I wonder how Cloudflare estimates the increased rate of false positives they’re getting after they made their bot detector even more oversensitive in recent weeks. It no longer likes my default javascript-enabled browser profile and I don’t always bother to load another one when I get cloudflared, so >50% of visits from me are “bots”.

I just checked, and it is apparently called “Default”.

I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I’m not sure if they’re completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it’s like.

Coincidentally, today I removed systemd from my laptop (Debian Trixie.) It was reasonably easy. I booted from a USB drive into a shell through debian’s “rescue” mode and typed plausible-looking apt commands until it worked. For some reason it didn’t create /etc/inittab and I made a typo when I tried to do it myself, but other than that no problems. Differences noticed so far that a normal user would care about: none. If nothing goes wrong I guess I’ll do the same on my desktop at home this weekend, because why not.

Nothing against systemd, but I think it’s valuable to continue having other options and it was fun to see that it’s still pretty easy to use them (maybe harder if you’re a GNOME user, idk.)

Personally identifying information here, but I don’t mind telling you all that my exact time of birth was 1970-01-01-00:00:00.000000.

Imagine how malevolent the next generation of AI will be, when it’s trained on today’s Internet text.

When The Witcher 3 came out I had the money and bought it shortly after release at a local shop, because my net connection then was way too slow to download anything measured in gigabytes.

I think it was a set of 3 CDs. I took them home, started installing, and then found out that 3 CDs was nowhere near enough and it wanted to download somewhere in the 10s of gigabytes before I could play. It took about three days.

A quick grep | wc of the Wikipedia list of Toy Story characters suggests that they’ll run out somewhere around the year 2120 if no new Toy Story movies are made. Perhaps Debian should start getting its movie studio department working on a new one before then, just in case.

deleted by creator

Rust-coreutils may eventually become a suitable replacement for coreutils but it hasn’t yet existed for long enough to iron out all the bugs and there’s no real advantage to using it right now.

The idea is that Rust will make everything easier to maintain and improve in the long run, or something like that. It’s somewhat plausible, but it’s not totally obvious whether that will prove correct. So it’s easy to suspect that there must be some other unstated motivations behind it, although to me there don’t appear to be any in view.

“The cloud” is just somebody else’s computer.

I think the window for having that debate was some time around 1992.

Yeah, I was somewhat dismayed to see Little Snitch getting so much attention on mastodon despite it not being free software. I don’t see the appeal.

OpenSnitch does the job quite well. Things in debian are mostly well-behaved, but it’s caught quite a few games running under wine that were up to no good.

Linux vs Windows? One is a popular computer operating system, the other is some kind of advertising and data collection tool from Microsoft.

It used to be the largest, a few years ago. It used to be among the best, a few years before that. It’s still pretty good, but no longer suitable for everyone like it was in the old days.

Translation: They demonstrated entanglement between helium atoms. (Previously it had been done only with photons.)

Lorde’s “master’s tools” speech is routinely misread in tech discourse

Can confirm. As a person with a “tech” background I certainly misread it that way the first time I saw it quoted and went to learn more. It took some amount of actual thinking to understand what she was getting at and how it could be engaged with more fairly in contexts so far from that of the original.

You say “smart move that helps manage risk while having no real impact on anything”, I say “foolishly craven gesture that demonstrates incompetent leadership while having no real impact on anything.”

I always thought that having some kind of “kid-safe” mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn’t necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they’re supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.

It seems so painfully obvious that having a “date of birth” field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.

Quodlibet is the one with all the features.