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  • 191 Posts
  • 123 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2025

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  • Web forum software bumps up a thread to the top of the board when a user posts a reply to the thread. This enables lengthy long-lived debates to take place. It gives a lot more opportunity for good ideas to be presented on a topic compared to reddit or lemmy which cycles posts off the front page hours or days after being posted. But trolls can easily derail the entire purpose of the forum by insisting on always having the last word in an off-topic, manufactured debate that eventually draws the entire userbase in.





  • public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL

    Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.

    As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?













  • Disclaimer: it’s been a while since I’ve used git.

    You’ll be unable to push if the remote branch has diverged since you pulled because someone else has pushed changes different from your own.

    One way to resolve this is to run git pull. If your commits have made changes to a file and the diverging commits have made changes to the same file, then you’ll have a conflict and git will put your local repo into a special merge conflict state. Your working files involved in the conflict will be automatically changed to include the differing changes, delimited by <<<, ===, and >>> characters. You’ll have the option to abort the pull or edit the files, git add them, and then git commit which completes the pull. You can then push.

    git pull will do git fetch to update your copy of the remote branch, followed by a git merge. The documentation for resolving merge conflicts is contained in the git-merge man page: git help merge, particularly in the sections entitled “Pre-merge checks”, “How conflicts are presented”, and “How to resolve conflicts”. Side note: the man page will open in the system pager, in which typing /conflict and the keys n and N will step through each occurrence of the word “conflict”. Oh, you can even read it in glorious PDF.[1]

    Running git pull when you have uncommited files may be a different story entirely. Best to not do that. You can check whether your working files are clean with git status. It seems like the “proper” way to deal with this situation, if you must, is with git stash. That supposedly can be used to save your uncommited changes, cleanup your worktree to prepare it for a pull, and reapply the saved changes after.

    I recommend sections in the free Pro Git book if your want something more pedagogical than the man pages.


    1. https://manpage.me/index.cgi?apropos=0&q=git-merge&sektion=0&manpath=Debian+8.1.0&arch=default&format=pdf ↩︎


















  • One possible way to deal with this and very nearly return to the former freedom-to-tinker status quo is to send the bank your custom OS along with a computer-checkable formal proof that the bank’s app, while running on your OS, behaves as it would be expected to under the stock OS. With homomorphic encryption, it might be possible to do this without revealing your custom OS, only its one-way hash. The bank can then verify that the proof is correct and then accept transactions with attestation from your custom OS. This would enable installing a custom ROM that can be used for online banking without having to go through some cabal/consortium. The only caveat is something of this magnitude has never been done before. It’s a research project for sure. It would take many man- and compute-hours. But it would be very cool.





  • I’m sure they tested the new recipe on a sample audience long before they put it into mass production which informed them that the recipe change would positively impact their bottom line. Big companies don’t make enormous blunders which put them out of business. The social media tech companies we all hate are still around and have billions of users after all the crap they did. Why? Because all of the negative changes they made to their platforms were first tested on a sample of users and the sample kept using it. After all of the recipe downgrades and shrinkflation, you still see the products on the shelves. The only time you ever see an established brand suddenly vanish is when they’re bought out by private equity or they’re made obsolete by new technology.



  • I’ve spent more time than I care to admit reading Wikipedia entries on significant people from past centuries. Way too often their life story is full of disease and death. A dozen siblings. All of them suffer the same disease in childhood. Half of them don’t make it to adulthood. Mother dies during childbirth. Father struggles making money from their creative work, dies in a duel. Subject cared for by wealthy uncle. Is affected for the remainder of their life by the lingering effects of the childhood disease. Repeat for the next generation.