Be a shame if someone "audited" it, eh Vinnie?

Seriously though, after this kind of thing who in the world would ever willingly do business with these guys when there are better alternatives? They might sell you software and fuck off or they might go full retard and audit you into oblivion. Yeah, no thanks guys.

After 2015 and they System==D debacle, I absolutely banned Fedora from any project I participate in. If I must use Linux, I use Devuan. However, for most situations, one of the BSD's is perfect. Fedora is a trash heap of a distribution that always brings a load of garbage into Linux. If it's not Lennart-from-M$-who-went-back-to-M$ then Fedorites are cheerleading Wayland, GNOME3, the 19th revision of their Code of Conduct, or some other divisive & questionable move. Those guys have terrible instincts and can be relied on to always do the WRONG thing.

The web is best browsed with Dillo, Elinks, or at worst something like Palemoon or ArcticFox. Screw these huge browser projects anyway. They all take massive resources to compile and run. Chrome is an especially bad bit of corporate spyware doing their best to prevent ad-blocking. At least Firefox is still somewhat portable, but it's still just (far) too damn big. I never allow Javascript and if a site wont work with a simple browser, I just leave. The web is mostly a time wasting corporate strip mall. Everything you need to know is in the man pages or source code.

Fire them. All of them. They are expensive and useless. Despite Trump's failure to overcome cherry picked activists judges, the voters thirst for government employee mass firing remains undiminished. Fire all the beurocrats, now. At the federal level we need a small military and a few excise tax collectors. Just about everything else should be shut down or transitioned to the private sector.

They cannot do the basic *arithmetic* to understand that UBI is not technically feasible (or they refuse to try). This is just another non-technical story that makes current Slashdot commie user base heads explode. "Big meanie with government says no UBI for you." Laughable. Then there is the simple fact that high levels of income redistribution has an extremely poor history of effectiveness in realistic historical terms.

US population: 330M. Assume $1,000/month UBI per adult (250M adults).
Annual cost: $250M × $1,000 × 12 = $3T.
2024 federal budget: ~$6.5T. Tax revenue: ~$4.9T.
UBI = 61% of current revenue, requiring massive tax hikes (e.g., 60%+ income tax rate across all brackets, far exceeding current top rate of 37%) or unsustainable deficit spending (2024 deficit: ~$1.8T). Historical tax revenue caps at ~20% of GDP; UBI pushes this to politically/economically infeasible levels (>30% GDP).

They just revealed they've been sitting on a two year old zero day issue with Chrome that was fixed last month. I think I'll stick with Dillo and Elinks.

Every FOSS coder has 10 ideas he hasn't had the time or energy to code yet. When I see a giant explosion of open source hit the street and actually work and/or one-up the existing stuff, I'll believe "vibe coding" works.

In the meantime, AI is kinda helpful for diagnosing weird compiler errors and occasionally can write 15-30 lines of code without introducing more bugs that it fixes. SOMETIMES. I use multiple LLMs every day so I agree it's helpful, but "about to take coders jobs" is very hard to believe unless everything you write is 10 lines of code or less.

The kids where I live will probably set them on fire or put cones on their head. This ought to make for some entertaining videos.

If these AI tools are so good, why didn't they skip translation into English requirements and just re-write all the code in a more modern language? Couldn't possibly be that these promises are oversold and underdelivering, eh? Personally, I cannot get ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, or CoPilot to write more than about 30 lines of code without introducing/causing more bugs than it fixes. I use one or more of them daily for various (admittedly useful) tasks, but the idea that LLMs are a replacement for programmers is still looking silly from here on the ground with no journalists around.

This should be the takeaway for everyone. To (mis)quote Scarface "Systemd is a great big pussy, waiting to get fucked."

This is 100% on Pottering's System==D. It's not a "Linux" problem, it's a System==D problem. For someone who ostensibly in the group that "doesn't give a shit" you sure sound mad. Are you mad? Because you sound angry.

I hate online flame wars, but you've misunderstood me and missed my point.

Many people do what you did- dive into the details. My point is: most Android and iPhone users are totally unaware of the lack of privacy in their phones (and computers). Nobody I know knows or cares, and some think I'm "paranoid" because I do care, and try to take steps to limit my exposure to hoovering.

You mentioned iPhone privacy settings: what percentage of iPhone users even know about it?

In case I'm not being clear, my point is: consumers are not aware of the lack of privacy. I think if you could educate them, explaining how much of their personal data is being hoovered, especially phones, if you could get them to think, mull it over, I think they'd want much more privacy, and many would be shocked by how much of our personal stuff is being sent out from our phones.

I barely do anything personal on my Android phone. I'm on a quest to understand Android processes and process control. My phone came with a cleaner app that shows many background processes running. You can "clean" them, but they'll pop up again. Why is Samsung Notes sending stuff through the network? Many other processes pop up, accessing the data / network connection, when I turn on data connection. Why do they need this? Why are they sending stuff? Point is, it's happening, and I doubt most users are aware of it.

I'm generally not okay with this concept of passive agreement. These ToS are much too long, even if someone wants to read through one.

I'm not a criminal and I have nothing to hide. But how would you feel if someone was peering in your bathroom window? I could argue they're not hurting you in any way. But most sane people understand that there's something unacceptable about voyeurism.

I could go on but I fear this will be further misunderstood, and I have much higher priorities to deal with. Thanks.

 

Things would change if courts would award damages for time and effort wasted fixing the problems caused by all of this personal information gathering and correlating. Poster above mentions getting incorrect bills because someone used (or perhaps mistyped) his email address. If we could track our time spent fixing these things, then charge the offenders at lawyer's fees ($300/hr for example), maybe people would be much more careful with our personal information.

You state that as if it's a well-known fact. I don't think it is. Please elaborate and support your statement.

"It looks like you are trying to be productive and do some work. Would you like me to get in your face and make some inane suggestions?"