Tootfinder

I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.

While working through another last rites slew, I was thinking that back in the day there were a number of developers who believed they should add a lot of packages to #Gentoo, in the name of giving users a choice. Like, they were projects whose sole purpose of existence seemed to be to find every piece of software that roughly fit a specific topic, get it to build and package it for Gentoo.
Of course, the long-term effect of that is that there's a lot of unmaintained, often broken packages. "The choice" doesn't really work. Sure, users have a lot of packages to choose from — but they have to actually figure out which of these packages are actually useful (if any).
A few years ago attempting to remove packages also faced some verbal opposition. You shouldn't remove unmaintained or outdated packages, because they still work. You shouldn't remove packages that sometimes fail to build, because some flag combinations still work. You shouldn't remove packages that don't build at all, because the user can visit Forums and find some workaround to make them build 🤦. Or they'll have an ebuild handy to start working on it. And anyway, you shouldn't be removing stuff at all, but fixing it instead.
Sometimes the arguments were straight dishonest too: people literally said we need more packages to lure new users in. Like, it didn't matter to them that the packages didn't really work and that the people trying to use them will get a nasty surprise. They wanted people to say "hey, Gentoo has this software we need, let's start using Gentoo".

So, after some deliberation and a few beers I decided to actually put all of the package build stuff into a Forgejo pipeline. Still very weird to me that I need to install `nodejs` to use things like `actions/upload-artifact`, but right now it's working pretty well. Did have to rebuild the runner because it kept running out of disk space.
#forgejo

Steve Wozniak about ”AI” and Apple :
”I want something from a human being. (…) I hope Apple doesn't shut down the little young inventor that doesn't ever have control and power and huge wealth and have a place for them. That little young entrepreneurs, um, can be the most fun thing in life for a person finding their way in life. And I hope Apple, um, I don't know, enhances that rather than kind of tries to control it."

Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware

It’s only a matter of time before some idiot P-plater annihilates a stretch of the Hume Highway—mark my words—and Benalla disappears in a burst of gamma rays.
#GrouchyOldMan https://

Physicists moved volatile antimatter by truck for the first time ever — paving the way for groundbreaking new
CERN scientists transported antimatter by truck for the first time, enabling ultraprecise studies that could reveal why matter dominates the universe. …

Sometimes {renv} just isnt enough to ensure your environment is controlled. Maybe {slushy} could be an option? https://gsk-biostatistics.github.io/slushy/index.html

In the era of #LLM psychosis, it's important to emphasize that it is fine to talk to yourself.
Your own brain is entirely capable of being a sounding board. It can provide a second and a third opinion. It can look at things from another person's perspective. It can simulate complete complex interactions. And it can do all that in the privacy of your own head, with no extra energy cost. And it can give you a deeper understanding of yourself.
You don't need chatbots for that. You don't need to lean on their nazi owners. You don't need to pay for them, you don't need to share the intimate details of your life, you don't need to burn the planet in the process. You won't get hurt accidentally, you won't get abused or blackmailed. And your brain won't leave you helpless when someone suddenly decides helping you isn't profitable.
#AI #NoAI #NoLLM

If you're wondering what I'm doing on this fine morning: I'm recursively wgetting ~140G of old #Gentoo dist-kernel binary packages (that nobody really cares about) just to re-kup-load it to the same hypervisor after renaming and PGP-signing them. At roughly 14 MiB/s.
Praise be overengineered solutions.
Yes, I could be instead spending hours trying to figure out PGP agent forwarding.
EDIT: it's no longer 14 MiB/s.