Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

I’ve installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can’t remember ever having a compatibility issue. I’m sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it’s still 2005.

They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!

That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.

These days there’s 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don’t even have to know ls to use it.

Fair. I’ve worked in tech for just over a decade now, and I’ve only been in the polar opposite environment, and found it sorta suffocating. Everybody knows this guy is pumping out crap, and every bug in the system comes from his part of the code, but well…if anybody says it, or even hints it, they’re being unnecessarily confrontational, and nobody ever gives anything but positive feedback in peer reviews.

I feel, from my limited experience, like the 90s might have been peak machismo rock star hacker work culture, and the pendulum has now swung to the very far side.

I mean, that’s fair, and as was pointed out elsewhere Linus has sought help for his temper.

On the other hand, for all the talk of how “unprofessional” it was for him to behave this way, he did shepherd an OS kernel from a hobby project to the most popular OS on the planet (with the possible exception of Minix, apparently…)

I agree that polite directness might be better, bu IMHO the more common polite indirectness and avoidance of any hint of conflict is clearly worse.

Well that’s pretty hilariously ironic. I’m nothing like this, I wish I were more comfortable being direct. But meanwhile, you heap abuse on me and threaten to beat me up because I said “boy, it’s nice to see someone speaking directly”. You’re much worse than Torvalds, and I completely agree it would be a terrible idea for us to ever work together. Or for you to work with anyone else, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s kind of invigorating to see somebody speak so plainly. No “There’s a couple issues we should maybe discuss”, no “Let’s loop back on that sometime”, no “Hmm, is that really the best approach? Do you have any documentation?” Just a straightforward “Dude, this is shit! Here’s some reasons why!”"

Having worked for a decade in tech, I would love it of people were this direct.

You can label your devices. When formatting, do mkfs.ext4 -l my-descriptive-name /dev/whatever. Now, refer to it exclusively by /dev/disk/by-label/my-descriptive-name. Much harder to mix up home and swap than sdc2 and sdc3 (or, for that matter, two UUIDs).

I’ve played Skyrim and Fallout 3 & 4 on Linux, and Uncharted. They worked just fine.

You need to enable Proton for all ‘unsupported’ titles in Steam (literally two clicks). After that…the only games I’ve found that don’t work are down to anti-cheat. I used to occasionally have to change the Proton version for some games, but it’s been a while since I had to do that.

It’s nothing like gaming on Linux was 10 years ago. It’s much more like gaming on Windows, the last time I did it: you occasionally find a game that needs tweaking, but 95% work flawlessly.

Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).

Another problem: legislation like this cements the status quo. It’s easy enough for large incumbents to add features like this, but to a handful of programmers trying to launch an app from their garage, this adds another hurdle into the process. Remember: Signal and Telegram are only about a decade old, we’ve seen new (and better) apps launch recently. Is that going to stop?

It’s easy to say “this is just a simple hash lookup, it’s not that big a deal!”, but (1) it opens the door to client-side requirements in legislation, it’s unlikely to stop here, (2) if other countries follow suit, devs will need to implement a bunch of geo-dependant (?) lookups, and (3) someone is going to have to monitor compliance, and make sure images are actually being verified–which also opens small companies up to difficult legal actions. How do you prove your client is complying? How can you monitor to make sure it’s working without violating user privacy?

Also: doesn’t this close the door on open software? How can you allow users to install open source message apps, or (if the lookup is OS-level) Linux or a free version of Android that they’re able to build themselves? If they can, what’s to stop pedophiles from just doing that–and disabling the checks?

If you don’t ban user-modifiable software on phones, you’ve just added an extra hurdle for creeps: they just need to install a new version. If you do, you’ve handed total control of phones to corporations, and especially big established corporations.

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

They’ve given me too many headaches…

I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn’t.

Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven’t done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to ‘get’ it yet.

Or mutable constants…