terrible for developers

He brought up specific things from the POV of working on subsurface where Linux made things a lot more difficult for them than every “consumer” operating system.

I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.

Which packaging projects? I don’t even remember him talking about particular projects (aside from Debian itself), just about the general landscape of the problem and the attitudes of distro makers that have created it.

AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.

Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk…in theory. He hated it.

I notice neither of these has made all that much of an impact. I have never in my life used either one of them or been encouraged to by anyone else, it has always been package management, or Docker, or pick your binary tarball, or curl | sudo sh and cross fingers.

He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer.

He attained two totally separate attainable technical solutions which solved massive problems in the tech ecosystem and shape the landscape of computing today (one-and-a-half, GNU deserves quite a bit of credit.) I happen to agree mostly with his judgement on this particular problem, so it’s easier for me to see it that way, but I definitely would not dismiss out-of-hand his judgement on the right way to approach significant problems.

Steam I think is probably the closest thing to “right” for the problem he was describing. You pick your app, it downloads and then it works. There’s some behind-the-scenes nonsense involved, but it is in actuality hidden from the end-user, in a way that it is not in any of the “we fixed the Linux desktop!” solutions I have seen that are in actuality just another instance of XKCD 927. I was actually really pleased that he brought up Valve since that was the example that came to mind when he was laying out the problem.

I think it is okay if Linux is bad on “the desktop,” honestly. The world needs tractors and consumer-grade cars. They both have use cases. If what you need is a tractor, and you’re comfortable with the fact that it’s not going to work like a car, then a tractor will do things that are totally impossible with a Hyundai Elantra. That doesn’t mean we need to make tractors just as user-friendly as cars are, so that people can have one vehicle that does both. It is okay for some things to have a learning curve. But I think the example of the difficulties they had with subsurface are really significant things, it’s not just a question of “oh yeah it works different,” there are things that are just worse.

I think something like Arch or NixOS is probably the closest to “right” at this point. There is still a learning curve, so maybe not for everyone, but it’s manageable and things aren’t set up in gratuitously difficult ways. Maybe Bazzite, based on what I’ve heard, but I have not tried it so IDK.

I do too, clearly as does Linus. He’s just talking about some of the issues that prevent it from getting adopted by the normies.

A government lawyer conceded in court that those detained by ICE at the facility did not have access to certain services, including sleeping mats, in-person legal visits, medication and more than two meals per day.

The fuck

“Services”?

Why not just replace it with a cap that isn’t a flip-top? Screw it on tight, squeeze the bottle slightly before putting the cap on so there’s a slight negative pressure. That would be my first thing to try.

So the bottle doesn’t break, it just pops open? This still sounds like a packaging issue. Maybe unstopper / squeeze / stopper the bottle, so it’s got negative pressure. Maybe replace the cap with some other more permanent type of cap (one that doesn’t have a little flip-top, if the ones they’re including do, just a solid cap and then ship the flip-top one alongside it)? IDK. How is it coming apart in transit? It’s not literally the plastic bottle breaking, is it?

This has got to be the packing, not the bottle. I have never heard of a bottle being shipped that suddenly broke on its own, without impact with its environment being the issue.

Well… that sure shows this whole event in a different light.

Here’s the pinout for the webcam component: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Webcam

Unfortunately it isn’t really clear whether the switch positions are in the pinout because it’s the mainboard’s job to implement shutting off the camera when it’s off, or just as information with the webcam module responsible for shutting it off in hardware. I have no idea which it is, but it wouldn’t be super-hard for someone capable with EE to take off the bezel and fool around with it and see which it is (or just pay $19 for the magic of buying two of them, if you didn’t want to take apart your own laptop for it.)

They say they provide full schematics on demand to repair shops (https://knowledgebase.frame.work/availability-of-schematics-and-boardviews-BJMZ6EAu). I’m not sure why they don’t want to just post them publicly, so in that sense you might be right, but they also don’t seem like they are trying to keep them or the interface details of the webcam module fully top secret either.

They do seem like they publish enough information that someone could figure out the answer if they wanted to. (People in the forums have fooled around with them and seem to be convinced that they are actually hardware switches: https://community.frame.work/t/how-do-the-camera-and-microphone-switches-work/4271 IDK whether that’s accurate, but that’s what the forum people think.)

No idea why you’re trying to lecture me from this position of authority about taking apart PCBs and whatnot. Anyway, that’s how it works, hope this is helpful for you.

I sort of suspect that the wiring is in a diagram somewhere. I could be wrong, but that would be my guess. It’s not in a PCB, that’s up in the bezel where it’s just wires and stuff.

Also! Inflation and whether or not it was the president’s fault, and all the Palestine protests and how Democrats (only Democrats) were facing a lot of heat for their support of Israel. Almost as if our media is corrupted by partisan influences that are trying to mislead and influence people, and it works shockingly well.

Framework laptops have a little physical switch to turn off the camera / mic when you don’t want them.

The original SGI webcams, some of the first that ever existed, actually had a physical plastic cover that you could slide over them when you didn’t want the camera on. “No, I don’t trust your hardware any more than your software. I shouldn’t need to. Stop looking at me when I don’t want you to, and prove to me that you are not, or else I will be suspicious.” Back in those days that was sort of a universal point of view among internet people, I think…

Yeah. A lot of times it’s pretty simplistic thinking. Anything that sounds vaguely like you’re saying that Israel isn’t evil can just get shouted down without getting engaged with, and usually people will cheer for that reaction.

Also people don’t like to “lose” internet arguments whatever are the facts of the matter, and me being an unrepentant dickhead during the disagreement definitely doesn’t help make it easier to have the conversation. Whatever man

Certainly possible, most politicians are, I think. I was just saying that you wouldn’t have to be some nutty apartheid-supporter to look at Rasoul’s statement and have some objections to it.

Absolutely correct. So anyone who’s doing that (or supporting it, making excuses for it, whatever), that’s real fucked up and they’re a bad person. I should have clarified, that type of broad category I’m fine with.

What I was saying is that someone who has been tirelessly advocating for the US to stop funding Israel, showing photos of the genocide and starvation on the senate floor, introducing votes to defund Israel, showing up at protests, all that kind of thing, if you manage to introduce a category of “Zionist” into the conversation, and then say “Well he’s a Zionist so he’s supporting genocide,” that’s a stupid way to reason. That’s what I’m saying about broad categories. That type of broad category (using imprecise language to strategically make it sound like someone’s supporting something they’re not supporting) are useful tools for getting people confused.

Makes perfect sense.

Almost as if you can’t look for morality or amorality in broad categories, and you need to look at what someone’s actually doing (or advocating or whatever), and be specific.

Beastie Boys had one of the first and biggest of the anti-Iraq-War songs, I can’t think offhand of one that was more “mainstream” at the time and still explicit and specific about it.

Well I’ll be sleeping on your speeches 'til I start to snore
Cause I won’t carry guns for an oil war
As-Salamu alaikum, wa alaikum as-salam
Peace to the Middle East peace to Islam

And so on. It might not have been the best (IMO that is “Empire” by Dar Williams, with haunting sadness, historical scope, and irony), but it was big.

Many words have multiple, often contradictory and historically loaded meanings: “christianity”, “socialism”, “honour”. What’s weird about talking about them?

If somebody was writing about the “evils” of socialism, I would actually have exactly the same complaint about it for exactly the same reason. I would actually fully expect people to have precisely Tim Kaine’s reaction to it, basically to say “Whoa WTF are you talking about, I am socialist, and I’m not evil.” That’s actually a pretty good example to explain what I am trying to clarify with you.

Christianity’s a little different… I think “honor” actually has enough of an agreed-upon definition that you wouldn’t need to get tangled up in the definition of “honor.” That’s actually another instructive example: Two people arguing about whether a third person “has honor” are unlikely to be unintentionally wrangling about “what does honor mean,” and so getting themselves confused about it in the same way that they might be if they’re arguing about “Zionism” or “socialism,” and so it’s more likely to be productive. They might disagree, but they won’t extensively go in circles about it. With these kind of broad and definition-varies-by-the-person definitions, you just have to be really careful with how you apply it and talk about it, especially when huge issues of good and evil are involved, or else you’re going to do material harm to people who are trying to help you, and make it more difficult for them to help you.

So… you’re on board with defining some people as “evil,”

Where the actual fuck did I do that?

When you posted the article about “the ‘evils’ of Zionism” along with “Zionism has proven how evil our society can be” and “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way. This is Zionism.”

Again, he’s not wrong. I get what he’s saying, it is accurate. But you can understand how someone who thinks “Zionist = anyone who thinks Israel should be allowed to exist” could read that and then object to it. Right? Or no? I feel like you’re having a lot of trouble grasping simple points here.

I’ve actually seen people get accused of being Zionists

I already told you: “I personally don’t consider the word “zionist” to be a slur.” I don’t use it as an accusation. So I don’t know what to do with your defensiveness here.

Advanced reading comprehension: Why did I bring this up? I get that you don’t know what to do with it, but what point was I trying to make when bringing up accusations of someone being a Zionist that I’ve seen before? I’ve touched on it and why it is important a few different times.

Yeah. It’s also notable that Rasoul is a Democratic committee chair, and he’s been railing against Israel’s “war” for years now, and all of that has always been fine. It became an issue with this particular post, for the reasons you specified, and now people are trying to use it as a way to spin up this whole thing where the Democrats hate the Palestinians and want to silence his criticism of Israel, and this is just more proof.

You are saying that the word means too many different things to too many different people and therefore is not helpful to be used. Did I get it right?

100% right. Doesn’t that make sense, though? You don’t necessarily have to agree with me that it’s not helpful, but isn’t it weird to just kind of keep using it and acting like we’re talking about what the “real” definition of it should be when you know that that’s my argument?

I did answer, I told you I don’t care.

Point out to me where I applied the term it to any particular person.

So… you’re on board with defining some people as “evil,” but you couldn’t care less whether any particular people are or are not in that category that you’re calling “evil.” You just know that people in this vague category are evil. Sterling. I’ve literally never heard of that working out bad for any reason, in history or anywhere else.

The whole substance of the kerfuffle to me is that different people mean different things when they say it. Rasoul means one thing, and I get what his message means, it makes sense to me. But then some other people see it, and they think he’s talking about a totally different group of people, and they get heated up about it, which also makes sense. Now you’re coming in with a third definition, which I’ve actually never heard before (I’ve actually seen people get accused of being Zionists and then extensive arguments about why they are Zionists and what it means, they definitely didn’t get to use your definition “well I say I’m not, so that means I’m not.”)

This is no way to run a railroad. The purpose of language is communication. It’s actually fine if different people mean different things when they use words, it doesn’t take too much to get to the heart of the issue and people can talk it out without the language getting in the way. But you seem totally unconcerned about any of this, and just kind of want to make a simplistic point without needing to define your words well or get everyone on the same page. I don’t think that will work, I don’t think it’s a good way to try to type messages, that’s why I am disagreeing with you.