shirro

@shirro@aussie.zone

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shirro ,

The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.

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    shirro , (edited )

    Not a fan of how Boeing managed Starliner but this headline is clickbait. This is the time to find remaining issues with the vehicle so they can be corrected before it begins regular operational flights. Running tests on the service module in space is good value because after it separates for reentry it is destroyed.

    NASA doesn't always feel like a totally trustworthy source. They appeared to downplay problems with Artemis I but the OIG blasted the Artemis I Orion and said the numerous problems represented a significant risk to crew safety that could lead to a future loss of crew. The problems with Starliner could be more serious than they look but it has successfully de-orbited and landed twice and I think there is a very good chance it will again with crew onboard.

    shirro ,

    Electoral donations are kind of arms length influence. I think we are well beyond that in SA where politician's families and future careers are deeply intertwined with the businesses and organizations seeking influence.

    shirro ,

    Don't give a fuck about Microsoft. The last notable products they invented were Windows 95 and Office on the Mac. It has all been downhill since. An NPU isn't going to make gcc or games run faster so who the fuck needs it.

    shirro ,

    Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don't seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.

    Will antivirus be more significant on Linux desktop after this xz-util backdoor?

    I understand that no Operating System is 100% safe. Although this backdoor is likely only affects certain Linux desktop users, particularly those running unstable Debian or testing builds of Fedora (like versions 40 or 41), **Could this be a sign that antivirus software should be more widely used on Linux desktops?...

    shirro ,

    Anti-viruses are a scam and always have been. They aren't much more than security theater and box ticking. Don't get into the mindset that you can outsourse security to a single product. Security is something that happens in depth. The more intrusive av software can itself become an attack vector as it often runs with lots of privileges.

    Distros operate with webs of trust and cryptographically signed packages. Your distro installer verifies the integrity of the package. There is no need to check a third party signature database. It adds no value. Even well audited software could contain hidden vulnerabilities so increasingly we are running software with less capabilities via systemd, flatpak/brwrap or in containers. The environment is very different to the origins of av software on Window 9x where people would download random unsigned executables to a system with no privilege restrictions.

    There are lots of challenge for the FOSS community. We love features and freedoms and those features and freedoms sometimes make security more complicated. We need to show more restraint packaging software like ssh and not add so many patches and additional dependencies. We also need to show more restraint in the typical rust, go or javascript project where adding dependencies is so easy we end up sometimes including hundreds of them for stupid crap like coloured messages or being able to handle a dozen config file formats. I don't care about your garbage collection or advanced compile time checks, if you include hundreds of crates from other developers you are no better than npm and I would put more faith in a 20 year old c library.

    shirro ,

    Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don't want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don't.

    shirro ,

    There are a small number of terminal emulators I would be happy to use as daily drivers and most of them have been named here but my default is kitty. It supports everything I need and a lot I don't and doesn't have any showstoppers. All the modern terminal implementations are performant enough. I used real terminals like vt-100s and vt-220s everything we have today is awesome in comparison. We fetishize the performance and features too much. Once you have something that works there isn't much reason to change IMO.

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