• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 19th, 2024

help-circle

  • I don’t understand why the R4L are even trying to get it into THE kernel at this point. Especially after the open hostility, but also after basically offering to be “downstream” of whatever C people do.

    The difference to forking and gradually transitioning things to Rust seem technically minimally negative and socially enormously positive to me.

    And when and if people want to use the linux kernel with Rust, made by the R4L people, they would then be able to do that? Idk.

    I have no stakes in either side, so I don’t really care.


  • Depends on how smart she is.

    To not sabotage things, you can always leave it at a “mix of luck, talent and hard work”. And you’re working hard, and maybe you even have luck, but step dad might have all three.

    If she’s smart, you can drop the whole thing on her: first of all, you love her, her mom loves her, her step dad hopefully does too or at least likes her and that has nothing to do with money. Then you can just be transparent on how much you earn, how much time that means in effort, and how much “lots of money” takes to earn. Then you can just do some math, and her step dad’s numbers won’t add up.

    It’s a sensitive topic though, you can say your piece, communicate with your ex and the step dad about that she asked and what you said. They might have a different take.

    Might even spin it into making her think about what she wants to do in the future.


  • It shouldn’t feel forever. I like that the longest part of booting my PC is the grub selection for my dual boot setup. I have an older laptop that takes about 2 minutes to boot. Not a deal breaker, but a noticeable delay.

    I don’t really care.

    But it being snappy sure feels good. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 feature making the setup unattractive, 5 being indifference, 10 being super important, booting fast is a 6.


  • idk, I’ve been using xubuntu for more than 10 years now, I’m not happy with absolutely everything, but the trouble I do have is definitely less effort to fix than learning a new, more elaborate distro.

    So, it’s a pretty good, common denominator, and as long as it keeps working it doesn’t really need to be anything else?

    I’m sure there are differences and niches that other distros fulfill better, but until there is a killer feature I’m interested in that only works on a specific distro or works extremely well on a different distro, I don’t see the “push” factor that would make me leave?

    (btw, that there is no “report bugs here” button that’s just built into the window manager (besides the -,+,x buttons) and takes me to project home pages or bug trackes is wild to me, on any distro as far as I know. Like they don’t want to interact with users? I don’t get it.)



  • One of the events that comes to mind was a “open” conference at a university that “actively encouraged” “low class” participation. (They didn’t say this).

    What I mean by that is that it happened during normal work hours and you had to send an email to sign up, but they did allow you to come.

    Over the course of the event it became clear that it was a joint PR thing for the sponsors and the university to appear to be “doing something about [issue]”, so they had 2 talks, an audience participation thing, where it was very clear that the thing needed most was more funding for people and work material and tools (think PPE, it wasn’t that or that critical). …and a panel discussion between [company] and [5 politicians] that in absolutely no way addressed the issues that were brought up in the audience participation part.

    There was very nice, expensive catering.

    Pretty surreal experience and something that solidified my belief that some very important parts of our society are utterly broken beyond repair.








  • When you lament the loss of ready and experienced volunteers, what we lack are people who’ve learned at the side of truly talented people

    What I’m actually lamenting isn’t the lack of experienced volunteers.

    I’m lamenting the fact that the groups in need lack the awareness that nobody is teaching the stuff they need and that they should do it themselves.

    E.g. https://kernelnewbies.org/ I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned them. Their idea of “outreach” is to open the door and wait for people to fall in. They have no teaching material, they have no recommendations. I’m recognizing that there is something happening that is in my interest and I personally would put in the time to learn whatever is necessary to get to the level that is required to seriously touch that code. I just literally don’t know where to start and have no point to connect. There is a https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelMentors mentors program. Not only is their only point of contact a mailing list, if you follow the link, you will find that the mailing list doesn’t actually exist.


  • A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it’s still the same concept.

    E.g.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)

    Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you’re tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

    People have tried to run economies with it and that… failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it’s not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That’s their entire purpose. We’re just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don’t have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

    So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they’re using different systems that have to be maintained.


    And the reason I’m writing it here, is that people don’t know about it. Therefore they don’t demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don’t have it.

    I’m not saying anything new.

    It’s the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we’re just missing one or two last steps.




  • We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

    The original computer “AI” craze was started by “cybernetic systems” and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of “cyber-” that don’t have anything in common with the original concept.

    The original concept goes like this:

    1. set a goal
    2. perform an action
    3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
    4. If you are at your goal, you’re done,
    5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is “feedback” and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

    The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

    You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It’s the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It’s how autopilots autopilot.

    The idea that “nobody could have predicted…” or “nobody responsible” is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

    Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

    Didn’t catch something “going on for years”, maybe someone should check more often. “Crazy single individual causing a tragedy”? No, that’s a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn’t take care of before, didn’t flag, and didn’t stop in time.

    “Nobody wants to work on our open source project” Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?


  • I’m not applying but I have a comment / suggestion:

    A pattern I’m seeing here, in activism and open source is that you basically want the full package right now. While I understand that that is what you need, people like that don’t grow on trees.

    It would be good if there was a “trainee” position for people to gain the kind of experience you are asking for. And guidance, by you to make sure they learn the right lessons. Possibly including a private-ish best practices handbook or whatever. I know that that means additional work in the short term.

    Thanks for reading, all the best wishes!

    (Compare to linux’ kernel team asking for kernel devs and the policy of “pick any topic you’d like to work on”. Do I expect a fully course on everything, bringing me from “high school knowledge” to “kernel dev professional”? No, of course not. But a few book recommendations would be great. In that case. Not sure if you can learn moderation from a book.)