That makes sense too. I guess it’s a very difficult balance to hit, for all concerned. I think a lot of the famous outbursts that happen on LKML are probably an inevitable side-effect of that balancing-act, and of maintainers being stretched in multiple directions.
Yeah, maybe just a good steward quality-testing the Bus Factors?
Thanks, that’s good to know, but for raw-writing a bootable image to a device do you (or anyone reading) know if there are also straightforward powershell commands for mapping devices at the block level? (as opposed to mounting at filesystem level)
The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.
Side-note: Last time I was on a friend’s Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.
If you haven’t already seen the talk recently given at the Chaos Computer Club’s “Hacker Hotel” named “How Thermonuclear fusion works, free energy without waste”, I highly recommend it. https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-ff152736-e38872dd7aed088e
Thanks. Had heard the name but didn’t really know “what they do” in that sense. Will check them out.
For others who, like me, haven’t yet heard what the 50501 Movement is, here you go
I’m glad that wording got clarified, otherwise people’s mental images could have taken a disturbing turn. :-D
At least on that day he was.
I think a good tool against this could be to have an international nonprofit organization of investigative journalists, OSINT experts, and detectives (and experts in seeing through AI abuse and other fraudulent media behaviour, and as soon as they build reputation they would need damn good lawyers too). They would act as a fast-response crack-team to look under the covers every time any powers-that-be launch a news cycle chaos-offensive (which sadly these days is “all the time”). Not just as a side-hustle or section of a general publication, but as its own non-profit-beholden organisation dedicated to that task.
They would follow the timings and run contextual pattern recognition on all the big/fishy “look over here” announcements (or character hit-pieces attacking the credibility of people sharing uncomfortable or explosive information). Their explicit goal though would be surfacing the most promising other stories that are being buried, combine and tug on those threads to discover what kind of meta-stories and deeper narratives are being lost in the “manufactured mainstream” noise, and provide announcements/advice/guidance to other journalists and reporters on what to do next with those. They would need to all be highly experienced and disciplined expert investigators of impeccable integrity to provide adequate mental-vaccination against risks of sliding into conspiracy-hypothesising tin-hat territory due to the nature of the work.
In addition to the obligatory website for people to discover and learn about them, they could provide a non-paywalled RSS stream of their findings, tongue-in-cheek naming it “While you were out”, maybe with a sister podcast discussing their findings called “Excuse me, I think you dropped this”.
This little exchange felt so wholesome in a deliberately counterintuitive way. :-D
It would probably be configured using YAML and require health checks and quorum monitoring. I’m not sure I would want that job, especially on-call shifts. The consequences of downtime would be on a whole other level.
That’s definitely one of Randall’s more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Indeed that was refreshing to read, and much needed. At the moment it feels like a tsunami of bad news and bad takes is flooding online communities, so these kinds of encouraging posts feel like a Public Service. Thanks
I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an “information revolution” on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don’t think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.
This is utterly heartbreaking. Only 11 years old.
The other option is to channel that hate into action.
This. The Dalai Lama is very quotable on this subject. One of my favourites is:
To be angry on behalf of those who are treated unjustly means that we have compassionate anger. This type of anger leads to right action, and leads to social change.
To be angry toward the people in power does not create change. It creates more anger, more resentment, more fighting.
There’s more here:
https://www.alwayswellwithin.com/blog/dalai-lama-quotes-compassionate-anger
Also, pondering again your comment which spawned this slightly lengthy subthread, namely:
If we say “males and females” and use the equivalent terms for both, is there a problem with this? Because it’s not treating them differently so I don’t really understand
I am not a linguistics expert so I’m probably not using exactly the right terminology here, but I think the bit that matters is using:
adjectives as reductionist/caricaturing pseudo-nouns
when any such words are used merely as labels vs as signifiers for emphasis
Namely:
A. Calling someone a “human” or “person” is using a less common noun as ambiguous label
B. Calling someone a “woman” or “girl” or “man” or “boy” is using a common noun as general label
C. Calling someone a “female human” or “male human” or “female person” or “male person” is using an uncommon adjective-noun combination as explicit signifier
D. Calling someone a “female” or “male” is using a usually unwelcome adjective-as-pseudo-noun as reductionist signifier
In this context “reductionist signifier” means “reducing the value, worth, and significance of a person to only that defined by a single abused adjective”. So a line in a book which says “The bar full of people fell silent when a female entered the room” is implying that the “people” (probably primarily/entirely male, by inference) are “whole people” (with hopes, dreams, struggles, character arcs), while the “female” is as far as the writer cares merely a one-dimensional representation of a (different) gender, and not “a whole person, who happens to be female”. I remember reading long ago (but can’t remember attribution): “Never trust an author who shows you they don’t care about their characters”. I think the application of that can be extended from authors to people in general, based on how they speak.
If I’ve read your comment correctly I think we actually agree on all points, but my hurriedly written comment didn’t communicate two of them as clearly as I would’ve liked.
We concur that consistency of terms matters, words are the skeletons of thought-processes and therefore biases, etc.
I realise my emphasising the phrase “biological descriptors” was a bit misleading and strictly speaking actually wrong, but in my partial defence I was trying to avoid more scientific words when not necessary (not wanting to drift into pretentiousness). In light of your observation about biology vs gender identity (which I agree with), probably my point would be more correct if I’d used a phrase like “reductionist differentiation descriptors”. Even if accurate that sounds a little pretentious so I’d love any domain-expert to chime in with a more accurate-yet-concise phrase.
I used the rat example purely as an example of a research context divorced from social/political connotations, not as a human-animal vs non-human-animal differentiator (not implying any double-standard there), hence why I followed it with the example of how paramedics also use it. My point could equally have used a “10 humans…” example.
In-band periodic key-exchange. Pre-arrange that keys expire every X messages, and that the last (Xth) message is dedicated to sending the new key encrypted by the previous one.