I wrote about the reaction to the shooting of a CEO.

"It seems to me that when you create a world where human life has been made as cheap as possible, you will eventually find you live in a world where your human life is deemed by others to be cheap, too."

https://www.the-reframe.com/peaceful-solutions/

It isn't that far-right has suddenly become a big movement in Europe. The far-right support has always been and will always be around 20%. The task of society is to keep that support in the "morally unacceptable" box that is buried deep in the ground. Clickbait, polarisation supported by technofascism and Putins money and methods for destabilisation in democracies however are the most powerful attack against that equilibrium I have ever experienced. And we are losing.

are you a programmer? do you like heavy metal? would you like to be *really upset* by a music video?

do i have something for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yup8gIXxWDU

software engineering methodologies are simple, there's really only two goals

the first goal of a methodology is to make workers replaceable, and this is usually achieved by removing any worker agency in the project

the second goal of a methodology is to insulate decision makers from risk and this is usually achieved by blaming the workers for failure—for not hitting estimates forced upon them

unfortunately, "delivering software people want" doesn't make the cut

Wow, an adversary first compromised a neighbor of the target, and then attacked the target over Wi-Fi (with stolen password).

This is the first observed case of the #AntennaForHire attack that AirEye hypothesized.

Any Wi-Fi attack is now a remote attack!

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-nearest-neighbor-attack-how-a-russian-apt-weaponized-nearby-wi-fi-networks-for-covert-access/

$ git revert c1d1ba844f01 # ("Code of conduct: Fix wording around maintainers enforcing the code of conduct")

This seems to have regressed. Let's revert.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

Two weeks left to submit talks to the 1st #eBPF devroom at #FOSDEM (CfP closes on 1st December) ⚙️ 🐝

Send your proposals, or if you know people who might be interested, spread the word, please!

https://ebpf.io/fosdem-2025.html

Journalist: Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese:

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza

made me chuckle - For de av oss som trenger en oppmuntrin på morgenkvistenen: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/11/05/curl-v-google-com/ via @bagder #curl #https #google #therealstory

Tech workers don't need unions.

We can, after all, just hop jobs if we want significant salary increases. We all love intermittent employments and hustle culture. We dislike forming stable attachments, becoming experts on projects, and seeing them to fruition.

9,4% p.a. - or a total of 38% for the next four years - is something every single one of y'all individually successfully negotiates, right?

https://www.dw.com/en/boeing-factory-workers-end-7-week-strike/a-70690180

#Unionize #WeDeserveTechUnions #CollectiveBargaining

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”

~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

#comedy #quotes

"Isn’t it ironic that we’re banking on a technology we don’t have the resources to power sustainably, expecting it to save us from a problem it’s actively contributing to?"

How AI is fuelling the climate crisis, not solving it:

https://energytransition.org/2024/10/how-ai-is-fuelling-the-climate-crisis-not-solving-it/

Software liability comes to the EU.

The new EU liability law extends the definition of “defective products” to include software, holding manufacturers accountable for harm caused by software vulnerabilities.

If a software flaw leads to damage, manufacturers can now be held liable, emphasizing the importance of security throughout the product lifecycle. This change encourages companies to prioritize cybersecurity measures and regular updates to protect consumers, shifting some risk from users to software providers.

The law also allows easier access to evidence in legal claims, balancing the power dynamics between consumers and manufacturers.

There is a carve out for open source software. Importers and the EU representatives of foreign software can be held liable too.

You ever seen something so painfully out of touch and oblivious it hurts?

I'm sure many have seen https://stallman-report.org/ detailing Richard Stallman's misconduct and how it and his enablers have harmed the free software movement. Much of this is not new but I was still shocked by a line early in the "Why publish this report?" section: "Women represent just 3% of the free software community, compared to 23% of industry programmers generally." Obviously not all of that disparity can be attributed to #Stallman alone, but his continued position of prominence is a symptom of a broader disease in the community's culture. Paying attention to these problems rather than turning a blind eye to them is a necessary step towards healing.

Results of the 2024 TAB (the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board) election:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/87y13bc05z.fsf@trenco.lwn.net/

"'There were 934 eligible voters in this year's TAB election; 229 of them cast ballots. The results were (with the top five winning seats):

1 Kees Cook
2 Dan Williams
3 Miguel Ojeda
4 Dave Hansen
5 Shuah Khan
[...]

Thanks to everybody who participated.'"

#Linux #kernel #LinuxKernel

#BPF #kernel changes up to now normally came as part of the big -net pull. Seems for #Linux 6.12 the involved developers try something new, as Alexei send the changes straight to Linus this time:

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/440b65232829fad69947b8de983c13a525cc8871

#LinuxKernel #eBPF

What happened to Greta Thunberg?
_________________________________

As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. In following the science, Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to get down to the root of the climate crisis.

But Greta kept going. When she published The Climate Book in 2022, the then 19-year-old activist had some words for the entire system we live under today:

"We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the Global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”

That was two years ago, and it’s no surprise she hasn’t been given the spotlight nearly as often since. In fact, in the wake of that book launch, she’s been the subject of countless hit pieces, and her Palestine solidarity activism has been denigrated as well.

Greta went from a cute kid saying that climate change is bad to a young adult rightly charging global systems with not only fueling the climate crisis but also being oppressive and grossly harmful to life in numerous other ways. And, perhaps most importantly, she sees these systems as interconnected and knows that radical change is necessary for the future of life on this planet.
_________________________________

FULL ESSAY -- https://www.jphilll.com/p/gretas-growth

#Politics #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange