I think the point of both is that even if he skipped all the text explaining he’s about to break the system, he would have still have had to type the words explaining them, and therefore hopefully think about the words he’s typing. It might not protect against copy-paste as effectively, but there’s a higher chance he’d read what he’d copied than a wall of text. Not 100% effective, but it’s probably going to catch more users than “do as I say”, where he still thought he was installing Steam, so it’s good those changes were made.

But yes, it won’t catch everyone like Linus because they either won’t think about it or they will copy-paste without reading. Ultimately an immutable distro might be best for him. Then again he might still find a way to break it somehow.

I think there were a few other changes indirectly inspired by what had transpired, but admittedly I can’t remember most of them. I think Debian also modified apt.

I also think I remember immutable distros taking off just after this.

I sometimes forget that us Linux users often lack social skills. Understanding other people is hard.

Anyway, I’ll try this grass, is it on GitHub?

As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.

However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.

I kind of suspect life wouldn’t exist today if it didn’t make the occasional error. Although I believe DNA does have rudimentary correction mechanisms: each strand is paired up with its negative and duplicated chromasomes will have 2 chromatids. In those cases there are kind of 4 copies. Sometimes errors are corrected by using the other chomatid as a template. However, not all that useful before the chromosome is duplicated.

At some point the data has to be copied for reproduction, so DNA must be writable at least for new copies, but that’s part of what makes the copying process so vulnerable. However, I do agree that it’s too easy to trigger a write, and while histones reduce writability, they also reduce readability.

Maybe it’s because I’m not an Arch user anymore, but I wouldn’t dream of cutting out “junk” DNA. It’s incredibly important.

I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.

If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There’s a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it’s interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)

As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.

Then they started adding controversial telemetry and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.

Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.

What stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.

You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.

I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.

Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.

Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.

Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.

As much as it’s dumb, many other places (such as Australia, where I live) are similar at this point.

If you want something not Google, I used to have Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone before Australia’s 3G network was switched off. It would have to be an older Fairphone however.

Oh, and Minix still exists.

While much of the Unix family has died, (especially in the System V family) there is an old one surviving and a few new additions being added.

Solaris is still alive, and from it was forked illumos. Meanwhile BSD has spawned its own family made up of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD, but also MacOS and Playstation. Other systems that appeared without any prior history like Linux include Redox OS and SerenityOS.

With that being said, the Unix family has noticeably shrunk, and the System V family is very much in danger of going extinct, with only the Solaris branch looking like it will survive the next year. If the System V family goes extinct, it would make the BSD family the only surviving branch descended from the original Unix.

Do you have a lot of files it might try to preview? I remember encountering similar loading times in my photos folder because it ties to load previews for every file.

I think half the reason immutable distros started being recommended to people is the fallout after LTT’s Linux challenge. I noticed some people presenting immutable distros as the solution to prevent things like accidentally removing the desktop.

I suppose you’re right. They’d been shifting for a long time.

True, although I believe things only got so bad after the party elite had became isolated from their base, and the above is how they initially became isolated from them in the first place.

From what I remember, they repeatedly voted against anything left of what they considered centre in the primaries because they followed the theory that only centrists (or those as close to the other party as possible) win elections, by swaying swing voters in the middle. The other party had long abandoned the idea by this point however, because chasing what they considered centre often meant upsetting those finding themselves outside of that centre.

If the people voting in the primaries were more representative of those outside views, perhaps there could have been another outcome. However, not many of those people vote in primaries.

It’s good, I would have thought the same if I were to stumble on it now. Somebody must have provided an extremely quick downvote, because I hadn’t downvoted you