Americans: Fireworks are illegal? Fuckoff, I'm lighting them in the street then.

Worse: some dumbass caused a fire near LA by buying professional show grade fireworks without knowing how to use them.

If he had access to a fireworks store (like I shop at in New Hampshire) he probably would have just bought those.

I buy consumer mortars and those are *plenty* big for home use.

Much kudos to the Chinese who make very reliable pyrotechnics at quite a fair price. I only spent $160 this year despite the tariffs.

Why ask whether china is eroding the lead; rather than whether the incumbents are maintaining it?

Maybe my faith is weak and if I were huffing the dumb money I'd understand; but it looks awfully like our boisterous little hypebeasts promised that, this time, unlike all the other times in 'AI' we could totally brute force our way to the AGI Omnissiah; briefly tried copium in the form of hoping that competitors would be intimidated by their capex(because there's basically a generation of VCs who think that failure to reach monopoly is indistinguishable from losing); and finally proceeded to speedrun commodification because it turns out that nobody actually had any plan for what would happen if this alley started looking visually impaired even after we plundered the entire internet to feed it.

I realize that it's more fun to focus on what the sinister chinese are doing than what our glorious golden boys are not doing; but let's do the latter anyway; especially since this is one area where you can't just please chinese factory slaves as an inherent price advantage. The guys mechanical-turking out 'training'/'classification' tasks will all go wherever to scrape up the cheapest labor available, then stiff them on promised payments; and (while the process is pretty porous) being not-china is definitely still the best way to get access to premium TSMC processes; and at least not-worse for most of the rest of the most interesting ones.

Either LLMs are fundamentally a technology where being the first mover is a dumb idea; or the 'leaders' are actively fucking it; because, unlike some of the cases involving rare earths mining or finding fast fashion sweatshop sites, this was theirs to lose.

Two theories that seem reasonable from what I've been hearing:

1. Contaminated fuel combined with high temps causing the fuel to become gaseous before getting to the engine.

2. Apparently a solar storm hit exactly at the time of the crash, raising questions about induced currents causing an electrical failure.

The emergency turbine shouldn't have deployed if it were bad gas, so that leads to the sudden electrical failure causing the crash.

That turbine works fine at altitude but not at take-off because at least you can glide to a landing if you have electrical/hydraulic power.

I assume that there's a research OS somewhere that has discovered that this is much harder than it looks for anything nontrivial; quite possibly even worse than the problem that it is intended to cure; but looking at the increasingly elaborate constructs used when sudo is intended to be a granular delegation makes me wonder if the correct approach lies down the path of better permissions rather than ad-hoc lockdown logic.

There are some cases(eg. password-change or login tools often both reflect granularity limits in credential storage; and make reads or edits on your behalf to parts of files that you wouldn't be allowed to touch directly; but also do things like enforce complexity or age requirements that would require a really expansive view of 'permissions' to encompass) where the delegate program is handling nontrivial delegation logic on its own; but in a lot of instances it's hard to escape the impression that you are basically bodging on 'roles' that can't be or aren't normally expressed in object and device permissions by building carefully selectively broken tools.

I obviously don't blame sudo for that; its scope is letting you run a particular thing as someone else if the sudoers file allows it; but a lot of sudoers files might as well just say "there are no roles on this system between 'useless' and 'apocalyptic'"; and that feels like a permissions design problem.

Of note; probably not one to try to NT yourself out of; I'm not sure that you can build a sufficiently expressive set of permissions on classic UNIX style ones; but I've yet to see an NT-derived system that didn't boil down to 'admin-which-can-be-SYSTEM-at-a-whim'/'little people' regardless of the wacky NT ACL tricks you can get up to.

I'm curious if it's a case of the alternatives being tried and largely found to be worse; or if (along with a number of other OS design/architecture fights) the whole thing has mostly been pushed out of mainstream relevance by the degree to which you can just pretend everything inside a worker VM is basically at a homogeneous privilege level if you don't want to deal with it.

Components are just as crazily marked up in the U.S. I wouldn't be at all surprised that the Chinese manufacturers can get even better pricing then an individual could from a Chinese supplier due to volume.

I guess the plan is to use current senior programmers until AI is good enough to replace them too.

Or trackers.

I once came home to our shared house (post student years) to find the hallway about six inches deep in feathers and a dead bird - I'm not sure the bird appreciated the gesture.

I seem to recall reading somewhere they think we're kittens and are trying to teach us - or more likely an automatic behaviour encoded into genes building brains by evolution led to increased survival of kittens and relative increase in prevalence of those genes.

I would call the cops.

Yes, the punctuation police.

The systemd version takes a similar approach - only handling the 99.9% use case of running a local command as a different user based on some basic rules and only really providing a userspace implementation without suid.

IIRC that use case is about 15% of OG sudo's code but most distros carry around all the features. I dunno, maybe it can be compiled without those but I don't see that in distros I've used.

Corporatism is a distinct concept from Capitalism. That's the one you're describing. There's been a psyop by Socialists to describe corporatism as capitalism so they get more of a merger of business and State (fascism).

Corporations are creations of a government in which governments get a cut and politicians get bribes in exchange for protection from justice for the corporate actors' crimes.

If you read Adam Smith he described this as Mercantilism in his time and recommended free market capitalism as its antidote with an emphasis on the accumulation of capital and investment into more competitive production.

Von Mises fleshed this out more a couple centuries later (followed by Hayek and Rothbard). The definitive work is /Man, Economy, and State/ which breaks it all down in tremendous detail.

Notably corporations in the early USA were limited to public works projects and had time-limited grants (e.g. for building a bridge or later the railroads).

JD Rockefeller bribed Congress during Reconstruction to make corporations permanent, so he wouldn't lose his charter for Standard Oil. He later wrote the Sherman Anti-trust Act to hurt his competition.

Today we have immortal psychopathic corporations with a legal mandate to be depraved and with legal personhood. The Dulles brothers created the CIA to fight wars and conduct assassinations on behalf of the corporations. cf. United Fruit or the Pepsi War.

After the Revolution remember to forbid corporations. The Gini Coefficient is too damn high.

I can't comment on where sudo itself lives on the spectrum from aggressively solid implementation to really-dodgy-smell-around-the-edges; but it seems like its purpose is a fundamentally tricky problem even if its execution were impeccable.

The basic "user is authorized for root; but we'd prefer he be thinking and logged when he uses that authorization" is reasonably cogent use case; but it's more of a reminder than a security barrier. Then you get into the actually-interesting attempts at limited delegation and determine that you'd basically need a different userland for a lot of purposes: aside from the modest number of things(often with setuid already in place) built specifically to carefully do a very particular delegated function on your behalf and provide you with nothing else if they can help it; very little aside from garbage kiosk UIs or web or database-backed applications with user and permission structures mostly orthogonal to those of the underlying OS actually tries to constrain the user's use of the application(within whatever context that user is operating; generally having a privilege escalation is considered bad).

Half of what you run considers having an embedded shell to be a design feature; so including any of that on the sudoers list essentially means being able to chain arbitrary commands from that sudoers entry; and the other half doesn't outright intend to include a shell but would require some really brutal pruning, likely of important features, to prevent being able to chain a couple of interactions into having the ability to run whatever. And that is assuming that sudo itself is working entirely correctly.

Hot dog on a bun with glyphosate, chips with BHT, ketchup with HFCS, pickles with Polysorbate 80, and a large Coke.

Hot dog caused Diabetes! Q.E.D.

This is why every civilization for thousands of years have made sausages. To make everybody fat and insulin dependent!

TRUST THE EXPERTS.