541–550 of 560 posts
I guess my habit of running a firewall and not allowing programs to access the internet unless they actually need it is helpful for stuff like this. Absolutely no reason a text editor needs internet access. I only update stuff through winget, which fetches the installer from github in a lot of cases, and changing a package requires a PR to the winget repo AFAIK. Not foolproof of course though.
I guess my habit of running a firewall and not allowing programs to access the internet unless they actually need it is helpful for stuff like this. Absolutely no reason a text editor needs internet access. I only update stuff through winget, which fetches the installer from github in a lot of cases, and changing a package requires a PR to the winget repo AFAIK. Not foolproof of course though.
Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Control may annoy me sometimes, but this is exactly why I run it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A huge chunk of activism is pointless and annoying. Activism can be annoying, but it's never pointless (not even when it fails to be effective). > All they really do is end up getting Fox News people to vote for fascists like Trump out of spite It wouldn't be worthwhile for activists to resign themselves to inaction out of fear of offending the "Fox news people". "Fox news people" are already more likely than not t…
I don't think this is really true if you look at the results of the last election. Activism just on the transgender issue alone looks to have swung a lot of votes.
What activism was that? Were there sit-ins? Millions marching in the streets? Were trans people chaining themselves to bathrooms? What was the terrible activism so extreme that it pushed "fox news people" into voting for an R when they'd normally vote for a D? My guess is that there are effectively 0 "fox news people" who'd ever vote for a D to start with and that fox news watchers didn't actually see or experience much activism on the transgender issue. Instead what they mostly had a problem with was policy put in place by non-transgendered people, library books that included transgender characters, and the existence of trans people generally. No activism needed.
> Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled served malicious update manifests. I'd be curious to know if there was any pattern as to which users were targeted, but the post doesn't go into any further detail except to say it was likely a Chinese state-sponsored group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NLNET can only allocate funds to something an individual or small group proposes. If you want to propose something, please go ahead. Well, gee, let's look at the sponsorship page for KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/ I see a couple EU companies, but no EU governments. It takes a paltry $15K to be a Platinum sponsor. I picked KiCad because PCB design is critical military infrastructure, the alternative…
There is an EU initiative to bring in chip manufacturing but it's not related to open source. For sovereignty purposes, airgapped software or locally made software is as good as open source and it's usually higher quality. There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs. And I repeat myself: NLNET can only rule on the proposals it receives. Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
I don't agree. Even if proprietary software is somehow "better" (and I don't concede that automatically), proprietary software is always at the risk of disappearing--see: VMWare after the Broadcom purchase. Your critical software being open source means that you have the right to fork/copy and just keep going without needing to do anything else. Proprietary software disappearing means that you need to file legal paperwork and get a judge to care and then wrench the source code out of someone's hands.
The failure modes are vastly different.
And this is before we get into the whole undocumented, proprietary storage formats issue.
> Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
I am in the US. Can a US citizen propose that? I would assume that this has to come from EU citizens, no?
To be honest, if I could get KiCad some funding simply by filing some paperwork, that's probably a good investment of time.
> There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs.
Not really. Autodesk bought Eagle. Renesas bought Altium. Cadence bought Orcad. There's a whole host of stuff controlled by China. Most of the other free things aren't even close to KiCad.
I guess maybe PADS, since it's owned by Siemens? But I haven't bumped into a PADS user in a very long time--I wonder if it's considered legacy or just far too expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm writing this comment from Russia, St. Petersburg, and yes, you can be against the Ukraine war in Russia.
Educate me then. The mental image I have from researching the topic seems contrary to what you’re saying.
Safe for regular person, but socially risky: "We should surrender and pay reparations" "This war is totally Putin'a fault" "Putin is corrupt dictator" "Zelensky is a good guy"
Could in theory lead to a fine and/or losing job, but mostly safe: "I support Navalny", donation to ACF or some kind of western-affiliated NGO.
Could lead to a fine and/or prison time, when it done in social media or on the square: "Slava Ukraine", Butcha fakes, Let's willingly donate to Ukraine war effort, etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
please tell me about the intricate politics of a phone booth. just because you can make everything political doesn't mean it is inherently political or doesn't make you look like a terminal online annoying loser when you try to compensate for your vapid personality outside of ideological dogma.
Phone booths are made by the phone company to increase the money they make, that's political. Phone booths are made with more or less shielding implying a greater or lesser danger to their occupant, that's politics. The ones at the airport have glass dividers while the ones at the lonely gas station at night are fully enclosed with thick glass. Different ones have different amounts of graffiti and different likelihoo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taiwan is already independent. Surely the normal way to refer to it would be as coming out against assimilation with mainland China?
The official position of Taiwan (Republic of China) and the People's Republic of China is that they're rival governments of the same China. The Taiwanese government has never formally declared itself independent from the mainland. Such a declaration would likely cause the PRC to invade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've broken the analogy. The broad categories of food equate to the broad categories of discussion topics. How attention works, whether training on scraped data is legal, and whether or not the latter should be permissible are three distinct topics. Only the third is inherently political. The second has a close relation to politics but is ultimately a legal question as opposed to a political contest. The first has…
The spec sheet being written in English is politics. The spec sheets of the most advanced microcontrollers, the cheapest microcontrollers, and the most widely used microcontrollers are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics. Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal t…
We definitely do not agree on that point. I mean sure, I can imagine a scenario where a company chooses not to publish in a particular language for a political reason. But I do not believe that is typically the case.
If I pull up a Japanese ActivityPub node and notice that the people there are posting in Japanese (not English!) is that political? I don't see how. They're using the language that is convenient for them in that context. So too a Chinese outfit publishing documentation in Chinese for a chip they only ever intended to sell domestically. Or perhaps they fully intended to export it but decided to cut costs by not bothering to translate the documentation. Cutting costs is a universal pressure that transcends all boundaries. Working in one's native language doesn't seem even remotely politically charged to me.
> If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
The point of my original analogy (that I feel still stands) is that wanting to categorize something for some purpose is not necessarily political in nature. Sure, it could be motivated by such. But it doesn't have to be. Perhaps you have a legitimate reason to want to sort your vegetables by fat content. It doesn't have to be political (though it certainly can be).
It follows that me not wanting political conversations in a certain venue is not necessarily a politically motivated position in and of itself. It could be (my intention could be to manipulate the discourse for a political purpose) but it doesn't have to be.
> politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
Politics influence the vast majority of human activity almost by definition. It doesn't follow that everything is political. Words are intended to mean things. If "everything is A" then what is the point of A as a category? Obviously categories are only useful to the extent that they exclude things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The spec sheet being written in English is politics. The spec sheets of the most advanced microcontrollers, the cheapest microcontrollers, and the most widely used microcontrollers are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics. Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal t…
> are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics. We definitely do not agree on that point. I mean sure, I can imagine a scenario where a company chooses not to publish in a particular language for a political reason. But I do not believe that is typically the case. If I pull up a Japanese ActivityPub node and notice that the people there are posting in Japanese (not Engl…