Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.
Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That’s because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn’t get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.
Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn’t need to install a third party program to manage permissions.
Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)
British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.
After he got a handle on it, Torvalds returned to the kernel. He’s been much more mild-tempered since then. As he mentioned in Tokyo, he won’t be “giving some company the finger. I learned my lesson.”
This is probably a good thing.
Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about “artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what’s the most likely next word that you’re going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant. Do you think we will see LLM written code that is submitted to you?”
Torvalds replied, “I’m convinced it’s gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code.” But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn’t too worried about AI. “It’s clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all.”
Indeed, Torvalds hopes that AI might really help by being able “to find the obvious stupid bugs because a lot of the bugs I see are not subtle bugs. Many of them are just stupid bugs, and you don’t need any kind of higher intelligence to find them. But having tools that warn more subtle cases where, for example, it may just say ‘this pattern does not look like the regular pattern. Are you sure this is what you need?’ And the answer may be ‘No, that was not at all what I meant. You found an obvious bag. Thank you very much.’ We actually need autocorrects on steroids. I see AI as a tool that can help us be better at what we do.”
But, “What about hallucinations?,” asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, “I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that’s why I’m not so worried. I think we’re doing just fine at making mistakes on our own.”
There were no questions about whether maintainers would start utilizing LLMs. The questions were focused on how maintainers would respond to LLM-generated (or -assisted) patches being submitted to them. This attitude seems perfectly reasonable to me, but it would have been more interesting to ask questions about whether maintainers would start using LLMs in their work. Torvalds might have responded with a more interesting answer.
The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.
Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.
It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.
Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.
The GTK3 port is done, and now they need to finalize the new extension API and improve their color space support (particularly CMYK). It would be nice if Wayland had a color management protocol extension standardized by then, but I don’t think it’s a blocker.
That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.
The Linux Foundation and Kernel devs don’t really deal with the OS layer much. This is something that would need to be implemented at the desktop environment level; like GNOME or KDE. Neither LF nor Linus Torvalds has any say over that.
So if GNOME does something everyone else is not doing, they’re “fucking up”, but if they follow what someone else has done that you like, they’re just creating a “cheap copy”? How do they win?
You’re not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn’t realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.
Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don’t want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don’t think I’m contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That’s the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.