I was glad to see Niko publish his initial work and look forward to seeing how it’s gone.

So algorithms then?

LLMs have some interesting properties and certainly can do a good job sifting through large amounts of raw data. They are however a very brute force approach compared to say a network routing protocol. Sooner or later people will start to realise (again) that engineering is about trade offs and you need to work out what your constraints are and stop trying to solve every problem with massive amounts of multiplication.

I swear people have rose tinted glasses as to the state of the init system before the current generation of system management daemons.

If you really want to have Debian without systemd there is always Duvean but the Debian architects are free to choose the technologies that solve the very real system orchestration problems that exist.

The amount of drama bait this caused over the last week was something to behold.

I like to think I’m reasonably technical and I do put network and some devices restrictions on their accounts. However stuff still gets through and I don’t really want to play a cat and mouse IT admin game with my kids. If I as the root user could set the field on their PC’s and that would allow them to access age appropriate services without having to hand over personal data to some age verification service then i’d consider that a useful feature.

When they get the keys to root they can set it to whatever they please.

It was worse than that. Our understanding of radiation took awhile. While Uranium glass is probably safe I wouldn’t go using it regularly. A lot of women (“radium girls”) suffered from cancers induced by licking their brushes when painting luminescing instruments. This comic looks like 50s era when post the bomb sci-fi was full of “atomics” as the stuff of the future.

Normally you try and cost reduce the BoM and split the difference. RAM seems to be out striping any cost savings you can normally make updating the hardware.

Who are the community employing? Why do they need consulting before code changes are made?

What a pointless drama article this is. FLOSS software does stuff for legal compliance more often than you’d think. The whole point is people can contribute fly by patches and the maintainers make the decision to merge. It seems like being an optional field but potentially providing useful functionality is enough for systemd. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are forks you could join or even use a different init system. No one’s freedom is being oppressed here.

Stable package > back port package > flatpak/snap.

Basically I want everything as stable as possible unless I have a particular need for a newer feature.

The main things I run from flatpak/snap are browsers and the Minecraft launcher because they are both regularly updated.

Free software licenses generally don’t restrict what kind of study or what kind of changes you can make. A lot of licences explicitly say “for any purpose”. There are licences that add additional restrictions, for example restricting the field of use to non-military, but they are not free software licenses.

ETA: the question of where liability lies for infringing terms of a source license occur should a LLM model launder for example GPL code into a propriety code base is something that will have to be decided by the courts.

Freedom 1 of the four software freedoms is:

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

When it comes to export controls and sanctioned entities it doesn’t really matter what Red Hat would like to do - they have to comply with the law in the jurisdictions they work in. Even if it was purely a community project individual contributors face a similar liability if based in those jurisdictions.

When it comes to sanction lists there is a fair amount of commonalty between the US and Europe. This is really something to complain to government about.

a long time ago I wrote a program as part of my third year project to sort and rank potential hydrogen bonds in tRNA based on crystallography data. I wonder if my supervisor ever used it going forward.

Do they also insist on a CLA so they can relicense contributions?

What was wrong with working with Godot that made them want to fork?

I guess somewhere between 6 and 7…urm 6/7 👐 (and my kids say I don’t understand memes 😅).

If you have ever read the “thought” process on some of the reasoning models you can catch them going into loops of circular reasoning just slowly burning tokens. I’m not even sure this isn’t by design.

I think the OP’s analysis might have made a bit of a jump from overall levels of hobbyist maintainers to what percentage of shipping code is maintained by people in their spare time.

While the experiences of OpenSSL and xz should certainly drive us find better ways of funding underlying infrastructure you do see a higher participation rates of paid maintainers where the returns are more obvious. The silicon vendors get involved in the kernel because it’s in their underlying interests to do so - and the kernel benefits as a result.

I maintain a couple of hobbyist packages on my spare time but it will never be a funded gig because comparatively fewer people use them compared to DAYJOB’s project which can make a difference to companies bottom lines.

The year of Linux on the desktop is whatever year you personally switched over.