The Communication Cube


"Open Source" people are fighting to kill open source projects (re. xorg fork)
Code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdlhHOLaRgQ
I love, that someone helps X escaping, but I don't know what to expect quality-wise and in terms of security. ? But we need something sensible 'til Arcan's released, and then until it's broadly supported.
 
Have just spent around an hour tracking buses on a local bus companies' website at Peony's behest. I think it's time to employ stronger measures.

 
I love, that someone helps X escaping, but I don't know what to expect quality-wise and in terms of security. ? But we need something sensible 'til Arcan's released, and then until it's broadly supported.
Hacker culture has changed for sure I don't even know if you can call it that anymore. At some point people started programming as a means to an end, because it was viewed (somewhat naively) as a viable career. Now you get programmers that are random assholes you have nothing in common with. They definitely don't understand that open source is about inclusion, getting people to use your software and being able to adapt other peoples software to your needs. It's not about getting more bug fixes or altruism. It's about interacting with like minded individuals and that aspect is definitely diluted since software now runs the planet and so many chodes are involved.

Incidentally I recently compiled XFree86-4.4.0 on my g4 cube because the X server that ships with osx 10.4 doesn't listen on port 6000. For security reasons you can only remote in via ssh tunnel and that saturates my 500MHz powerpc cpu. It took many hours but built with little fuss. I want a use-case for my old cube and the best use case for retro devices - gaming - wasn't something i ever did much on a mac (I had Nintendo). x11 is a very chatty protocol and compression over ssh does wonders, running firefox remotely with rpi4 as thin clients works fine - as long as ssh -o Compresson=yes. So I need to bypass ssh because the encryption is too heavy but still need compression, so my freshly built x-server isn't getting much use. I think i might be able to solve it with a few perl 1-liners, something like: /tmp/.X11-unix/X2= -> perl:gzip -> TCP -> perl:gunzip -> whatever-local-socket -> X11. I also recompiled sshd with compression type NONE but got frustrated. I will get this working. Oh yes. I will get this working.
Post automatically merged:

We definitely used to be more collaborative.

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I feel there needs to be an alternative to everything that's under Red Hat's thumb. Otherwise we will be doomed. I don't see a potential for another, new kernel and ecosystem getting to where Linux is at ever again.
Am I irrationally Angst-ful?
 
I feel there needs to be an alternative to everything that's under Red Hat's thumb. Otherwise we will be doomed. I don't see a potential for another, new kernel and ecosystem getting to where Linux is at ever again.
Am I irrationally Angst-ful?
Maybe with the help of AI some parts of the process can be much faster compared to starting from scratch. But a lot of work went into the Linux kernel, so you probably won't match its quality easily.
Also it's supporting many platforms. A kernel supporting only Risk-V, for example, might be easier to make.

Probably easier to try to make Red Hat more free.
 
Hacker culture has changed for sure I don't even know if you can call it that anymore. At some point people started programming as a means to an end, because it was viewed (somewhat naively) as a viable career. Now you get programmers that are random assholes you have nothing in common with. They definitely don't understand that open source is about inclusion, getting people to use your software and being able to adapt other peoples software to your needs. It's not about getting more bug fixes or altruism. It's about interacting with like minded individuals and that aspect is definitely diluted since software now runs the planet and so many chodes are involved.
Yes, software as a business has kind of destroyed software as culture. It's like with music. I don't sing nor play nor know anything about music, I just like to listen to it.
Still, the music industry has kind of removed the fun. I like music as folklore (I don't mean folk songs played by some genius on stage and many people listening, I mean family or friends knowing the same songs and sharing them or versioning them spontaneously).
But of course the music from spotify or a music store can sound better, so there's some kind of unfair competition between commercial and spontaneous music.
That free software is used for mission critical stuff and daily business does need to remove some of the fun and bring some money, but it would be nice if there was still some culture surviving on the sides.
Besides that I get the feeling even commercial software used to be about helping people use computers, and nowadays is more and more about helping computers (ab)use people.
 
commercial software used to be about helping people use computers, and nowadays is more and more about helping computers (ab)use people
At least with apps in the walled-garden ecosystems, it's catering to computer illiteracy, which in turn leads to fostering it. Who knows someone that has no proper concept of filesystem?
 
At least with apps in the walled-garden ecosystems, it's catering to computer illiteracy, which in turn leads to fostering it. Who knows someone that has no proper concept of filesystem?
Yes, but it's more than that. Info stealing, adding dependencies from multinationals to everyday lives, controlling what people's devices do and when, pushing adds, unfair competition, even clickbait headlines feel abusing. General entshitification.
It's not only software though, There are bars limiting how long you can sit, or airlines overbooking, or concert tickets tricks, or any kind of abuses. I mean sellerrs always tried to frame buyers, but they used to put more artistic dissimulation in it before.
Now they're often too big to care.
 
How does AI generated code factor into FOSS? Maybe it's shit but it's definitely faster to develop - gotta give it that.
 
Yesterday an Indian airplane crashed after take-off killing many people, Israel attacked Iran's nuclear facilities, 1.000.000 Russian casualties milestone was hit in Ukraine (according to Ukraine). Crazy times.
 
Yesterday an Indian airplane crashed after take-off killing many people, Israel attacked Iran's nuclear facilities, 1.000.000 Russian casualties milestone was hit in Ukraine (according to Ukraine). Crazy times.
And yesterday wasn't even Friday the 13th !
 
How does AI generated code factor into FOSS? Maybe it's shit but it's definitely faster to develop - gotta give it that.
As input, I doubt any code generator respects license compatibility. There will surely be lawsuits on whether people can train models on free software and what license does the model output carry,
As output, in some cases the problem is already too much code contributed and too little capacity to review it. It doesn't take AI, sometimes it's just a big corporation paying a few developers fulltime and creating a community imbalance.
Culturally, I don't think AI can fit any communities culture. All that you said about understanding other people's code.
In software engineering writing code is not the most time consuming task, but in free software development even less.
I read some free software maintainer complaining of AI generated bug reports with no merit and overwhelming resources (I think I sent it here some weeks ago).
There's also often the requeriment that the build chain for a free software project should be free software too. What is a free software AI model is being recently defined, but whatever it is it may still be undesirable in that it may require too much data, hardware or energy,
so if the model is ot part of the build chain and just its outputs are considered like code contributions, it seems kind of unsustainable.. I don't know.
So I don't think AI should be useful in free software.
But people or corporations are still going to use AI models to write software and some are going to publish it with some free license (with more or less uncertain legal validity) and some of it then it might even be actual free software. But the community is not going to work the same, and I don't know how to set up the governance. I can imagine it as one of those code drop projects that get published but not really community maintained.
No idea.
 
How does AI generated code factor into FOSS? Maybe it's shit but it's definitely faster to develop - gotta give it that.
If you just want lots of text that looks like code, hm-kay.
At least when it comes to C++, chatgpt is plainly unqualified beyond sanity checks (that also don't find every bug), simple functions or class definitions (it's good at writing the boiler plate stuff for you), design pattern showcases and examples, helping to find the relevant stuff in a complicated diagnostic, explaining a language concept to you, or being an interactive reference. Ask it to write something a bit more complex or something marrying two or more advanced concepts, you get garbage. Though, maybe I just haven't figured out how to use it properly. :)
 
This week I wrote one line of code. I just merged it for testing an hour ago. The other 30+ hours were spent in analysis, discussions and experiments. I have copilot was of no use.
 
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