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Comment Honestly who attacks the FSF? (Score 0) 18

LLM crawlers are understandable these days, but who on earth is actively trying to take the FSF down?

A bunch of heathen VIM users trying to stop people from accessing EMACS? What the heck?

Let's say you actually managed to take down the FSF website. Who would even notice or care? How would that help your hacker rep in any way? You'd be a laughingstock for making the attempt.

Comment Re:sudo-rs (Score 1) 18

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.

Comment Re:What the fuck?! (Score 1) 28

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.

Comment Re:Depends on EV Use (Score 1) 217

Sure for vacation/road trips I need the fast charger but that is like ones a year?

Yes it is only once or twice a year but it's not something I'd be willing to give up so it's an important once or twice a year and it's the main reason I'd not replace the vehicle we use for such trips with an EV at the moment. Even a fast charger takes 30-60 minutes to charge you vehicle which will reduce your driving time by 1-2 hours assuming ~2 rechargers/day unless you are willing to run it down to almost zero and have a town with a charger in exactly the right location.

I'm sure the technology will improve - it's already come on by leaps and bounds in terms of charging speed from a few years ago - but until it does long distance road trips in an EV are much more hassle than in a ICE.

Comment Equal Representative Democracy (Score 1) 52

Billionaires should not be in the equation of who is elected and what laws are passed in a Representative Democracy.

No, billionaires should not have any increased say over elections and laws due to their wealth than any other person. However, they should still be allowed the same voice as everyone else in supporting or opposing ideas although in practice holding them to that is going to be extremely hard to do.

Comment I agree (Score 5, Insightful) 109

Yes AI may be generating a lot of code now. But you need someone to find where what was generated was weak, or inefficient.

Over time the quality of generated stuff will improve, but since so many companies are generating a lot of code today that is a LOT of technical debt that is building up rapidly.

I especially agree that now is the time to round out your skills - as stated, study design, study platforms you connect to but do not develop on. Study AI tools, find out when they work for things you work on and know well - and when they do not.

Good luck out there everyone!

Comment Gaza? (Score -1, Flamebait) 38

After an Iranian missile hit, at least, the parking lot of Microsoft Israel, several reports came out saying that they were helping the IDF with genocide operations in Gaza.

I don't know if it's true but those are the real reports.

The timing and 'quiet' character suggests Pakistan might have told them to get the hell out.

"Developing story" as they say.

Comment Cutting the Pendulum's Cord (Score 1) 262

The no-EDI directive already went out at few months ago. I know because I work outside the US but in an US-led collaboration and our US collaborators have had to shutdown participation in any and all DEI initiatives. However, if you read further down the article you will see the following:

Trump’s big, beautiful bill calls for a 56% cut to the current $9bn NSF budget, as well as a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships – with graduate students among the hardest hit.

This cut is much, much more than the funding spent on DEI and will basically mean that the NSF has to slash lots of major research projects. I'm not tied into the US system enough to know what this will mean in practice but in my own field of particle physics I suspect we are going to see one or more major US-led collaborations terminated and US involvement in others stopped or heavily reduced.

This isn't the pendulum swinging the other way, it's someone cutting the pendulum's cord.

Comment Wrong Solution (Score 2) 262

Many studies that the government foots the bill for are flatly idiotic

Ok, so let's just assume for the sake of argument that your assertion is correct. How you would fix that? The obvious approach is to revamp the grant selection process and/or provide better guidlelines and criteria for studies you want to fund. The NSF had a less and 50% success rate for grants before the cuts so it is not like they had more money that applications and just had to fund whatever came along, if they really are funding "idiotic" studies it is because they are selecting the wrong studies to fund.

Taking a slash and burn approach to major science funding agencies budgets while simultaneously providing no guidance or instructions about what studies you want to fund is not going to fix the problem you claim exists. All it will do is decimate science across the US, culling both the research you like and that you do not equally because you have done nothing to change the selection process only reduce the level of funding.

That being said it is going to be great for those of us outside the US because now all the best students are going to be looking elsewhere to do research. However, overall we will not be able to fill the funding gap left by the US which means that some future excellent researchers and research projects are going to fall through the cracks and that's bad for science in general but terrible for science in the US. This is brexit-level stupidity and the consequences will last at least as long.

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