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lordhumphrey

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Urgent – OSU Open Source Lab needs your help

gentoo.org
8 points·by lordhumphrey·10개월 전·1 comments

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lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
The "spirit" of FOSS licences the various sorts of ideas that lead to the GNU project and the FSF in the 80s, and all that user-freedom-fighting heritage.

I think even critics of the GNU project and the FSF would have to admit that as historically accurate. I can only presume, then, that your comment is based on a lack of awareness of the history of FOSS licencing.

Perhaps a read of this would be a good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
They provide funding for "Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more!". There was a drop in corporate funding, so they had to rely more on the OSU College of Engineering. Now the College is having its funding cut, so the Open Source Lab might have to close down, if nothing comes up.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Whether an action has gotten a legal thumbs-up or not is of little relevance here.

I'd like to leave the question of why that's true as an exercise for the reader, but your comment makes it sound as if you have trouble with this concept, so let's be explicit - a state operating autocratically can, and often will, rubberstamp whatever it decides it wants to do.

Had a quick look for the numbers from FISA to give you an example of this. https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2013/06/fisa-co... says that they denied 11 requests for surveillance warrants out of 33,900 requests over 33 years of operation.

That's a pass rate of 99.07%!

So allow me to say - a warrant wouldn't have changed anything, they give them out like nothing.

In the article though, it does say: "ICE did not respond to requests for comment from SAN. It is not clear whether ICE or any other law enforcement agency obtained a warrant to use an IMSI catcher — commonly referred to as a “Stingray” — to conduct surveillance."
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Extremely interesting! I did ask myself if all those people would like having their photos online, what with the PRC across the pond. But perhaps I'm being "old-fashioned" there.

Very much appreciate the insider story. I've had a quick browse of your blog and will go back to it when I get a bit more time. Kudos to you for pursuing your interests boldly.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Just read the Wikipedia page - holy sh*t, if you'll pardon my French, what a figure! I haven't done anything with Perl, or Haskell, so this figure was just outside my view. Will definitely check some stuff out, I appreciate the pointer.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
What's amazing is the cynical moral calculus people like yourself engage in when you completely discount some types of human lives, but then display this theatrical shock at the notion that the lives of your personal mythological figures - Presidents and "literal" CEOs - might not be utterly sacrosanct in everyone's eyes, the way they are in yours.

How many lives is a CEO's life worth to you? How many lives is "the life of the President" worth?
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Yes, and the name for this behaviour is called "being scientific".

Imagine a process called A, and, as you say, we've no idea how it works.

Imagine, then, a new process, B, comes along. Some people know a lot about how B works, most people don't. But the people selling B, they continuously tell me it works like process A, and even resort to using various cutesy linguistic tricks to make that feel like it's the case.

The people selling B even go so far as to suggest that if we don't accept a future where B takes over, we won't have a job, no matter what our poor A does.

What's the rational thing to do, for a sceptical, scientific mind? Agree with the company, that process B is of course like process A, when we - as you say yourself - don't understand process A in any comprehensive way at all? Or would that be utterly nonsensical?
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Excellent name! BULLSHIT really captures the spirit of the whole thing.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Marshall McLuhan called, he said to ask yourself, who's driving who?
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
I strongly encourage anyone who finds Meta's repeated crappy behaviour objectionable to delete their accounts on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Or, at least, to delete as many as they can get away with, given their personal constraints and obligations, and otherwise minimise as much as possible the interactions with this company.

Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.

It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
I think you may be being downvoted for the exclamation mark, which I also found a tad over the top, although I didn't downvote you.

Particularly when the mistake you're correcting was so reasonable and charming. It's an excellent example of an "eggcorn".

If you haven't heard of eggcorns, fear not: the word "eggcorn" is itself an autology, i.e., a word that is an example of the phenomenon it describes. So if you remember the word, "eggcorn", you should be able to remember the concept. An eggcorn is a type of malapropism, but one that could plausibly fit the context of the misheard original word or phrase.

So, for example, "eggcorn" could plausibly have been the word for the object which we actually call an "acorn".

Similarly, when I read "into death hears", I immediately knew what the writer meant, and had a little chuckle to myself thinking about how it actually made total sense. So perhaps we could point out to them nicely the lovely eggcorn they were using, rather than text-shouting.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
The comment you're resonding to didn't say one thing about not punishing "actual criminals". What in the world are you responding to?
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
> It's why I'm here - it's one of the only countries on earth for which I'm politically optimistic.

My curiosity is piqued by this. Do you mean to say you've moved there from somewhere place? And what do you mean, why is it the only country for which you're politically optimistic?

I don't mean to pry, and have no ulterior motive or point in asking. It just seems like a strong statement, and I cannot guess what you mean, or if I'm missing some cultural insinuation here or something. Taiwan does sound like a very interesting place to me, generally, though.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
This is a copy-paste of what I wrote elsewhere:

> Here's the definition from the esoteric programming language wiki, which is a lovely resource for anyone interested https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language:

> "An esoteric programming language is a computer programming language designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke, rather than for practical use."
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Your musings at the end reminded me vaguely of https://www.greenarraychips.com/ a Chuck Moore designed computer chip.

"With 144 independent computers, it enables parallel or pipelined programming on an unprecedented scale. Map a data flow diagram or an analog block diagram onto its array of computers for continuous processes without interrupts or context switching."
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Malbolge and then https://github.com/iczelia/malbolge-lisp were mindblowing to me.

And then there's the legendary https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca

"Orca is an esoteric programming language designed to quickly create procedural sequencers, in which every letter of the alphabet is an operation, where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame."
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Forth isn't an esoteric programming language. The word “esoteric” has a specific meaning in this context.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Hmmm. GP listed three languages which are not esoteric, and you've patted them on the back and shared three more which are not esoteric. Oops.

Esoteric language =/= any non-mainstream language.

Here's the definition from the esoteric programming language wiki, which is a lovely resource for anyone interested https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language:

> An esoteric programming language is a computer programming language designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke, rather than for practical use.
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
> 2. We will not accept changes (code or otherwise) created with the aid of "AI" tooling. "AI" models are trained at the expense of underpaid workers filtering inputs of abhorrent content, and does not respect the owners of input content. Ethically, it sucks.

Do you disagree with some part of the statement regarding "AI" in their CoC? Do you think there's a fault in their logic, or do you yourself personally just not care about the ethics at play here?

I find it refreshing personally to see a project taking a clear stance. Kudos to them.

Recently enjoyed reading the Dynamicland project's opinion on the subject very much too[0], which I think is quite a bit deeper of an argument than the one above.

Ethics seems to be, unfortunately, quite low down on the list of considerations of many developers, if it factors in at all to their decisions.

[0] https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relation...
lordhumphrey
·10개월 전·discuss
Could this argument not be made for anything plugged in to OpenAI's API? If so, I don't see how it's a response to the point.

If you make an app for interacting with an LLM and in the app the user has access to all sorts of stolen databases, and other conveniences for black hats, then you've got what was described above. Or I'm missing something?