I'm proud to call Bradley Kuhn a friend and am celebrating him joining the growing community of out-and-proud FOSS leaders.
But it is a tragedy when someone is forced out.
I've watched as Eben Moglen and SFLC have abused the legal system and attacked SFC, wasting the scarce resources of one of FOSS's most important charitable nonprofits, and am devastated to learn about the personal abuse Bradley has endured.
FOSS friends: please take the time to read this. https://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2023/10/11/moglen-sflc.html
other portentous unix timestamps (los angeles timezone)
1696969696 Oct 10 '23 01:28p 🎉
1700000000 Nov 14 '23 02:13p 🔜
0x66666666 Jun 09 '24 07:35p 🤘
0x69696969 Jan 15 '26 02:25p
1777777777 May 02 '26 08:09p
1800000000 Jan 15 '27 12:00a
1888888888 Nov 08 '29 07:21p
1987654321 Dec 25 '32 10:12p 🎄
1999999999 May 17 '33 08:33p
2000000000 May 17 '33 08:33p
0x77777777 Jul 06 '33 08:01p
0x7fffffff Jan 18 '38 07:14p
Microsoft, quietly, has published a guide on how to download and install Linux.
No... Seriously... It is not a joke...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install
The article was published September 29, 2023 (9 days ago).
The guide provides every option available, too. Starting with using their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), to using a Virtual Machine, and even on "Bare Metal" alongside Windows.
That's right, Microsoft now tells you how to dual-boot Linux. 🤯
"Fast and Clean: Auditable high-performance assembly via constraint solving"
a superoptimizer for ARM64 assembly, cool!
https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1303.pdf
repo:
Which is no surprise to those of us who have been trying to tell early fediverse settlers that discovery has to be prioritized over safety. Unless we can find news and information to begin with, finding it safely becomes moot. Bluesky clearly gets this, which is why the big news accounts are now starting to gravitate there. If the fediverse doesn’t improve in that regard, it will soon become the Linux of social media. Beloved by thousands, ignored by millions.
Source: …
What do #Linux books fail to cover that you'd like to see in a book? What is covered too much? (Please boost for reach, I'd love to get a lot of feedback on this if possible.) #OpenSource #Documentation
Dear software people,
Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.
It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.
Sincerely,
Charlie
Videos are finally online! We hope you will enjoy it!
Thanks you to our great speakers and our sponsors
Big thumbs up to @_syam for the audio/video, Frank Tizzoni for the caricature, Emma Tizzoni for our new mascot, @Aissen for the live blog, @erwanaliasr1
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ8PmP_dnN7Ida3J3tzO-yqrxuF-yEQtI
you know the @pluralistic episode of XKCD? do you remember what it's about or just that it has a Cory Doctorow joke in it?
because you should read it. it was fucking prescient.
Let's do a round-up of a couple!
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
The burning down of this library is often seen as one of the biggest losses of culture in history. In reality, it seems that the library mostly stored copies of works, and while big, it stored very few *unique* things - therefore, not much was actually lost.
THE BYSTANDER EFFECT
The claim is that when there are many bystanders of an incident, none will take responsibility. This is based on the murder of Kitty Genovese, where it was claimed that there were many witnesses, but none of them did anything.
That's false - in fact, the amount of witnesses was limited due to the location, and multiple people alerted the police, but the police failed to respond in a timely manner. More recently, research into the bystander effect suggests that the entire theory is wrong - people *do* consistently come to the aid of others.
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
Claimed to 'prove' that given power, people will turn malicious and start abusing others. In reality, the experiment was fraudulent, and proved no such thing - the guard in the experiment were actively *encouraged* by the researcher to be abusive.
THE BROKEN WINDOW THEORY
This is often seen as some sort of 'scientifically proven fact' about human behaviour; if you leave vandalism or other "anti-social" behaviour untreated, it will invite more of it.
In reality, this was just made up by a cop in New York, never proven, and used as a justification for violent and oppressive policing tactics. There's no evidence that this is true, or ever was.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
This theory claims that when a group of individuals are given access to a common shared resource, they will each act selfishly and collectively exhaust the resource, whereas it would've been fine if one party controlled access. Usually reference over-grazing.
In reality, this concept (in its current form) comes from a thought experiment where it was just *assumed* to be true, rather than from actual research; and instead there is a long history of shared resources being effectively collectively managed without giving any one party total control over access or distribution.
This doesn't stop authoritarians from using the tragedy of the commons as a justification for their accumulation of power; claiming that otherwise, the resources would be exhausted.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
This theory claims that victims of crime and/or abuse will develop an irrational attachment to the perpetrator, implying that they can no longer be trusted to have agency in determining how to deal with the situation.
In reality, rather than being based in rigorous research, this concept was coined by a criminologist based on a single bank robbery in (as the name implies) Stockholm.
Crucially, the victims were quite clear about the reason for their trust towards the robbers; the police were acting irresponsibly in this incident, endangering people unnecessarily, and therefore the robbers were the more rational and less dangerous party in the conflict. Not quite the 'irrational attachment' that's so often claimed...
Perhaps the most insightful part of https://davidgraeber.org/articles/punching-the-clock/:
"Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. [...] This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect."
Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.
Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.
Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".
Understand first laws of Physics
@paulmckrcu #kr2023
Whatever it takes to get people to understand.