I’m for ending the war through a unilateral surrender of Russian forces and the trial of Mr Putin for crimes against humanity. However, my opinion doesn’t have a lot of influence over whether that happens.

Similarly, I’m for ending the war in Gaza through the voluntary disarmament of Hamas, the repudiation of terrorism as a way of life, the handover of illegal settlements to displaced Palestinian Arab civilians, and the prosecution of Netanyahu for treason and war crimes. But I don’t expect to get to make that decision either.

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.

Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.

There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.

People pay for this?

Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

This has been going on for over 25 years now.

The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.

I’m confused. To me, “building a tree” and “parsing” are the same thing. If you end up with a tree representation of the structure of your document, the thing you did to get there is parsing.

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

Grinding a spliff into your bellybutton is not a joint naval drill …

If you can’t tar to a pipe into ssh to a remote host and untar into an arbitrary location there, are you really using Unix?

I’m reminded of the character names that show up in MIT CS textbooks, like Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”) and Eva Lu Ator.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.

21st century, meet 18th century; apparently the Barbary Wars come around again but on a different corner of Africa?

If you threaten violence to people for calling you a fascist … you might be a fascist.

The best code editor is the one that works well with your other tools, including your compiler and your keyboard.

Corollary: If you use an unusual compiler or an unusual keyboard, this may change what the best editor for you is.

Every time I read the name “Donald Tusk” I imagine a walrus in Donald Duck’s sailor suit.

Sure is a better image than the Donald we got over here.

Some other ways:

Cultivate bitterness.

Find the pessimists in your organization, and disappoint them.

Make mean cynicism a part of your workplace culture. Do this by example: Promote mean cynics and put them in charge of things. But do it also by conversion: Behave in a way that makes mean cynics’ view of the world correct.

Reward bad personal habits to create internal conflicts between work and health.

If someone skips sleep to finish a project, give them a bonus. This gives them an internal conflict between approval and health, and teaches them that they can sacrifice their health to receive a reward.

Encourage a hard-drinking culture in teams that have stressful roles that demand team cohesion, like SRE or Ops teams with on-call requirements. This gives them an internal conflict between their support network and health.

If someone is sick, injured, bereaved, or otherwise suffering: Make it clear how much their condition is inconvenient to their coworkers, and how much their projects are impacted by their absence. Assure them that all will be well once they can conclude their personal problems and commit to the team. Do not, however, offer them any specific help; if they express specific needs for accommodation, disregard them as idle and unrealistic wishes.