zanny

Note that the sandboxing security theater of flatpak and snap etc is largely just that.

You can have very secure deb packages by having default-deny apparmor rules. This is basically how Android works, it just asks you to grant the permissions in real time (and uses a frankenmix of custom Google fu Android Java API and selinux).

You can also use cgroups to control kernel feature access like devices, networking, peripherals, etc.

It comes from both angles though. Having more software provide an apparmor profile (transpilable to selinux policies, etc) and having GUI-integrated permissions and cgroups control functionality in both software stores (via appstream? it seems to be the common thread) for both at-install and at-runtime permission grants.

The problem of course is inertia. Flatpak isn't even compelled to sandbox and its sandbox is not nearly as comprehensive as one would want when running untrusted software, not just potentially exploitable buggy trusted code.

At the same time it isn't Mozilla Corporations obligation to pay people to write a free and open source wiki that doesn't make them any money back.

Even if they were a legitimate software charity the money for those developers has to come from somewhere.

Firefox was big because the alternative was dysfunctional.

Mozilla cannot really competitively compete with Chrome on features, not for long. Anything new they put out that can pull in a meaningful usershare increase will be replicated by Google. And all the niche features they want to push (privacy et al) aren't going to cause major market swings.

Firefox circa 2004 was dominating because IE was a steaming pile of garbage and Apple had no market share at the time. If you wanted a usable browser it was your only option and even then they were still a minority to the installed by default broken trash.

I've been in the market for a phone all year but pretty much everything is a compromise. Its hard when you want expandable storage, something with a feasibly replaceable battery two years out, a good screen, a good camera, and the ability to keep using the device after two years via Lineageos.

The Zenfone 7 is the last major announcement this year for me to consider because otherwise its a compromise on one of those axis. Phones kinda suck.

The Pixel line sees almost ubiquitous Lineageos support.

Twitter is ruled by the will of the company and by extensions its shareholders and by extension of that the interests of capital.

The Fediverse broadly isn't really ruled, its about who you participate with. It is to the benefit of Mastodon et al that even though the mainstream deplatforms intolerance it doesn't actively prevent them from using the software, just from using their servers of it.

Yea, if you want to be in the mainstream Fediverse you need to play by the consensus rules of that space. But its just that, a consensus of server operators, rather than the will of a corporate entity.

The joinmastodon.org site curates the instances it recommends to only show ones that don't permit racism, sexism and transphobia. OP seemingly wants those on their instance so they won't find it there, and they also won't find them in the global timeline on the "mainline" fediverse because those instances are banned for obvious and good reasons.

You can, however, probably find links into the alt-right sphere fediverse on the chans. And they would be federating together so you can trace those instances to find one you, uh, want.

Offsite offline backups. Redundant ones. This scenario is really no different than if your datacenter had a gas leak and blew up, particularly because you never will ever be able to prove the attacker didn't retain your data somewhere so all you can do is guarantee recovery. Of note in this case is that the thieves only stole 2TB of data - this is a trivial expense to orchestrate a manyfold backup regime for in near real time when the alternative is shelling out millions.

And its also about your threat model. If data leakage of any form threatens your business you need way more security than if you just want to be able to recover from exploits in your publicly facing infrastructure (or the ability for a rogue actor inside the company from sabotaging the business from the inside).

At the most extreme having physical separation of infrastructure with physical token based auth and multiple signature verification to interact with data is going to be a heavy price in diligence to maintain secrecy. At the lowest end having a redundant backup storage array with a cron job on all employee computers to versioned backup files every minute that doesn't have network signin access.

It does happen in Unity and Unreal too when you strictly work in the visual editor without writing much code.

It also happens in Qt and similar WYSIWYG visual editors where they often cannot render full dynamic content in the editors. But in all those cases you can just write everything in code without using the visual tools, and you can do that with Godot as well.

Just from the list in my post:

> elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday

Simple majority legislation

> absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state

Really easy to correct with conditional budget funding on the basis of providing / enabling absentee / mail in voting, again a simple legislative majority on a budget bill

> the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election

First past the post isn't codified into the constitution. The only part that requires constitutional amendment is the electoral college but that can already be overriden with a combination of popular vote interstate compact and said statewide elections being held in an approval or score voting way.

This one requires policy change that is federal law currently mandating first past the post, but its not constitutional. Additionally this could be done in a way that removes federal simple majority requirements in federal elections and instead uses federal funding incentives to pressure states to adopt more democratic election systems because that would face a lot less blowback from anti-democracy interests.

> the continued existence of the electoral college and senate

This is the one that absolutely requires amendment. The electoral college can largely be made obsolete with the interstate compact but little can be done about how undemocratic the senate is. That is wholly intentional though - the senate was introduced to give less populated states more influence in government and to largely provide capital a numerically small wing of congress to control more easily monetarily.

> nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons

Felony voting rights are currently state by state, and again federal law or financial incentives could be used to pressure states to not deprive felons of their voting rights, or it could be codified as law with simple majority.

So of my stated points 4/5 can be done with just regular law, much of it done with just budgetary law requirements.

This is presuming you have democracy now, when studies that show that congressional policy has no correlation to the interests of the people at large but a meaningful correlation to lobbyist money.

In a republic, representatives are meant to be selected as being a stand in for the majority of their electorates will and interests. In aggregate, such authentic representatives would then be proposing policy and instituting an agenda corresponding to the desires of a majority of the public at large.

Studies show a supermajority support in the US now for drug war deescalation, universal health care, military disarmament and an end to the Middle Eastern occupations, more equitable tax code, and more. Policies a substantial minority in congress are even remotely interested in considering let alone passing.

Its not much of a democracy if the people you elect, in aggregate, are not actually acting in the interests of their electorate. At all. Its a democracy in name, but a plutocracy in practice, and to be fair this was the structural intent of the founding documents. Having a senate is undemocratic. Having an electoral college is undemocratic. First past the post voting is undemocratic. Historically, huge restrictions on suffrage, the barriers put in place for newly suffraged peoples to actually vote, general disenfranchisement / difficulties in voting, the lack of regulation on campaigning, etc are in place to perpetuate and empower the plutocratic power duopoly regime incumbent political institutions exist to protect.

But thats where conservative mindsets come from in the first place. Content with the status quo and in fear of things going wrong that they don't want to try to do right. And its not an unfounded fear - centuries of evidence shows regime change never works, especially when its against the interests of a societies incumbent ruling class. But I just don't like maintaining the veneer delusion that America is anything close to truly democratic, or has ever really been.

Note that just because Republicans are wrong (and boy are they) does not make Democrats right. Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election, the continued existence of the electoral college and senate, nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons, and more.

The Republicans are the wrong answer, but by and large and consistently for the last 80+ years the Democrats have not been the right answer. The US has a void (many voids, but this one in particular is most problematic) of a labor / workers party. Democrats are liberals and republicans are conservatives, both of which represent capital interests. This lack of representation is structurally foundational to US government and has been intentional since the founding over 2 centuries ago, and its also intentional that the only path to correcting it without violent revolution is a supermajority of states to compel an amendment to fix it. Which is in and of itself a nondemocratic process because a supermajority of states have a minority of the population.

My problem with this is the assertion that failure == not making a profit. For the OP, yes, if your goal is to make money off your code then writing free software is pretty prone to failure on that front.

Free software is philanthropy. Even if you somehow are getting paid to write it, it cannot be done for profit. If your objective is revenue discarding the burgeoning international IP regime as a source of income is foolhardy.

That being said, software for profit is hugely contrary to software that is used. Its infinitely harder to see anyone else use your code and you must always be cognizant that your proprietary for sale code is always going to see orders of magnitude less utility and adoption than free code.

So when you write software from day one the objective is going to be to either maximize money or maximize utility. They are contrary to one another. Some would argue that making money == ability to do more work == more utility but no amount of time invested into software used by a few will compare to less software being used by orders of magnitude more people.

And there is also no guarantee of success. Its why proprietary, popular software exists. Making a proprietary or free product does not guarantee money or use. But depending on which you want going for one will hugely limit your ability to obtain the other.

This axis also comes up in free software itself between permissive vs restrictive licensing. If your code is MIT / BSD / Apache / etc you will almost certainly never make money from it. Anyone can just use it however they want with no restrictions and will do so. It will maximize its utilization with no regard for the ethics or objectives of said use.

If you license it restrictively, IE GPL or CC-SA, you will reduce your potential adoption audience to not include those that want to distribute it in propriety without providing their users the same freedoms they got from you. This can, however, be the same exchange of utility vs money, or, more often, time. Infectious free software propagates slowly but does cause the general amount of freeness to increase through permeation. It also lets you sell licenses for proprietary use and is one of the only major ways to monetize free software consistently, see Qt.

And Godot. You know, the 15 year old totally free engine of 30,000 commits 2.5 million LOCs that also does pretty much everything.

Is there a legitimate law on the books that Fedex et al cannot legally deliver letters, or is it just that subsidized postage stamps are so cheap no private company can profit off paper mail delivery?

Because letters are paper but so are magazines, newspapers, etc that I know are delivered by non-USPS mail carriers.

It isn't a very persuasive argument to destroy cheap post for the masses to... let investors make money. As it is if usps was incapable of fulfilling its duty private entities could enter the market at way higher prices and if useful would see business.

Importantly its because kids don't want to be a part of the "old" culture. They actively reject entering places with an older established demographic because they want to define their own spaces.

Tiktok by its nature cannot maintain the momentum it has with kids 14-18 now with the kids that are currently 8-12. They will reject it no matter what Tiktok does because thats how kids are conditioned in the west to behave.

Replacing minium wage with UBI is definitely a net good.

Don't buy the "companies will start treating you humanely if only they could pay you less". Corporations, particularly publicly traded ones, are in competition for profit. In most sectors exploiting your employees to the fullest presents a positive return on quarterlies no matter how much or little you pay them. Maximizing return on dollars committed is fundamental to growing revenues.

UBI helps improve worker condition by making the negotiation between labor and capital more equitable. So long as one person comes to the table for their needs and the other comes for their ones the former is always disadvantaged and ripe for exploitation.

I can't imagine the population of any country would be too happy when google.com returns a "Service discontinued due to law blah blah blah" when they want to look up how to beat eggs.

This is what happens when you make a string of 10-30 characters someones property.

UBI isn't "expensive". Its not a sunk cost. Its wealth redistribution, not destruction. It makes your states books look massive to implement - "wow, the government is taking for trillions to cover its expenses, thats so much!" but if one of those expenses is guaranteeing the minimum standard of living to everyone that is stimulative.

Compare that to US defense spending now. Of course, 2.4 trillion a year in UBI payments is still 4x more than the US spends in the defense budget every year, but defense is a monetary black hole - the return on investment is awful because unless all the personnel and equipment commitments correlate directly to substantial amounts of economic enablement (and they really don't - the most direct example is exposing oil markets in the Middle East through occupation in recent years, but pretty much no country on Earth is lining up to pay what would functionally be protection money to the US military mob for being global police) then you build the tanks, bombs, trani the troops, run the bases, etc to do the equivalent of dig and fill ditches. There is no realized productive value in having the weapons capacity or entrenchment internationally the US military has.

That is the kind of money drain in government that can wreck a nation through siphoning of its profitable yields. Most would spend UBI on immediate goods requisite to human survival, that is a huge capitalization opportunity. Tremendous growth. The rest would be paying more in taxes than they get in UBI anyway to cover the costs.

Except if its just a price shock than the increased profitability of apples will attract investment in apple farming to produce more apples because of unmet demand and fair market conditions. The price would go up, the profitability margin would be exploited by increased competitive production up to near break even costs, and prices would fall back to where they are today just with way more apples being grown.

In practice in pretty much every industry in the US incumbents put up regulatory barriers behind themselves to prevent competition from emerging.

A nice side effect of UBI is that this scenario you describe, plus the hundreds of other undesirable jobs that people are forced to do now to have shelter that thus subsidize their real costs would be hugely pressured to automate them.

In a UBI economy the economic pressure to get self driving trucks would be an order of magnitude greater, creating financial incentives for Google et al to pour more money into AI research to achieve it because the market value is so much greater when truckers are demanding much higher pay to justify the labor when they have a choice in it.

The same would apply to an automated garbage truck that can use CV to scan refuse and collect it via a standardized bucket system rather than having two impoverished desperate humans cling to the back of the truck being paid dirt to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

UBI would probably be the most beneficial policy to spur the R&D that gets us to singularity the fastest.

Most proposals don't give UBI to dependents. You get UBI when you are no longer the obligation of someone else because then you are truly on your own.

It is important not to inadvertently incentivize those without the financial means to raise kids to have them. Its better for their mental health, society as a whole, and the children if they economically prosper first and reproduce later.

If producers are able to totally game a commodity market and control prices so completely than you have bigger problems than just poverty.

And yea, we do. If we had UBI tomorrow and people wanted more apples because they could afford more fresh fruit the apple cartels of today would collude prices up and use regulatory capture to block competition from entering the market to supply the elevated demand for apples.

But thats basically saying "hey, you want a government in your interest, you should probably get to a democracy first". If businesses control the legislature you don't have a democracy to begin with and should probably get that first before talking about... pretty much anything else. Because any other conversation is eminently pointless if you aren't influential upon your government.

Fixing housing policy is not exclusive with UBI.

And in most states there are minimum square footage requirements that, when too high for the incomes of the population to sustain them in housing, are going to be ignored by said population.

If your tax burden is overwhelming to your finances you are going to get more out of UBI than you get taxed into it lest its failed in its primary goal of wealth redistribution.

Your fellow citizens are not employing you or else the desolate ghettos would be overflowing with capital growth.

Traditionally it takes a capitalist to start a business that can feed and house a population and that capitalist is in it to extract value from their labor. The job does not exist to serve the community, it exists to make the business owner richer. All the demand in the world will not build a sandwich shop lest a capitalist has the funds to build the building. Even if that capitalist is a local who can get a bank loan to do it, etc.

When those people move from high rent areas to the presently dilapidated small towns that UBI would revive the renters in the cities won't be able to price gouge their units like they are used to.

Right now housing is totally out of wack because there is an extremely scarce resource (urban housing) that everyone wants and cartel like control of supply to prevent expansion thus making the price grow uncontrollably to consume as much of the maximum incomes earnable in the area as possible.

If suddenly people had a choice between slave for subsistence wages in an extremely high CoL area or move somewhere incredibly cheap and live off government cheese those that make that choice will deflate the demand until a more equitable equilibrium is reached.

So while your landlord could try charging you more for your UBI adjusted you will have the bargaining position that they almost certainly won't be able to replace you with someone willing to pay such outlandish rents.

> Easier way is to think UBI as "free meal" tickets and free housing. Which doesn't sound all that appealing.

For the 20% of food insecure families or ten million+ homeless people in the US it would probably be very appreciated.

And it isn't just the outright homeless, its those currently in abusive households that have no out too.

And it might surprise you, but the working poor - the 80% of paycheck to paycheckers - aren't going to luxury sporting events or buying luxury goods right now anyway. They are paid too little to afford it when the cost of subsistence is so high.

Because the logistics of government bodies trying to guarantee essentials while somehow getting them as efficiently as markets in optimal conditions can is anything but simple.

The IRS sent me a $1200 months ago via direct deposit in the bank account it already had on record for me. Setting up public bank accounts at post offices so every citizen has access and having the tax apparatus that already collects all your financial information reverse the process for 12-24k a year is extremely easy to implement compared to establishing entirely new branches of government.

There might be an argument that the food stamps program can be made universal for a fixed amount for everyone as a compromise position. IE you get 800 instead of 1k a month in UBI but get $200 on an EBT card to buy food with. But a UBI lets you simply abolish the bureaucracy of food stamps altogether.

Depends on the phone. Most 2015-2019 Qualcomm phones use niceness to determine CPU allocation, whereas Android 10 has more complete cgroup support where different groups are assigned to different cores and the APIs categorize tasks / threads / processes by what they are doing into different execution profiles. Pre 10 had some fixed cgroups available but it wasn't as comprehensive.