• 2 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • There are two tensions here:

    1. Community building
    2. Code production

    Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.

    In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.

    That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.

    Let’s take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.

    For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there’s a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I’ve got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.

    This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it’s not something I’d have noticed by myself, because I’m not part of the deaf community.

    In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don’t know the answer, because I’m not a member of that community, just as I’m not a member of the deaf community.

    In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference

    The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn’t just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.



  • I don’t know if there is, but it feels like the email protocol problem.

    Like, while the protocol sucks in many, many ways, it would take something revolutionary to replace it because it’s everywhere.

    It’s been around so long that everything talks the protocol, the binaries that handle it are mature and stable.

    Then you have to ask: what would you replace it with? It does the job it’s designed to do very well. There’s nothing the matter with the protocol, and it’s still fit-for-purpose.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems - spam, bad actors, and so on, but ultimately that’s not the fault of the protocol (though, maybe, for email, people have been arguing about protocol-level ways of dealing with spam for years).

    I don’t have an answer, but I feel like there should be one, but I doubt the is.


  • The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

    Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

    The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

    An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

    This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

    Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

    Hope that helps,





  • For those that find this question is asking something that they are also struggling with, the answer was the ‘embed’ tag

    MDN link

    You will need to place the element into a structural holder (eg div), and remove and recreate the element in JavaScript to get it to vanish and reappear if you want it to reload on show.

    Pages loaded in this way do not inherit CSS theming, except background colour (if no background colour set). It does pick up @media settings, but only from the browser. This is intended behaviour.

    Ultimately, to get the full functionality, I am going to have to redesign these items to be part of a single page, loading the data in piecemeal. However, this fix gets me a functional way of achieving something I need quicker than a redesign.

    Thanks,

    -BX







  • I have to say this is quite a worrying abuse. Both of software, and of privacy.

    It’s being deployed for something it’s not meant for, and being used to remove liberties for it. Of course, much of this will be lost to media circles as in CSA cases, the presumption is guilt in the public’s mind.

    Whatever the truth of the original conviction, the use of this software as a condition of bail should be banned, and abhorrent to anyone who values justice.

    That is not to say the software doesn’t have it’s uses - especially in cases of porn addiction. However, the software is nowhere near good enough to be used in legal cases. It says so itself. It errs, intentionally, on gathering more data, on being more conservative, simply because it’s not good enough to make the judgement on its own.

    That’s before we look at the unintentional consequences of impinging on the freedom of an innocent person (‘Hannah’), and the way in which the software is not ‘intelligent’ enough to make judgements on whether or not it should take a photo of emails. It also led to fear of accessing help (and an inability to access help).

    Use of this software in this way is an abuse.