I'm personally opposed to “constitutional rights” and other such things and consider them an absolute sham that purely exists to make the countries that offer them look good, not to protect anyone. I don't believe they've ever really done that and at best they've served as a basis for judicial activism. Constitutions should purely describe how the state actually functions and how leaders are elected and how the political system works.

“rights”, whether it be constitutional, things like “the universal rights of man”, “war crimes” and similar things have always been ignored when convenient and purely exist to make the party that supposedly offers them appear enlightened, that same party will ignore them whenever convenient and the same applies to laws in general to begin with. There is no country where “rule of law” functions remotely adequately. It's “rule of men” rebranded. If one did something and there was no law against it but people thought it was really bad they will find a way to punish one and just creatively interpret some law in some insane way, and conversely, if one broke the law, but people thought it was a good idea they will let one go, or of course just by having friends at the right places.

It unambiguously banned many things that court ruled it didn't ban based on arguments like “Don't be so literal minded” or “This is a living document.” I'm pretty sure locking up a people in internment camps because they had Japanese parents wasn't “due process” either, but it was “constitutional” because “reasons”.

Actually it does, when the judge already agree with you, your legal arguments don't really matter much, they can be as excellent or as poor as you want them. I reject the entire thesis that it has ever been or currently is about the text of the law in about any country. “nations of law” are a hoax.

ByteDance is the only exception, that company is named in the law and cannot be removed from it by the executive, but for any other potential party, it can decide at its own pleasure whether it wants to include it or not.

Whether something is unconstitutional or not, especially with a constitution as utterly vague and as often ignored when convenient as the U.S.A. constitution is not a fact but an entirely subjective opinion. It is when a certain nine persons are of the opinion that it does. However, their opinion aside, my opinion is that it's ridiculous for a law to name entities by name that as a matter of law violate it, which is what's going on here. The law is not violated by specifically described behavior in it, but by being either ByteDance, or any other random company from a certain list of countries the U.S.A. executive branch decides violates it.

The issue with this law that's often been criticized is that it's explicitly written to allow for this, as well as actually names a company by name. The law explicitly applies to A) ByteDance and TitTok, B) Whatever other company the executive branch thinks it should apply to provided it be from <list of countries>.

That is actually how the law is written which is ridiculous. It would be quite another thing if the law simply stated what was illegal, at which point it would lie with the courts to decide whether ByteDance actually broke it, but this law basically is written as “ByteDance is always guilty as a matter of law, also, whoever else the executive says is guilty is also guilty.

Yes, so they have automated something. At one point a man walked up with a screwdriver to screw in a car wheel, at this point, a machine does it far faster but fundamentally it's the same procedure.

Man has managed to automate something yet again, that he may sit on his arse one extra hour per day and work less, for he enjoys sitting on his arse more than working in dangerous factories, I can't blame him.

This makes me wonder how big the revolution will be once they find some way to perform similar training but with far less input. Some kind of new revolutionary model that can achieve the same while reading far less. It has to be doable because right now artificial neural networks need vastly more input to be able to achieve far less reasoning skills as humans do from their inputs so maybe it's possible, though to be fair, humans also need far more time to process their input to make it useful.

Would be interesting though, if some kind of second revolution came with something that was completely different from a neural network in how it operated.

So, this is just a phrase for “Making Indian accents sound North-American” right? Because everyone in North-America is “white”, and everyone in India is “brown” I guess?

“Neutralize” is also silly. Everyone perceives whatever accent he grew up with as the most neutral one.

I used to visit a book club forum I stopped visiting because it became apparent to me no one there was actually interesting in fiction or discussing it and they were mostly talking about the concept of reading that fiction and treating it as their image and most swore by hardcopy while I heavily favor reading on my phone, a foldable, because it's more convenient, customizable, and allows one to carry a limitless amount of fiction on one's person at all time.

They were constantly taking pictures of new arrivals and talking about how they “can't wait to read them”, but apparently could wait long enough to take a picture to post it online. It also made me think of that “hot men reading books” Instagram account. It made me realize that people who claim to be into reading books for a very large portion are more infatuated with the “image” of it, not actually with reading good fiction, and that the people who actually spend a lot of their time reading books, be it fiction or even nonfiction resources have switched to digital means because it's far more convenient for anyone who reads a large amount per day. Bookshelves are mostly to create an image. The amount of stuff I have on my phone would require me to move to a bigger house just to fit it all on a shelf, not to mention how inconvenient it would be to grab it from the shelf.

I realize that OLED screens aren't for everyone and hurt many people's eyes, but e-readers exist for that reason. The imagine many people seem to have of someone who reads a paper book is that he must be very smart, all I see is someone who's technologically illiterate, if he understood anything about technology he would've switched to a more convenient means to read it.

It's not only the danger but also the time, as well as how long one has to train for it first. Mark Shuttleworth had to spend many months at Star City first.

If I want to experience weightlessness, I can always go into a vomit comet instead which takes far less time, and doesn't seem entirely un-fun.

I think you severely overestimate the popularity of Steam on Linux. For one, it doesn't work, as said, without Glibc, which Android and Alpine, which probably are the two most popular systems in terms of number of individual installs don't have.

They're often completely unrelated things that have about as much in common with each other as MacOS and FreeBSD or even less. The only thing they have in common is sharing Linux. Fedora and Alpine really are nothing alike and whatever they share outside of Linux, they also share with FreeBSD, as in rough POSIX compliance. It's very silly to expect the same binaries to work on both. Of course, one of the absolutely biggest Linux-based systems, Android, isn't even really POSIX Compliant. It only “sort of” is.

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Windows provides binary backwards compatibility yes. Almost no Linux-based system does.

And desktop distributions are a minority? This is another thing I never got. These Linux people who think Desktop Linux is this big thing compared to embedded, server, and mobile phone. It absolutely isn't. The overwhelming number of Linux installs do not use Glibc. These people honestly need to get outside of their Fedora bubble and realize just how much bigger In terms of install Android, Alpine and ChromeOS really are which have a completely different architecture.

There's nothing contrarian about it. It's the reality that these systems have followed. You're saying that they should all change how they current operate, or should've done so in the past. I'm explaining why they operate the way they do. My view reflects what is currently happening, and thus the mainstream, not the alternative.

I never did such a thing. I simply explained why they aren't universally adopted and that by the fact that they essentially bundle half an operating system inside, people don't like them as much. There's a good reason this approach hasn't won out: it means a far bigger resource drain on the system and that that the specific philosophy of the operating system, the very reason people chose that operating system to begin with, is not being respected.

And how successful is all that compared to instead installing software the standard way from the distributions repositories? This approach isn't really winning in the end and people like the traditional way better because it turns out they don't want to pay twice the resource amount and they want software to actually work the way they want it to, rather than how the developer wants it to.

Containers have nothing to do with sandboxing and it's a pervasive myth that they function as one. They need a sandbox on top of it, which can also be used without a container. Running untrusted software inside of a container does not mean it can't escape.

People run Debian exactly because they don't want timely updates. This is where I feel you simply don't understand the differing philosophies of different operating systems. Debian is specifically chosen for it's stability, by which they don't mean “doesn't crash” but that they guarantee that the system won't change outside of major version changes or fixes required to fix critical bugs only. Non-critical bugs are not fixed, they are documented, this is by design. It is very attractive to many uses that the system remain unchanging. These people do not want to wake up at one point and realize some interface changed or something doesn't work any more the way it used to and want to concentrate that on major version updates and they want these versions to have long-term support so that they need to update as infrequently as possible.

This is why they choose Debian; this is one of it's main sells. This is why Debian doesn't update to new versions to fix critical bugs but backports the fix to old versions and this is exactly why bundling half an operating system inside of a container that may not respect the Debian philosophy isn't attractive to Debian users. They choose Debian for a reason, and that reason is typically that the system is unchanging and software doesn't update.

If you have the required o.s. outside of it in the right version perhaps, but otherwise all sorts of things such as Pulseaudio of Pipewire, and all that are included inside of the Flatpak container. Not to mention that it requires things such as Dbus to work to begin with, which I personally don't have installed.

Yes but Steam doesn't, which is what this was about. As far as I know it hard depends on glibc.

And here we go. The standard Freedesktop “my way or the highway” complete lack of perspective on the needs and desires of others. Everyone who can't see the great Freedesktop designs is a “masochist” or something similar and that's always the thing that's holding back adoption of the latest Freedesktopware. Wayland still not seeing close as much adoption as X11? That's always of course because people are “masochist” and can't see the greatness and how much better it is. It has nothing to do with that they simply like different things and have different needs.

There are obviously reasons people use Gentoo such as extra performance, customization of compilation options and ease of applying custom patches as well as picking the exact version of whatever package one wants and freely mixing that with other versions of other packages. This all falls apart when using Flatpack which is why Gentoo users seldom use it. I actually just yet tried to install flatpack for fun on a Gentoo system. It didn't do it because it wanted dconf which is masked on my system because I certainly don't have the time to figure out how a binary configuration store works when I could just be editing plain text files that are human readable. Of course, in all it's glory and splendor, the Freedesktop sages will tell you that you should never store configuration in plain text files, despite it being the most common way around because their way is the highway.

People can install whatever they want. But in the end of the day they aren't popular with the users for the reasons I outlined above. People will much rather install a package with apt-get than with Flatpack because then they get the version of it that does conform to the Debian philosophy.

Like I said, they ship half an operating system with it, and on top of that, they don't run without glibc, good luck ever getting that to run. A container effectively contains an operating system inside though.

It's doable if one ignore why an operating system even exists in the first place and just ship one's own with all the software and it has very little to do with what operating system it runs on then. At that level things become so abstract you can probably get those steam games to run on Windows as well by adding just a few extra things into those containers and providing the right interfaces

And Windows binaries working on FreeBSD or Android would also have massive benefits. But these are all systems designed by entirely different parties that have no intention of compromising their own systems and design to realize this. And certainly, one can probably ship some kind of container to make that work. In fact, that's more or less what Wine is, and it's not perfect but it sort of works.

Which goes against the philosophy of many of those systems. You'll notice that Debian heavily patches to make software conform to it's philosophy of how software should work, and Debian users pick Debian for that experience. Of course, Gentoo users are looking to easily customize how software is compiled to suit their own personal needs, and Gentoo packages facilitate that. These systems all have very different goals and aren't interested in compromising it for comparability, nor are their users interested in losing the reasons why they picked those systems, any more than FreeBSD or Android Users are interested in losing what makes those systems what they are in order to run Windows binaries.

Because it was started by the usual “my way or the highway” Freedesktop people who don't understand why people would ever want to run anything other than Fedora and don't realize the reasons behind why other systems do things differently and why people might pick that.

I honestly don't understand why people expect software to be able to be shipped as binary and simply work on a variety of different operating systems, many of which not even really sharing a common ancestry that are all managed by different groups just because they share the same kernel. It's as silly as expecting Android binaries to just run on Gentoo. Or Hurd things to run on MacOS because they were both ultimately derived from the Mach kernel.

So many people seem to think this reality is strange, and that it somehow should work, or should be trivial to solve. Entirely unrelated operating systems should somehow be able to run the same binary. It seems like a nonsensical thing to expect, it's magical enough that within reason the same source code without any alteration can be compiled to run on them due to their, within reason, respecting a similar source-based a.p.i.

Flatpack only works insofar it often ships half an operating system with it, and even then, Flatpack doesn't even really work on many of the systems it is advertised to work on, or implied to work on because the other half of the operating it expects to be there isn't completely there.

Like many of these ideas that Freedesktop came up with they felt were going to take the world by storm and solve all issues, adoption has been slow and a mess because they severely underestimated several problems and issues, and honestly, many of these developers need to walk outside of their own garden more and realize the needs of users who aren't the immediately family of Red Hat developers. I actually talked with some of those developers and their perception of several things was so incredibly off. I distinctly remember a discussion at the height of when Wayland didn't really have support for screen capture and live streaming because it was “insecure” that a fairly high up developer actually thought video games had live streaming capability built in, and had never heard of OBS, all the while passionately defending that there was no need for a protocol to capture not only the video input of the entire desktop, but also of specific windows and be able to do scene composition with it.

I mean, many professional actors do it, not even as a full thing in life but just for a role. Many people have acted the opposite sex, it's obviously extremely common in voice acting but it has also happened in real life acting. People have done this in the past with their lives on the line in order to evade capture.