Yes.

Not a “hater” in terms of trying/wanting to be mean, but I do disagree. I think a lot of people downvoting are frustrated because this attitude takes an issue in one application (yay), for one distro, and says “this is why Linux sucks / can’t be used by normies”. Clearly that’s not true of this specific instance, especially given that yay is basically a developer tool. At best, “this is why yay sucks”. (yay is an AUR helper - a tool to help you compile and install software that’s completely unvetted - see the big red banner. Using the AUR is definitely one of those things that puts you well outside the realm of the “common person” already.)

Maybe the more charitable interpretation is “these kinds of issues are what common users face”, and that’s a better argument (setting aside the fact that this specific instance isn’t really part of that group). I think most people agree that there are stumbling blocks, and they want things to be easier for new users. But doom-y language like this, without concrete steps or ideas, doesn’t feel particularly helpful. And it can be frustrating – thus the downvotes.

100% monitoring and control doesn’t exist. Your children will find a loophole to access unrestricted internet, it’s what they do.

Similarly, children will play in the street sometimes despite their parents’ best efforts to keep them in. (And yes, I would penalize Ford for building the trucks that have exploded in size and are more likely to kill children, but that’s a separate discussion.)

I get what you’re saying, I just think it’s wrong to say “parental responsibility” and dust off your hands like you solved the problem. A parent cannot exert their influence 24/7, they cannot be protecting their child 24/7. And that means that we need to rely on society to establish safer norms, safer streets, etc, so that there’s a “soft landing” when kids inevitably rebel, or when the parent is in the shower for 15 minutes.

I’m confused, are you saying that it was the 11 year old girl’s personal responsibility to avoid being the victim of sexual abuse? Or are you saying that it was her parents’ responsibility to be monitoring her technology use 24/7?

Neither seems right to me…

Now the predators will just continue to do there thing in a darker hole that is even harder to find.

If it’s harder to find, then fewer children stumble upon it and get preyed upon, which is a good thing.

In other news, emacs still didn’t ship my init.el as part of the default configuration! Lol

I would imagine the risk of bias here is much lower than, for example, the predictive policing systems that are already in use in US police departments. Or the bias involved in ML models for making credit decisions. 🙃

someone playing music on their phone though the car audio (super common now) tapping the phone to ignore a call is just as much a crime as texting a novel to an ex.

They are all crimes. Set up your music before you go, or use voice command. Ignore the call with voice command or just let it go to voicemail. Lol. It’s not hard.

And you are kidding yourself if you think almost every person driving for a living is not at some level forced to use their phone by their company (I was)

This is a great of the strength of this system: this company will find its drivers and vehicles getting ticketed a lot, and they’ll have to come up with a way to allow drivers to do their jobs without interacting with their phones will moving at high speeds.

I would much rather have someone pulled over when driving erratically then the person getting an automated ticket 3 weeks after mowing down a pedestrian.

The camera doesn’t magically remove traffic enforcement humans from the road. They can still pull over the obviously drunk/erratic driver.

I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules.

I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we’re in agreement here.

Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.

Using your fucking phone while driving is the crime. This isn’t some “thought police” situation. Put the phone away, and you won’t get the ticket. It’s that simple. We don’t need to wait for a person to mow down a pedestrian in order to punish them for driving irresponsibly.

In the same spirit, if a person gets drunk and drives home, and they don’t kill somebody – well that’s a crime and they should be punished for it.

And if you can’t handle driving responsibly, then the privilege of driving on public roads should be revoked.

I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?

This is such a weird ad absurdum argument. Nobody is telling some ML system “make a judgment call on whether the coffee bean soup is a distraction.” The system is identifying people violating a cut-and-dried law: using their phone while driving, or not wearing a seatbelt. Assuming it can do it in an unbiased way (which is a huge if, to be fair), then there’s no slippery slope here.

For what it’s worth, I do worry about ML system bias, and I do think the seatbelt enforcement is a bit silly: I personally don’t mind if a person makes a decision that will only impact their own safety. I care about the irresponsible decisions that people make affecting my safety, and I’d be glad for some unbiased enforcement of the traffic rules that protect us all.

I’m definitely a fan of better enforcement of traffic rules to improve safety, but using ML* systems here is fraught with issues. ML systems tend to learn the human biases that were present in their training data and continue to perpetuate them. I wouldn’t be shocked if these traffic systems, for example, disproportionately impact some racial groups. And if the ML system identifies those groups more frequently, even if the human review were unbiased (unlikely), the outcome would still be biased.

It’s important to see good data showing these systems are fair, before they are used in the wild. I wouldn’t support a system doing this until I was confident it was unbiased.

• it’s all machine learning - NOT artificial intelligence. No intelligence involved, just mathematical parameters “learned” by an algorithm and applied to new data.

Ah yes, the famously victimless crime of using your phone while driving. Honestly screw anybody who does that, they deserve to be ticketed each time, cause each time they might kill somebody.

I mean you still get served the ads that provide them revenue. But it’s not like I’m assigning you personal responsibility for keeping them in business, or saying you’re wrong or bad for staying. Just sharing why I want people to get off the platform quicker.

It seems obvious to me. Twitter has historically been used by public figures, and especially public institutions like local governments, transit agencies, etc, to make official announcements & statements. Of course having that on a centrally owned social media site was never good, but now with Space Karen making it actively hostile to users (and trying to prevent logged out users from seeing that info), it’s very bad. The sooner Twitter completes its inevitable collapse, the sooner those public figures & institutions will move to a better way to deliver those - Mastodon, RSS, webpages, whatever.

IMO it’s in the public’s best interest for all the holdouts to get out now so we can move on.

Sphinx has warnings for these already. They’re just suppressed and ignored :)

I see what you mean. The python ML ecosystem is… not far off from what you describe.

But please consider Python as a language outside the pytorch/numpy/whatever else ecosystem. The vast majority of Python doesn’t need you to setup a conda environment with a bunch of ML dependencies. It’s just some code and a couple of libraries in a virtualenv. And for system stuff, there’s almost never any dependency except the standard library.

You might be even more concerned to find that your Fedora package manager, DNF, is also written in Python: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf

Fact of the matter is that Python is a language that gets used all the time for system level things, and frequently you just don’t know it because there is no “.py” extension.

I’m not sure I understand your concerns about python…

1. Performance is worse than C, yes. But writing performance sensitive code in Python is quite silly, it’s common to put that in a C library and use that within python to get the best of both worlds. DNF does this with libdnf.
2. “It feels like an extension of proprietary hardware planned obsolescence and manipulation.” This is very confusing to me. There has been one historic version change (2->3) which broke compatibility in a major way, and this version change had a literal decade of help and resources and parallel development. The source code for every Python interpreter version is freely available to build and tweak if you’re unhappy with a particular version. Most python scripts are written and used for ages without any changes.
3. “i don’t consider programs written in Python to have permanence or long term value because their toolchains become nearly impossible to track down from scratch.” Again, what? As I said, every Python version is available to download, build, and install, and tweak. It’s pretty much impossible for python code to every become unusable.

Anyway, people like the Fedora folks working on anaconda choose a language that makes sense for their purpose. Python absolutely makes sense for this purpose compared to C. It allows for fast development and flexibility, and there’s not much in an installer program that needs high performance.

That’s not to say C isn’t a very important language too. But it’s important to use the best tool for the job.

Anaconda is just an OS installer program. At least, the Anaconda that you’re referring to. After installation, it’s gone.

There is also Anaconda which is a Python platform/package system/whatever. Maybe you’re confusing the two?

The reason is simple: in order to be a signed piece of secure boot software, the kernel needs to do everything possible to prevent unsigned code from running at the kernel’s privilege level, or risk its signing key getting revoked by Microsoft.

I assume your kernel is from Fedora and is signed. If your kernel, once loaded, allowed the loading of unsigned kernel modules, then any attacker could use it as part of an exploit that allows them to break secure boot. They would simply include a copy of the Fedora kernel, and then write a custom kernel module which takes control of the machine and continues their attack. The resulting exploit could be used on any system to bypass and defeat secure boot. In essence, secure boot is only as secure as the weakest signed implementation out there.

So, Linux distributors need to demonstrate to Microsoft that they don’t allow unsigned kernel code execution. Linux contains a feature called lockdown, which implements this idea. In order to be effective, lockdown must be automatically enabled by the kernel if secure boot is enabled. Interestingly, Linus flat out refuses to include the code to do that, I guess he disagrees with it. So a little discussed reality of secure boot is that, all Linux kernels which are signed have this extra patch included in order to enable lockdown during secure boot.

And that is why you can’t load an unsigned module when secure boot is enabled.

I use two monitors, and also KDE’s virtual desktops for work. A killer feature for me is that KDE has a window manager option to “pin” specific windows so that they are present on every desktop. This means I can have my terminal and slack client split across one screen and pinned, and then the other screen can contain my “main focus” on each of the virtual desktops - browser, editor, or email. I always can see the chat/terminal but can easily swap the desktop to get to a different focus.

I know that I could just have everything on one desktop and use the alt-tab to change that main window. But the alt tab is slow and non-deterministic. I may have to cycle between five things before I get to the browser, for example. With virtual desktops, I know where each focus is geometrically, and I can always swap over quickly with my key shortcuts.

If you can’t remember or don’t know the syntax well you can still understand a systemd timer, but that is much hard for the crontab.

I will agree that it is easier to read a timer than a Cron entry, especially if you’ve seen neither of them before.

Granted, crontab uses fewer characters, but if you only set up either once in a blue moon you’ll need the docs to write either for a long time.

This is where I disagree. I very rarely setup a Cron job, but when I do, I don’t need to look anywhere for docs. I run crontab -e and the first line of the editor contains a comment which annotates each column of the Cron entry (minute, hour, dom, mon, dow). All that’s left is to put in the matching expressions, and paste my command.

Compare that to creating a new timer, where I need to Google a template .service and .timer file, and then figure out what to put in what fields from the docs. That’s probably available in the manual pages, but I don’t know which one. It’s just not worth it unless I need the extra power from systemd.

This is from somebody who has several systemd timers and also a few Cron jobs. I’m not a hater, just a person choosing the best and easiest choice for the job.

Cron may be old but I don’t think it’s “legacy” or invalid. There’s plenty of perfectly good, modern implementations. The interface is well established, and it’s quite simple to schedule something and check it. What’s more, Cron works on new Linux systems, older non-systemd ones, and BSD and others. If all you need is a command run on a schedule, then Cron is a great tool for the job.

Systemd services and timers require you to read quite a bit more documentation to understand what you’re doing. But of course you get more power and flexibility as a result.