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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • That’s ok if we are talking about malware publicly shown in the published source code… but there’s also the possibility of a private source-code patch with malware that it’s secretly being applied when building the binaries for distribution. Having clean source code in the repo is not a guarantee that the source code is the same that was used to produce the binaries.

    This is why it’s important for builds to be reproducible, any third party should be able to build their own binary from clean source code and be able to obtain the exact same binary with the same hash. If the hashes match, then you have a proof of the binary being clean. You have this same problem with every single binary distribution, even the ones that don’t include pre-compiled binaries in their repo.



  • Is “intent” what makes all the difference? I think doing something bad unintentionally does not make it good, right?

    Otherwise, all I need to do something bad is have no bad intentions. I’m sure you can find good intentions for almost any action, but generally, the end does not justify the means.

    I’m not saying that those who act unintentionally should be given the same kind of punishment as those who do it with premeditation… what I’m saying is that if something is bad we should try to prevent it in the same level, as opposed to simply allowing it or sometimes even encourage it. And this can be done in the same way regardless of what tools are used. I think we just need to define more clearly what separates “bad” from “good” specifically based on the action taken (as opposed to the tools the actor used).


  • I think that’s the difference right there.

    One is up for debate, the other one is already heavily regulated currently. Libraries are generally required to have consent if they are making straight copies of copyrighted works. Whether we like it or not.

    What AI does is not really a straight up copy, which is why it’s fuzzy, and much harder to regulate without stepping in our own toes, specially as tech advances and the difference between a human reading something and a machine doing it becomes harder and harder to detect.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHyprland is now fully independent!
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    2 months ago

    Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.

    I don’t care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.

    You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking… but the opinions of the people running those things don’t matter so long as they keep being reliable.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHyprland is now fully independent!
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    2 months ago

    I have contributed to other projects without really needing to get involved in their community in any personal/parasocial level, though.

    I just make a pull request and when the code was good it was accepted, when not it got rejected. Sometimes I’ve had to make changes before it getting merged, but I had no need to engage in discussions on discord or anything like that. I’ve been in some mailing lists to keep track on some projects, but never really engaged deeply, specially if it goes off-topic.

    If I find that a good code contribution is rejected for whatever toxic reason, then the consequence of that is the code would stop being as good as it could have (because of the contributions being rejected/slowed down), so it’s then that forking might be in order. Of course the code matters.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHyprland is now fully independent!
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    2 months ago

    To his point: if not “discuss”, what is the correct approach against fascism? war and murder? dismiss it, try to “cancel it” without giving any arguments so it can continue to fester on its own and keep growing in opposition?

    To me, fascism is a stupid position that doesn’t make much sense, to the point that it falls on itself the moment you “discuss” it.

    I would have expected that it would be the fascists the ones unable/unwilling to discuss their position, since it’s the least rational one. So it’s certainly very jarring whenever I hear people jumping to defend against fascism while at the same time stopping in their tracks when it comes to discussing it. Even if those unable to reason might not be convinced by our arguments, anyone with reason would. Rejecting discussion does a disservice, because it does put off those willing to listen and strengthens those who didn’t really want an argument anyway.

    Like flat-earthers, they should be challenged with reason, with discussion. Not dismissed as if it were true that there’s a huge conspiracy against them. Whether they listen or not to that reason, dehumanizing them and rejecting civil and rational discourse would play in favor of their movement.

    Stating “genocide is bad” should NOT be a statement of faith. Faith is the shakiest of the grounds, if we are unable to articulate the specific reasons that make genocide be bad, then we are condemned to see it repeat itself. So, I’d argue it’s for the sake of the victims in Auschwitz that antifascism should not be turned into a religion, but into a solid and rational position that’s not distorted nor used willy-nilly.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    3 months ago

    You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

    Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

    In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

    I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

    Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?


  • Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh… but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).



  • “you want a government backdoor on GPL licensed code? publish the backdoor for everyone to use, see and exploit/check for themselves. And/or watch as people simply take a version of the software built from a more reputable source without that backdoor instead. Thanks for the money!”

    “you want to force all foss projects existing in the global internet across countries to get paid by you or close? enjoy your logistic nightmare as you pay to be made fun of by all other countries while I fork projects with one click”


  • It’s changing by having a library like wlroots do most of the work.

    When you consider the overall picture, “wlroots + compositor” is actually less complex than “X11 + window manager” because you no longer need to consider the insanely high requirements of having to have a team maintaining the spaghetti mess of X11 code.

    Wayland-based dwl has roughly the same line count as X11-based dwm (about 2.2k), without having to depend on a whole separate service as big as X11.

    But of course, it being a completely different approach, it’s likely that for most smaller projects (ie. not Gnome or KDE) it’s easier to start a new project than creating a layer to maintain two different parallel implementations.

    If you want something that’s more or less compatible with openbox, there seems to be this project, labwc, which claims to be inspired by openbox and compatible with its config/themes… though I haven’t personally tried it.

    Also keep in mind that openbox (and I expect labwc too) doesn’t include any “panels” / “taskbars” or anything like that… and it’s likely your X11 panels might not work well if they do not explicitly support Wayland (but I believe that, for example, xfce-panel now supports both).




  • You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

    Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

    In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.