Realistically, I would grieve the loss of my children, who would never be born if I didn’t line things up just right to cause them to happen again. I’d spend more time with my parents, who are getting along in the years, and I’d make the most of my time with them while they’re healthy and happy.

There are a few specifics where I’d try to get some loved ones out of trouble before some critical tipping point that would later cause a bunch of heartache and stress.

There are general things about money and politics I’d probably do differently, knowing about how stocks have performed and what not, but that’s not super interesting to me, because I’m mostly content in my personal life (including my career) and wouldn’t want to upset that balance by doing anything too different from what brought me here.

The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.

Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.

Even if my needs were met I’d still spend a lot of my time achieving wants. Not just stuff I can buy or pay for, but things that bring me satisfaction and contentment. So I’d probably still have a job, just with a little flexibility towards prioritizing job satisfaction over pure pay.

I made an alt on each of the big instances, because I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to use long term. Then I just kinda stuck with them, each following slightly different topics, and therefore having different opportunities to participate in discussions.

I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.

For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

So I gotta ask: what’s your plan for addressing your stress levels and your lack of sleep? A prescription from your doctor doesn’t squarely address those issues, and they should probably be addressed.

Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.

Yes, but an absence of a proof of the positive is itself not proof of the negative, so if we’re in the unprovable unknown, we’re still back at the point that you can’t prove a negative.

Yes but can you prove by evidence that there is no milk in my cup, if I won’t let you look inside?

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.

hyper intense color perception

So shouldn’t your perception of people’s subtle/muted aurora pictures also be hyper intense, making those muted colors more accurate?

every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

It’s more that GUI programs can’t be trusted with root privileges. They’re not designed for that, and can break things in unpredictable ways.

Executive actions that don’t need Congress:

• Enforce existing federal healthcare standards such that abortions required for health and safety of mother are included. The Biden DOJ is currently litigating whether emergency rooms must perform care for stillbirths, miscarriages, and life/health threatening pregnancy complications as part of EMTALA.
• Grant support around abortions (but not abortions themselves, because that is forbidden by federal law), such as sick leave or even reimbursable travel expenses for military servicemembers or other federally insured beneficiaries to obtain abortions. This is why Senator Tuberville blocked a bunch of military promotions for almost a year last year.
• Ensure federal licensing for services and drugs that may be used in support of abortions: FDA approval for drugs used in abortions, prescription-by-mail regulations, interstate telemedicine standards, etc. The Biden DOJ is currently litigating several of these issues.

The president also has the veto power for blocking any new federal restrictions on abortion or birth control or IVF.

With Senate approval, Biden can also appoint judges in the judicial vacancies to where there are more abortion-friendly judges in the system.

If Congress gets on board, there can also be legislation for rolling back some federal restrictions on abortion: the federal government runs major health insurance policies (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare) and actual hospitals/providers (Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, military hospitals), which are currently forbidden from administering or insuring abortions. Congress could also guarantee the right to seek telemedicine across state lines, including the right to seek abortion pills by mail.

You could always refer to the other time Dan Harmon referred to the same trope, with the Community episode where Abed is trying to tell the story through flashbacks, annoying everyone around him.

I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.

The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.

None of what I’m saying is unique to the mechanics of open source. It’s just that the open source ecosystem as it currently exists today has different attack surfaces than a closed source ecosystem.

Governance models for a project are a very reasonable thing to consider when deciding whether to use a dependency for your application or library.

At a certain point, though, that’s outsourced to trust whoever someone else trusts. When I trust a specific distro (because I’m certainly not rolling my own distro), I’m trusting how they maintain their repos, as well as which packages they include by default. Then, each of those packages has dependencies, which in turn have dependencies. The nature of this kind of trust is that we select people one or two levels deep, and assume that they have vetted the dependencies another one or two levels, all the way down. XZ did something malicious with systemd, which opened a vulnerability in sshd, as compiled for certain distros.

You’re assuming that 100% of the source code used in a closed source project was developed by that company and according to the company’s governance model, which you assume is a good one.

Not at all. I’m very aware that some prior hacks by very sophisticated, probably state sponsored attackers have abused the chain of trust in proprietary software dependencies. Stuxnet relied on stolen private keys trusted by Windows for signing hardware drivers. The Solarwinds hack relied on compromising plugins trusted by Microsoft 365.

But my broader point is that there are simply more independent actors in the open source ecosystem. If a vulnerability takes the form of the weakest link, where compromising any one of the many independent links is enough to gain access, that broadly distributed ecosystem is more vulnerable. If a vulnerability requires chaining different things together so that multiple parts of the ecosystem are compromised, then distributing decisionmaking makes the ecosystem more robust. That’s the tradeoff I’m describing, and making things spread too thin introduces the type of vulnerability that I’m describing.

In the broader context of that thread, I’m inclined to agree with you: The circumstances by which this particular vulnerability was discovered shows that it took a decent amount of luck to catch it, and one can easily imagine a set of circumstances where this vulnerability would’ve slipped by the formal review processes that are applied to updates in these types of packages. And while it would be nice if the billion-dollar-companies that rely on certain packages would provide financial support for the open source projects they use, the question remains on how we should handle it when those corporations don’t. Do we front it ourselves, or just live with the knowledge that our security posture isn’t optimized for safety, because nobody will pay for that improvement?

100%.

In many ways, distributed open source software gives more social attack surfaces, because the system itself is designed to be distributed where a lot of people each handle a different responsibility. Almost every open source license includes an explicit disclaimer of a warranty, with some language that says something like this:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

Well, bring together enough dependencies, and you’ll see that certain widely distributed software packages depend on the trust of dozens, if not hundreds, of independent maintainers.

This particular xz vulnerability seems to have affected systemd and sshd, using what was a socially engineered attack on a weak point in the entire dependency chain. And this particular type of social engineering (maintainer burnout, looking for a volunteer to take over) seems to fit more directly into open source culture than closed source/corporate development culture.

In the closed source world, there might be fewer places to probe for a weak link (socially or technically), which makes certain types of attacks more difficult. In other words, it might truly be the case that closed source software is less vulnerable to certain types of attacks, even if detection/audit/mitigation of those types of attacks is harder for closed source.

It’s a tradeoff, not a free lunch. I still generally trust open source stuff more, but let’s not pretend it’s literally better in every way.