So you get yourself a very narrow bedroom or a very wide bed.

Probably for the same reason he looks like Caillou in an 80s power suit.

So your argument is that since you are opposed to the app’s very existence it’s immoral to test it for security flaws.

I’d like to argue against that with the principle of defense in depth. I’m also not a friend of OS-level age verification and would like it to be dropped. But if it is implemented I want it to be implemented in a way that isn’t wildly insecure. I can simultaneously argue against the principle as a whole and insist that any implementation of it be secure. If it does come I at least want the damage from a botched implementation to be mitigated.

To use your cage analogy, I can both complain about the principle of caging people and about the fact that the cage is badly made and poses an injury risk to the people inside it. Neither is acceptable.

There are 3 or 4 total sentences in the whole thing and the very first one is laying out that this whole thing is about workstations. I don’t know how much more I could do other then literally plan for this argument that you started.

The problem lies with the closing sentence: “sure, but its down there with arch as a usable OS in anything outside of an LTT video.” That implies that both Pop and Arch are not very useful for anything. That is the broad statement that people are arguing against. You may not wanted to have made a strong statement there but you did.

As far as not mentioning nontechnical users, fuck right off with that, all users are nontechnical unless otherwise stated. Anyone who has had to set a computer up for anyone other then themselves knows this. I did not make the comment assuming that someone would get bent out of shape and look for any “win”.

Nobody knows how many people work in your shop and what kind of shop it is. That’s the part where you come in with a premise that is unknown to everyone else. There’s a huge difference between a chain of three computer stores in a 10 km radius, a chain of three hobby stores scattered across a country, and a chain of 100 anything stores operating as part of a major LLC.

Nobody knows if setting up workstations involves you walking over and configuring everything by hand, you pushing preconfigured images over PXE, or (as seems to be the case) you shipping unmodified live USBs to people along with a set of instructions. I assumed the first one, for instance.

We didn’t even know what your workstations are and do. When I hear “workstation” I think of a beefy PC doing things that require a lot of processing power and are typically given to power users. But they could also be thin kiosk systems that only ever need to display a single website. Or they could manage the POS system. Or a million other things. Depending on what those workstations are, the requirements could be anything from a hyper-specialized setup to “here’s a desktop with Chrome; you know the rest”.

So while it was obvious to you that “one of my stores workstations” implies “a general-purpose computer maintained and operated by a nontechnical user in a remote location”, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else.

The stores are 250 kms apart, you can not in good faith tell me arch is appropriate unless you have an administrator on site (and if I was that administrator I would likely strike you).

Given your use case, Arch is indeed a bad fit. I wouldn’t even argue for an Arch derivative (where usually the setup is done through a bog-standard Calamares installer). But that’s like complaining that nobody ever needs a semi truck because it doesn’t meet your needs of being compact and fuel-efficient. Like Arch it’s simply a tool for a different job.

There is no situation where you are setting up workstations for users that are not Linux-averse outside of a Linux development environment, in which case those users will not like that you set up arch for them, as if they are arch fans they will also want to do their own configurations.

Those users also don’t want to deal with any other Linux distro or Windows or macOS. They want their computer to work and someone else to make that happen. And if someone else does make it happen they generally couldn’t care less about what’s under the hood as long as their workflow isn’t impeded.

(Also, there definitely are people who prefer Linux outside of Linux development. Just because my company issued me a Windows desktop doesn’t mean I have to like it.)

The problem is that you didn’t state your premises very well, making your argument harder to follow. (You also argue very broadly.)

You first argued that Arch is not a usable operating system, which is a bold claim given that it’s one of the most popular Linux distros. While you did mention a workstation before, the claim regarding Arch wasn’t obviously connected to that, implying that Arch is not useful for any purpose.

When asked to back up that claim you talked about workstations for nontechnical users (which hadn’t been mentioned before). That didn’t match your earlier claims; you made a broad statement and then defended a narrower one. That’s indeed a motte and bailey argument even if you simply forgot to mention some details.

Also, if the users are nontechnical they’re probably not the ones who administer the workstations so they don’t need to care about technical details as long as you can provide a desktop and the applications they need.

After that you declared that any OS that needs more than 15 minutes to set up is useless, which amounts to pretty much all of them unless you don’t engage in any configuration at all. And, well, it’s another bold claim. It’s basically on par with “Mint is completely pointless because unlike Alpine I can’t use it to ship 5 MB Docker images”; you’re basically declaring that your specific use case is equivalent to any use case any Linux user will ever have.

A coherent version of your argument would be “I don’t like Arch because when I set up workstations for Linux-averse users it was much more work than Mint and I prefer something that’s quick and easy to set up”. And fair enough, that’s a perfectly valid reason for you to prefer Mint over Arch. But it’s not an indication that Arch is worse in general or even unusable. It’s just a bad fit for this specific use case.

I also mean areas of the screen looking like panels with physical gaps between them instead of rounded rectangles that float in an abstract space.

In case you thought that my “physical buttons and switches” refers to the screen: It doesn’t. The ID.3 Neo has what appears to be a row of rocker switches below the screen and the buttons on the steering wheel look like actual push buttons.

(Edit: The ones below the screen are also push buttons.)

That’s a big improvement over the last ID.3 where all of those were capacitive touch areas on flat surfaces. That made the off-screen buttons impossible to use without looking at them and, with the ones on the steering wheel, sometimes led to accidental inputs.

I applaud the move to physical buttons and switches but it does look like an uglier ID.3.

(Also, I see that sensible amount of skeuomorphism is becoming a thing in UI again. About damn time.)

The amount they spent on homeopathy wasn’t super large, actually, but it’s still welcome to see it getting kicked out. Until now it had been grandfathered past the requirement for medicine to have proven effectiveness on grounds of cultural inertia.

Mind you, I would’ve preferred it getting dropped due to sufficient public pushback against its special treatment and not as a cost-saving measure. But hey, I’ll take it.

The latter is not universal. Several popes have explicitly stated that they are indeed fallible (which would render total infallibility self-contradictory). Also, infallibility is generally limited in certain ways that I won’t bother researching in enough depth to put into a concise description. But the pope can’t just make up some random shit and have it automatically considered to be the word of God.

Of course, pointing out that someone violates the basic tenets of Catholicism while naming those specific tenets is well within “the pope is right” territory.

And it had a banger of a theme song, too. And some actually good-looking VFX.

Cool show all around; it’s unfortunate how short-lived it was.

When someone asks me “Kirk or Picard” I answer “McLane”.

Okay, I’ll answer “Sisko” but I’ll at least think of Maj. Cliff Allister McLane and the crew of the fast space cruiser Orion, which can be operated using nothing but flatirons, ice scoops, and faucets. The ship, not the crew.

Here’s one for a TV show.

In 2022, a crack quality assurance team was made redundant by a CTO for a botched product launch they didn’t commit.

These men promptly escaped from a maximally unstable job market to the LinkedIn underground.

Today, still wanted by recruiters, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

If you have a broken codebase, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the QA-team.

Struwwelpeter is a mixed bag.

There’s the story about the boy who starves to death because he refuses to eat soup. Or the girl who plays with matches and burns to death while her cats helplessly watch. Or the boy who sucks his thumbs so a tailor randomly shows up and cuts them off.

And those are mixed in with the guy whose extremely bad grooming habits make him unpopular or the guy who doesn’t watch where he’s going and falls in a river. Not quite as traumatizing.

An LLM trained on the PoE ingame chat would try to solve all my problems by asking to buy my Kaom’s Sign Coral Ring for 1ex.

That has happened to me… twice. Once they sent spam to abuse@<domain> and once to postmaster@<domain>. Both of those are “well-known” addresses that received one spam mail each.

Having your own domain with a catch-all address is rare enough that spammers don’t seem to try to target it.

Meanwhile I set up straight-to-spam rules for a handful of companies that leaked my email address. Very useful.

It’s known that AI companies will harvest content without care for its veracity and train LLMs on it. These LLMs will then regurgitate that content as fact.

This isn’t a particularly novel finding but the experiment illustrates it rather well.

The researchers you consider to have acted so immorally did add useless information to the knowledge pool – but it was unadvertised, immediately recognizable useless information that any sane reviewer would’ve flagged. They included subtle clues like thanking someone at Starfleet Academy for letting them use a lab aboard the USS Enterprise. They claimed to have gotten funding from the Sideshow Bob Foundation. Subtle.

By providing this easily traceable nonsense, they were able to turn the generally-but-informally known understanding that LLMs will repeat bullshit into a hard scientific data point that others can build on. Nothing world-changing but still valuable. They basically did what Alan Sokal did.

Instead of worrying about this experiment you should worry about all the misinformation in LLMs that wasn’t provided (and diligently documented) by well-meaning researchers.

Man, Crank 3 is a lot worse than the first two.

Doesn’t the EU already have a military defense pact built in? Under the Mutual Defense Clause (Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union), all EU members are required to defend each other is directly attacked. The Common Security and Defence Policy guides military cooperation. There are transnational brigades and everything.

We need to do better in that regard but we already have a lot of what you’re proposing. Chuck in an alliance with Canada and we’d have most of NATO’s functionality covered.

Dev: Why was my app rejected?

Apple: Your app was rejected because it uses a payment processor that is not allowed on the App Store. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Dev: My app doesn’t contain any payment functionality at all!

Apple: I’m sorry, I made a like mistake there. Please contact the App Store support team to help you with this kind of issue.

Dev: You are the App Store support team!

Apple: That is entirely correct! Please allow me to refer you to section 14 of the Apple Developer Agreement to show why your payment processor is not supported:

[Link: to the Apple Developer Agreement, section 14: Disclaimer of Liability]

Fitting name. Reading about their bullshit war sure causes my sanity meter to drop.