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Comment Re:If systemd Is So Bad... (Score 1) 25

If it's just one guy at Red Hat's bad idea, as is often claimed, then why does Debian and Arch rely on it?

We had discussions about this here at the time. You may feel free to locate and review them so we don't have to have them again. TL;DR: no clue about Arch, but Debian pushed the decision through with less consensus than usual to support the new GNOME, which depended on it, and which statistically no one was asking for.

Comment Re:This will certainly be great discussion (Score 1) 25

SystemD isn't a monolithic application. It's a collection of utilities that all share the SystemD banner.

It's a bunch of utilities that depend on the same libraries and one another, you cannot just separate out any pieces you want and use them independently, some of them come in packs and using one implies using the next, or having a real bad time. That is the root of the complaint about systemd not following the Unix way.

Heck, I think there was one now-deprecated component of KDE that was dependent on one SystemD utility that was Linux-specific. It got dropped over a more generic version that used more portable components.

Yes, the KDE devs are smarter and more competent than the GNOME devs.

Comment Re:oh dear... (Score 1) 16

The game-changing element of LLMs and agents is that they have a non-computer-language interface - you can talk to them in plain English (or Chinese or whatever).

But no, you can't. This becomes immediately apparent when you try to talk to them in the way you would talk to a normal person. You ask them for something which should be simple because what you want to know is what most people would want to know. You ask it the simple question and it frequently takes the most obscure view of the question possible. So then you have to rephrase the question once or twice to be incredibly specific in a way that would be unnecessary if you were talking to a human, since they are also humans and know what specifics you were expecting to have addressed.

Comment Maybe (Score 2) 16

The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter

...who might be wrong.

We don't yet know how AI output is going to interact with copyright.

So far you cannot copyright any AI output. That means you don't have the right to specify the license for it, either, because all software licenses are powered by copyright.

Courts might even decide that the original copyrights apply. But which? The ones to code that looks the most like yours? Or every license which applied to any code which might have been involved in the creation of the output? Nobody knows yet.

As such, you run into a trap when trying to decide if the output is open source. Does it only mean that you can see the source code, or is the license relevant? Do you actually have to have legal permission to use or at least see the code? Most would say yes, if you don't have the legal right, then being able to see the code is meaningless since you can't actually use it without poisoning projects with some other license — or no license.

TL;DR: It is very much still up in the air whether it is reasonable to describe any AI generated source code as "open source".

Comment Re:Does not make me like the IT guys (Score 1) 80

Microsoft has probably the most illustrious history of bugs where just visiting a website or opening an email can get your system hacked, but you're right, this is not a problem unique to them.

These days, Lookout asks you before it loads any images from outside your organization...

Comment Re:MICROS~1: making clicking dangerous since 1984 (Score 1) 80

We should really be building operating systems with more process isolation and clear permissions systems for which apps can interact with which other apps in which ways. There's elements of this in Android, and in capabilities systems like selinux, but the more powerful they get the harder they are to use. This is inevitable, but a lot more can still be done to make this kind of functionality accessible to users.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 14

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re:Does not make me like the IT guys (Score 2) 80

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.

Comment Re:Urgency? (Score 0, Troll) 83

So being paid to perform a service has now graduated from "handout" to "bribe" in clown world?

In child rapist island world, bad people made deals to grift and graft in between bouts of raping children. One of those people is sitting in the big chair, deciding who gets paid instead of the people the constitution says are supposed to do it. You want to act surprised that people believe the funds are being misappropriated?

The only contractors in the US which have a chance to get anything to the moon are SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boing. All are hugely problematic for a variety of reasons, and asserting that noticing that is clown shit is itself cuck shit.

Comment Offtopic and Troll? Suck the other one (Score 2) 95

Comment Re:Lifestyle brand known for bass-heavy headphone (Score 1) 41

I have no experience with their cans, only their buds, which I've been very happy with. Maybe they have been ruined since they started taking advice from Bose, as I haven't bought any in a while, but the last ones I did buy had a more-easily-untangleable flat rubbery cord and sounded really nice. They were clear for both music and calls, and were less than twenty bucks... maybe $14?

I'm not a "pay extra" kind of guy, though I do try not to buy the absolute most crap thing. I'm a "refurb" type.

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