jlg23

I think not.

[...] if you allow me to use that lingo which you won't but I don't care

[...] + lots of text I didn't read

Understood.

I think you are doing the post injustice by hijacking it. FOSS maintainers can get a burnout even without toxic users - hard deadlines and the understanding that people really rely on your project can do that to you.

e.g.: About 25 years I had developed some blogging software in the style of usemod (single executable, data stored in ./data) for coordination of and reporting about protests on throwaway VMs. This initially was a weekend project but spiraled out of control when it made its way through Europe and people called me for setups or features for other actions. My burnout was the result of trying to help grass root organizations while also being politically active myself and having a full time job. The solution was basically what the article says:

* invited more maintainers by dumbing down the implementation so that one does not need a black belt in perl to hack on it

* created minimal docs

* I found hoster in the scene who was competent and willing to do pro bono hosting in exchange for me being available in case of problems (he never called me).

This is ideal for large argument maps, thank you!

If those "many successful services" are FOSS, you are a very rare breed of developers - one I have not yet encountered in almost 30 years of FOSS development.

Could you please link some of your projects? I could use some inspiration how to deal with entitled FOSS users who do not understand that they already got much more than what they paid for.

Every compiler in any language for any language has at the very least educational value.

On the other hand, demeaning comments without any traces of constructive criticism don't have any value.

My initial reaction was that I have to use this just because of the buzzword density in the title. But after reading up, it looks like the author was pretty successful in moving the bloat from code to announcement title. I'll give this a try!

They should name their team DNS because that is what will be shown on scoreboards of all tournaments to which their players will have to travel with DB anyway.

Their reliability is so abysmal that I fly multi-hop flights from Berlin or to airports a few hundred miles off my destination if that allows me to not rely on them. Boats that go up and down the Amazon have not let me down the way DB reliably did.

This is regular reporting using end-consumer market rates to inflate numbers.

Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.

I could be wrong, but I recall in many developing countries phones there are many teenagers who code on their phone because laptops (even tablets) are prohibitively costly.

Yes, I see that a lot here in the far south of Morocco.

They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible but I don't know if they're doing that.

They do. Adapters are about $2.

Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

edge case (n): Requirement discovered after the requirements gathering phase.

I did not "get it" from the post itself, but it linked to a post that mentioned "subed", subtitle editing for emacs with syncing with/control of video playback in mpv. I could see myself doing that and then would be happy if I could also trim the video while I am at it.

One question - how does this prevent mosquitos from breeding in other bits of standing water that I can't locate?

It cannot and that is not its purpose. Practically you should be able to locate any other breeding grounds by mere observation and then you have to eliminate them one by one until the mosquitos are left with the ones you set up.

it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.

That is not necessarily related to the compound but the method of consumption. Natural sources of psychedelic compounds have, naturally, variances in potency. With Morning Glory seeds you also ingest some other probably pharmacologically active compounds, again in amounts that vary from seed to seed.

And worth a shirt "After much thinking, the solution is obvious."

The Candid Naivety of Geeks

Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.)

Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is going to change anything?

Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz. Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in, for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it, because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would commit to long-term memory.

No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds like something between bad impulse control and idiocy.

I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to convince.

Yes, but ICE can pick you at random (probably lawfully at least close to borders and international airports) while you always have to talk with CBP when entering the country. I personally have been avoiding travel to/through the US whenever possible just because some of the wrong people have been my friends and I happen to make my money with drugs - completely legal, helping to disseminate neutral information for free, but I would not want to discuss the finer details of ethics and drug policy with an underpaid officer of any police force.

The one thing that protects me somewhat from ICE is that I am white, in my forties, middle class and non-confontational when talking with officials. Or how a friend put it: No worries, you could be drinking a beer, smoking a joint and cops would laugh about your accent before telling to have a nice one.

This is travel advice I've been following for 25 years; because, as the article states, the rules are not new: Go through a port of entry that is not on US soil so being refused entry does not lead to incarceration and deportation. For people in the EU, Dublin is such a port of entry. Once on a plane from there, arrival in the US is the same as for a domestic flight.

That's not the same group. "Fraunhofer" is not a single group but the umbrella organization for 76 different institutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a good foundation.

Darija (Moroccan Arabic) is probably furthest away because it is heavily influenced by the Berber languages (and Arabs are not the majority in Morocco, they are just the largest minority). Also, Moroccans tend to do lots of context switching to French.

Egyptian Arabic is widely understood everywhere due to Egypt's strong position in the Arabic movie/TV industry.

Did this a few times, devs loved it: all in posix-shell, the main script was a rather ugly thing but devs would never touch it. You'd code your command as a simple shell script in cli-lib/$username/$command, it would be available to you as 'cli $command', to others as 'cli $username.$command'.

Useful commands would be copied over into the directory that contains the commands accessible to all. Usefulness was determined at the coffee machine, the smokers' room or in conversations after presentations on their work given by devs.

Also, interested interns would be tasked to spot "optimization potential" - so they read through these commands, learned to read and write shell scripts and they had to learn to efficiently address senior devs.

Everytime this was more a social thing than actual workflow optimization: Tooling became a permant side project, people could (and would) look their peers' scripts, one could take a short break from the main project by working on this. One observation I made: the more senior the devs, the less interested they were in this "playground" - after all good devs are always faster at hacking solutions to these simple problems than evaluating and adapting existing ones.

Looking at the license (MIT) we already got much more than what we paid for and the authors don't "have to" do anything but accept thanks of those who chose to be grateful for software they got for free.

I assume the article is based on this presentation at 38c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-investigating-the-iridium-satell...

Uh. So what?

At a European hacker con we had the custom of keeping crew badges in the first room to be occupied by us and our security. To get your crew badge, you had to get into that room without authorization.

Everyone worthy of being called "crew" did succeed.

Peace of mind and much less maintenance work.

In April this year we had to move a FreeBSD server to another colo: Uptime 3172 days, just rebooted, did not bother with an update and ever since it has been serving some high traffic sites. All relevant security patches are applied but in all this time there was not a single vulnerability we had to fix that required a reboot.

Codewise I'd prefer a signaled error in elisp and something like your proposed magic/back-door as a handler you'd have to set up in user(-config) space.

from the article:

Option 3 — Find a young, aggressive, ambitious person to run Atlas

[...]

This would have been an amazing opportunity for the right person, but it wasn’t in the cards.

A great metric for job security, not necessarily for better software: Unless it concerns security or correctness, I prefer an old but audited version of a library anytime over a newer version that I have to audit again.

A metric like this will be loved by PMs and loathed by developers who have to leave a known, sane state, update and deal with the fallout later on.

Exactly. 25 years ago in university none of my professors or assistant professors bothered with syntax, that was left to the compilers or interpreters of the language we were supposed to do our assignments in....

they should really temper the response on future calls

So I should swat myself in the morning when I want to go on a rampage in the afternoon?

As inconvenient as it is for the victims, the 100% response rate is the only guarantee the system cannot be abused in other ways. A similar example from Germany: A friend is driving 8h every 2 months to his mandatory shooting practice because he missed too many flights back due to residues of gun discharges found on him at the airport. The government is accepting this 8h commute as work time because any way around the mandatory, extensive investigation at the airport would open holes in the security procedures in place. And my friends "secret service" badge does not grant him any special powers at the airport - also by design.

There's an argument to be made that for something like temperature control with its various modes (heat/vent/cold, strength/temperature, fan speed, which combination of vents), a large touchscreen is actually a far superior interface -- easier to see and more intuitive.

I agree with "easier to see and more intuitive" and I'd use it when parked. But when driving, I don't want to "see", I want tactile feedback on whether I hit a control.