Well, there was United Linux, a project with the goal of becoming the standard Linux distro. That was way back just after the turn of the century. That project fractured & died pretty quickly. I always liked their logo, though.

Your question is a good one, and valid. Red Hat have had the chance to become the "Standard Linux" (see the history of Scientific Linux & Centos for examples) more than once but, judging by their behavior, that's not what they want to be.

Admittedly a bit late now but you might have a look at the Debian 13 release notes.

https://www.debian.org/release...

Debian 13 Trixie released today.

Thanks, Debian people.

That can't happen

The SailGP sailboat racing teams run identical boats. The F50s are even all made in the same shop. That sets them apart from other racing games. In addition, all of the telemetry (and there's a lot) of each boat is available to all teams.

The goal is to distill everything as much as possible so that only the skill of the sailors makes the difference.

If you saw the movie, "Tenet", the sailing scene took place onboard an F50. With only a three person crew but, hey, it's a movie...

Anyway... enough about sailboat racing - and now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Debian unstable is no less stable than any other rolling release, and I've been running the same installation (disk moved between machines and cloned a couple of times) since 2004 with no catastrophic failures.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1123/...

Having a couple of binaries in the git tree would be a kind act: I often do that with (much smaller!) project of mine to make it easy of people to try and use them. Of course, to create MRs, you'll still need to build and debug it yourself.

Let's make programming more fun by making it harder!

Yup, same as the feedback loops in "cold readings"

Charlie Stross(@cstross@wandering.shop) wrote, in Mastadon:
The LLMentalist effect: Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms used by (fake) psychics to gull their victims: https://softwarecrisis.dev/let...

The title of the paper is "The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con"

That's been done for years, just not by Facebook. It's a classic problem in machine learning, and they've either finally noticed ... or took a revenus hit! Not making money is an excellent motivator (:-))

Interests, like "I want a trailer hitch for my Subaru".

All that other stuff? Wanted for someone else.
It's just piggybacking the blame onto advertisers, because people don't like them anyway

• - they own the agent for the advertiser,
• - they own the agent for the publisher,
• - they own the auction house, and
• - they don't provide an audit trail.

I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.

Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about the first amino acids many years ago. It was included in a collection of essays (Why does ice float?, Why is the night sky black?and more...) titled, "The Left Handed Universe". So old the info may be long out of date, but an interesting read if you can find it.

If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.

That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry guns.
0.8% is a good error rate. 34% wrong is typical in matching black women. See
https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/biased-technology-automated-discrimination-facial-recognition#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20facial%20recognition%20technology%20is%20biased.,published%20by%20MIT%20Media%20Lab.