> It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program.
At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: [email protected]
Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice
The patches are not malicious, but the submitters are unable to explain them. We require submitting a non-trivial patch in order for someone to be considered for a FOSS internship. As there is money involved, this attracts scammers now more than ever.
One solution is to have a screensharing call with the contributor and have them explain their patch. We have already caught a couple of scammers who were applying for a FOSS internship this way. If they have not yet submitted anything non-trivial, they could showcase personal projects in the same way.
FOSS has turned into an exercise in scammer hunting.
Random grid gotcha that drove me crazy some time ago: due to browser bugs we can't use <img> elements with percentage widths or heights as grid items. The grid cell dimensions get blown out to the ones of the original image. Seen in both Firefox and Chromium. Relevant FF bug is probably https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1857365 '<img> grid item with percentage height, "width: auto", "grid-template-columns: auto", and no track stretching makes column to have the same width of the original image's width' (although someone there claims it works in Chromium).
Cosmos does not make Hypatia’s death so much a religious issue as an anti-intellectual on, but the truth is that it was actually a political one. A second problem comes when Dr. Sagan links her death to the destruction of the Great Library. In fact, in the final episode of the original Cosmos, “Who Speaks for Earth”, Carl Sagan says, “The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.”
The problem with this is that the last remnant of the Library of Alexandria were almost certainly destroyed in 391, 24 years before Hypatia’s death, and most of the library was likely destroyed, by accident, centuries earlier.
It sounds strange, but we actually don’t have a very good idea of when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. As best we can tell, much of it was burned unintentionally when a fire spread through the city during Julius Caesar’s invasion in 48 BC. While the majority of the library may have survived that war, it was almost certainly destroyed in the war between Emperor Aurelian and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in the 270s AD. This also appears to have been unintentional, as a large part of the city was burned.
What little was left of the library was deliberately destroyed in 391, when Emperor Theodosius I banned Paganism. The remaining repository of books in Alexandria was destroyed along with the Pagan temple it was stored in. [Even this has no evidence as pointed out by Tim O'Neill in the blog comments]
I admire most of Dr. Sagan’s and Dr. Tyson work, but when they characterize Hypatia’s death and the burning of the Great Library as the deliberate (and linked) actions of an anti-intellectual mob, they are simply misrepresenting the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...