be making legitimate 20x quarters from a $5 bill in a coin operated business setting. The quarter change making machine is the physical analog of a crypto mixer, but it's perhaps a bad example. Because making change for the sake of privacy is an unlikely activity, albeit a reasonable legitimate (if you ask me) activity.

I honestly would love to see more court precedence set on some of these so-called "structuring" laws where somebody intentionally "structure" or "laundered" money for the honest-to-goodness sake of legitimate privacy, or even for somehow being a form of free speech, something like that... to strike away some of these absurd regulatory powers before a panel of jurors.

>While the purported purpose is to increase privacy, mixers like Tornado are commonly used by illicit actors to launder funds, especially those stolen during significant heists.

Think about the children!

In my experience, even if the ORG or TEAM does not adopt the policy of adding type annotations, I just do it anyways. They might not use mypy, but I do.

One caveat is I've stopped adding type annotations for anything but the most latest Python versions. Mainly because I got tired of having to deal with importing modules for things like unions, or whatever container types... all of that should be in the core language, and in more recent python that is happening.

News papers and anybody with a printing press used to hold that same power. So it seems like the same thing, just faster, and whatever else... but that might be a too simplistic perception, ignoring other factors... or perhaps not.

I remember at the time the FOSS community found a bunch of prior art that would have most likely invalidate the Microsoft claims. There were plenty of graphical UI in existence that Microsoft probably copied. I do not have links to the epic /. flame-fests on the topic, but perhaps somebody else can find them. Lots of people were sharing links on slashdot with evidence showing how Microsoft would lose.

> "The supermarket is adding customers to secret watch-lists with no due process, meaning shoppers can be spied on, blacklisted across multiple stores and denied food shopping despite being entirely innocent," said Big Brother Watch's director Silkie Carlo.

To opt-out, one simply chooses to not shop at that business. Also, to avoid biometric recognition, one would have to protect their identity, in essence covering their face while in public. In the age of Covid-19, wearing a face mask is considered to be quite sensible, but also has the added perk of increasing privacy.

> "This is a deeply unethical and a frankly chilling way for any business to behave."

It's not deeply unethical, and it's certainly far from imoral. Having security cameras is a sensible activity. Having people who monitor security cameras is a sensible activity. Having those people monitoring the cameras remember past security incidents is sensible. Automating the whole process is reasonable.

It's intellectually dishonest to proclaim a system is unethical simply because it's more efficient at detecting unwelcome guests than a typical human would do anyways. It's like saying it's unethical to not allow cheating.

> How is this allowed in light of the interstate commerce clause?

It's complicated.

Obviously a website cannot simply proclaim to only facilitate the dissemination of information to people exclusively in one state, or to exclude people in another. There is practically no concept of mutual exclusivity or mutual inclusivity on the internet, so then it's abjectly "interstate" or even "international". But it's not that simple.

The commerce clause tends to apply to federal laws, of things that transit state or territorial lines. Just because something could transit a state line, does not mean the all things in all states are automatically under federal regulation, or that federal regulation has supremacy. Obviously certain things are legal in one state but not in others, and things might be legal or illegal at a federal level regardless of interstate commerce.

The question is, is free speech subject to interstate commerce? What about commercial speech (which is afforded less 1st amendment protections)? Since we are talking about free speech, commercial or otherwise, does the idea of commerce clauses even apply? According to Heller case, and recently reaffirmed by the NY v Bruen case, when dealing with civil liberties the courts must apply strict scrutiny.

So it might boil down to a simple 1st amendment case without any commerce clause mental gymnastics.

> They sold just for perception reasons.

Based on the charts, as best I can tell those bitcoins were probably bought and sold at approximately the same price range. This assumes the buying prices in February 2021, and selling Q1 2022. One might speculate Tesla set-up an automatic stop-loss trade.

I dunno, during economic recessions it's generally wise financial advice to park cash on the sidelines, liquidate fluid assets, etc..

> Besides, I'm glad to see interoperability mentioned there, perhaps one day we could text from one messenger to another one without being held back by the owner.

By forcing message passing platforms to submit to sharing private encryption keys? And that interoperability entailing the possibility of passing messages to government eavesdropping schemes? Sounds like a utopian paradise!

> Fines are up to 10% of global revenue for the first offense, and 20% for repeat offenses.

For Alphabet (Google) the revenue distribution from 2015 to 2021 was approximately 33% for all of Europe, Middle-east, and Africa. It's unclear to me the actual European numbers since they are combined EMEA.

For Apple in 2021 the revenue was approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

For Facebook in 2021 the revenue was also approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

So it's safe to say that a first offense would potential halve the revenue for the region, and a second offense would remove the financial rationale of doing business in the region.

Story time:

This one time I was hired as a tier-3 Unix & Linux support engineer at managed-hosting provider who shall not be named. This was back in my prime, I'd already had 10 ~ 15 years industry experience, so I was hired to deal with the really nasty problems that percolated up the chain, and to solve those problems via ongoing process-improvement loop. Over time my job got easier and easier, because lower tier engineers gained training and better standard, procedures, etc... I was on a two person team, we traded the on-call duty every other week. One day the other person left the company, and that began a comedy of errors...

We tried to fill the position both internally and externally, but the position was mostly vacant. Meanwhile I was covering the on-call 24/7 on a tentative basis, until we hired a permanent replacement. Welp, long story short... I fell victim to my own success. Management observed that there was no apparent disruption to the tier-3 area of operation, and that was mostly true, so they decided to eliminate the redundancy. BIG MISTAKE!

I politely told management that I'd no longer be covering on-call 24/7, and go back to every other week; That I was burnt-out waiting for a replacement, and not being able to plan vacations, or even experience off-hours serenity for fear of the on-call phone ringing. That didn't go very well, I was told that I'd be subject to disciplinary action, and they would make accomodation for vacations, but that I had to remain on-call 24/7.

So I decided to become a party animal, every other week. As soon as I left work for the day, I'd start getting drunk. I had parties every night, or went to parties, bars, or whatever... on the weekend I'd go camping at state or national parks with 1-bar of signal for on-call device, I'd be on a boat in the middle of a lake an hour away from my laptop back at the cabin. Stuff like that, pretty much I'd make myself available 24/7, but there was zero assurance I'd be sober or whatever... every other week.

This one time I went into work, and somebody was joking to me about something in context, like as if I knew what they were talking about, but I had no idea. Apparently I was engaged the night before while blackout drunk, and was semi-belligerent with the tier-2 engineer, but was able to get whatever emergency escalated issue resolved in a most anti-climatic manner. The story I heard was something about slurring-out linux commands from a noisy bar, and threatening to drive home (drunk) to ssh into a customer's system. But whatever instruction I gave over mobile did the trick, and the company barely met the contractual SLA for that incident!

So my plan kinda backfired. Management figured out what was going on, and while being applauded for doing my job, I was formally written-up for being drunk on-call. So I responded by stating that's only every other week, and my on-call rotation is documented on the company calendar. I asked if I was never permitted to drink off-hours while employed at the company, and that got HR involved. Apparently it was not entirely legit to be on-call 24/7, nor to intrude into my personal life to such an extent. So I was asked to sign something, an amended employment contract. I refused, and suddenly my performance reviews tanked the next few quarters, and was eventually let-go via a round of "layoffs". The entire tier-3 was eliminated, and they went with a tier-0 ~ tier-2 hierarchy (whatever that entails). No harsh feelings, I'm still in touch with many peeps.

It was at this point I transitioned from supporting Linux to making Linux. Pursued my passion, and started working full time as open source developer, and lived happily ever after not being on-call ever again. Or so I thought. Turns out software development occasionally has grindy rushes to meet deadlines, the so-called "crunch" culture, and instead of having a company provided on-call device... work peeps were calling my private number, in the middle of the night.

And so it goes...

I'd really love to see container constants. As of this writing only strings or numbers can be set constant.

``` const map[uint8]string { 0: "thing1", 1: "thing2", } ``` That way tables of data can be made immutable at compile.

Folks are left to invent stupid hacks, that don't really work. For example, a function that defines a template and returns:

``` func my_data() map[uint8]string { return map[uint8]string { 0: "thing1", 1: "thing2", } } ```

And then we have folks running silly function calls for the sake of avoiding mutability.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why this hasn't been done. We've all read the arguments against adding things to the language, but I accept in part, and reject in part that argument. Complexity always increases, so it's understandable to put the brake on run-away complexity. But GO is slightly pathological when it comes to the avoidance of adding sensible language features. The thing is most folks would rather have a slightly more complex compiler than a limiting programing language.

Agreed. Jane Fonda was a useful idiot.

I only read the first article in the four-part series, which extols the virtues of darkmode. So perhaps later articles pick apart the first, or describe the nuances? Regardless, DarkMode is like a pair of sunglasses. Sometimes one wears shades, sometimes one doesn't... and some really cool people are always wearing them because they are so cool.

I completely reject the premise of this, that one is somehow EU citizens are not personally responsible for the information they themselves put online.

The most hilarious thing is cookies!

For example, cookies exist, and they work a certain way... and despite not liking how they work.. they are here, and not going away, and imposing some kind of contract-law of cookies being accepted or rejected totally ignores that the user has, and always had, the ability to reject cookies at the browser level, unilaterally or with policies, without any contract laws.

> I also don't care that much whether the proprietary firmware is stored on on-board flash and programmed from the factory or if it's uploaded by my OS when the driver is loaded.

Bingo!

Nobody cares about firmware, that's not the issue, never was... but somehow that became the narrative repeated by people who don't know what they are talking about.

Many firmware loading drivers have caused drama over the years. I'm not sure if anybody remembers when Pottering and Sievers re-worked udev to change the ordering of how firmware was loaded from user-space, trying to improve how computers booted, by graphing firmware loads, determining the loading ordering, etc... which sometimes need to happen before it's kernel driver loads, or sometimes the driver itself is able to load the firmware, or the driver begin lazy, expects udev to load the firmware after the kmod is loaded... As a result, the kernel loads firmwares itself.

I'd say the whole firmware thing needs to be put under review, with concrete rules how they are loaded, and what their interfaces has to look like, and what hardware abstraction rules actually apply.

> this open-source release is nothing but a way to circumvent the GPL issues

Talking about strawman arguments... that's a doozie!

Instead of ignoring your strawman, staying focused on the topic...I'm going to address this nonesense...

Firstly Nvidia is not in violation of the GPL. Secondly, nobody cares about GPL violations, most certainly not the mainline kernel community. They do not pursue blatant GPL violations, because litigation is not productive in terms of improving the kernel, but keep in mind Nvidia is not violating the GPL. Thirdly, user space libraries that interface with a kernel API are not violating the GPL. Folks are allowed to run proprietary software on Linux. Do I like that, no... I certainly don't love it. However, Nvidia running user space graphics libraries is not much different than Radeon drivers using Mesa in userspace, it's how graphics architectures work in 2022.

So it's kidna ironic you're arguing about something separate (straw-man), and even then that argument fails...

Now then, putting your tangent aside... The whole point here is to start with the kernel, and get the kernel wrapper driver that interfaces with the hardware's firmware binary interface open sourced. The whole point is to get the driver into mainline, someday... Once we have that, we can untangle the the spaghetti of graphics API libraries, perhaps even port them to Mesa. Nvidia most certainly uses an intermediary low-level graphics representation for their graphics cards, so they can support all the various graphics APi's, or what not... it's a very common pattern for graphics cards... one Radeon even fell into not long ago. So it's just a matter of time before we decode this stuff.

But you're not wrong in terms of Nvidia's overall stack being proprietary, at least for now. But that's not important, what's important is Nvidia users wont' have so much drama when their distro kernel upgrades, and they screen goes blank thanks to Nvidia's driver not being compatible with the changed kernel ABI, and the AKMOD not being able to handle it.

I alway just use awk to process csv files.

    awk -F '^"|","|"$|,' '{print $2,$3}' whatever.csv

The above works perfectly well, it handles quoted fields, or even just unquoted fields.... This snippet is taken from a presentation I give on AWK and BASH scripting.

That's the thing about AWK, it's already does everything. No need to extended it much at all.

I believe the answer is yes, but I'm not 100%.

My understanding is the the stream repo sorta rolls forward but leaves behind a trail of X.Y.Z checkpoint repos representing major.minor.batch-number, so that would be like rhel-9.1.0 for the zero-day batch of updates on rhel-9.1

I half suspect Microsoft was bidding for Red Hat, and potentially that provoked IBM into action. It's just a theory, but Red Hat for many years was setup to avoid hostile takeovers from the likes of IBM with so called poison pill stocks or whatever.

Yeah, Red Hat is actually moving the black box of releasing-engineering out in the wide open, for anybody to replicate, and see how the sausage is made.

CentOS Stream would be a perfectly suitable alternative to RHEL9, and in many ways more desirable. And, in a strange way all those people who were being super conservative... more attracted to centos being behind RHEL, as if that made CentOS more stable by being slightly behind... well, that's RHEL now. So.. uh.. maybe just use RHEL instead, since it's now even more conservative? Also, it's important to recognize during all the drama, Red Hat changed their licensing to be pretty much free for small to medium sized operations. So the argument of being cheap, or whatever free value of CentOS is now entirely gone... Red Hat only cares to license from the medium to large.