When I used Fedora for desktop, VS Code triggered warnings because of a SELinux configuration. Something about using writable memory as executable.
The discussion on the topic was disappointing. Chrome does this, all Electron apps do this, VS Code does it. It was insisted that the warnings were fine because this is insecure and the developers should just fix their applications.
I do not have the patience to waste two hours researching every single complicated solution that every single application uses to make things work just to personally decide whether it's safe enough to whitelist it.
No, I actually tolerated it for a long time before switching. What made me switch was that Fedora became so horrendously slow that it took 15 minutes just to open a web browser. I even tried launching things with syscall tracing but the output just literally froze mid-line all the time while the system was writing to disk. Even though my RAM was mostly unused, it just kept freezing all the time.
This is a problem in ALL linuxes as far as I know. When Linux gets IO-bound, literally everything gets stuck and it's insane. My mouse cursor position doesn't depend on my hard disk. I have a dozen cores. I don't understand. I thought this kind of issue was solvable on a single core with just a round robin scheduler. How come things still get stuck?
It could be that the problem was that I installed every DE I could find to test them, but even after uninstalling a lot of things, the system never recovered its original speed.
I installed Linux Mint on the same hard disk and things run smoothly. In particular, I love how Cinnamon actually keeps the list of applications in memory instead of starting a search every type I open the start menu. The DE has its shortcomings but it's pretty decent otherwise so for now I'm happy with it.
P.S.: also when I tried to use git with apache, checking out overwrote my SELinux types and contexts, which meant I had to figure out AGAIN how do configure all this stuff just so I could access a wordpress site in localhost that was saved in my home folder. For a while I just gave up using branches in git. Now I just use Mint.
Pointless warning spam drowns out real issues in the logs all the time. You cannot expect an end user to fix chromium based applications or stop using them, so all you end up doing is making the system less usable and less secure.
There are two components to SELinux alerting mechanisms, both of which are documented.
For GUI notifications open the sealert app and disable alerts. For journal/syslog reports disable the setroubleshoot daemon dispatch plugin for auditd:
sed -i 's/active.=.yes/active = no/' /etc/audit/plugins.d/sedispatch.conf
service auditd restart
You can also uninstall the setroublshoot-server package completely, and all AVC denials will continue be reported separately outside of the journal.
Sure, but even disabling SE Linux all together seems like a lighter and more sensible solution to me than changing distros. I doubt those applications are suddenly going to stop doing the things deemed insecure because they're running on a different distro, so even just allowing those actions seems far easier and still better off than changing distros. I generally try to fix all SE Linux issues as they come up, but when I just need something working and don't have time to muck with it, I've disabled it in the past. Yes, I know it makes Dan cry, but having people screaming for something that they need immediately to do their jobs makes me cry.
If I remember correctly, Stallman's whole point about FLOSS was that consumers were beholden to developers who monopolized the means to produce binaries.
If I can't reproduce the model, I'm beholden to whoever trained it.
>"If you're explaining, you're losing."
That is an interesting point, but isn't this the same organization that makes "open source" vs. "source available" a topic? e.g. why Winamp wouldn't be open source?
I don't think you can even call a trained AI model "source available." To me the "source" is the training data. The model is as much of a binary as machine code. It doesn't even feel right to have it GPL licensed like code. I think it should get the same license you would give to a fractal art released to the public, e.g. CC.
It's not clear that copyright applies to model weights at all, given they are generated by a computer and isn't really a creative work. It is closer to a quantitative description of the underlying data, like a dictionary or word frequency list.
I think this makes the most sense. The only meaningful part of the term is whether or not you can hack on it, without permission from (or even coordination with) owners, founders or creators.
Heck, a regular old binary is much less opaque than “open” weights. You can at least run it through a disassembler and slowly, dreadfully, figure out how it works. Just look at the game emulator community.
For open weight AI models, is there anything close to that?
It's a bit impressive that AI managed to produce something blobbier than a binary blob. AI is the blobbiest blob, so blobby that it's a black box to even its own authors.
I wonder how could anyone be an open source enthusiast, distrusting source code they can't verify, and yet a LLM enthusiast, trusting a huge configuration file that can't be debugged.
Granted I don't have a lot of knowledge about LLMs. From what I know, there are some tools that can tell you the confidence/stickiness of certain parts of the generate output, e.g. "for a prompt like this, this word WILL appear almost every time, while this other word will almost never appear." I think there was something similar for image generation that could tell what areas of an image stemmed from what terms in the prompt. I have no idea how this information is derived, but it doesn't feel like there are many end-user tools for this. Maybe the AI researchers have access to more powerful tooling.
For source code I can just open a file in notepad.exe to inspect it. I think that's the standard.
If, for example, a computer program was programmed using an esoteric language that read used image files instead of text files as source code, I don't think you would be able to consider that program "open source" unless the image format it used was also open source, e.g. PNG. If it was some proprietary format, people can't create tools for it, so they can't actually do anything the image blob, which restricts their freedoms.
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
Piracy is a service problem. A paywall literally says “you might like this but pay me first to see what it is.” Substack has a “let me read it first” button and I’ve never seen an archive link to that even though there are plenty of private articles.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
> Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
When you select and copy text, text data (typically UTF-8 encoded) is copied to a temporary area called the clipboard (except on X11, where the clipboard doesn't actually exist). When you select and copy an image, the pixel data (24bpp or 32bpp bitmap) is copied to the clipboard. This means you can copy text or image data from one application and paste it into another.
When you copy and paste files within a file manager, data isn't transferred across applications. The data copied is just text data with a special tag indicating it was copied from the file manager. When you paste it, the file manager performs the copy action from one filepath to another. Similarly, when you copy clips within a video-editing application or 3D models or anything more complex than just text and image, it's all done by copying a reference to the data within the application, so you can never paste it outside the application.
You can't, for example, copy a video from DaVinci Resolve and paste it in KDEnlive. You also can't copy and paste audio data.
For some reason, the clipboard is confined to text and image.
The same applies to drag and drop, by the way. If you drag and drop an image to a file manager, either it will pass a URL (text data) and the file manager handles downloading it from the source, or, on Windows, it gives the file manager the filepath of the image the browser already downloaded in cache so it copies without downloading anything.
>This language server is stricter than the HTML spec whenever it would prevent potential human errors from being reported.
It doesn't support implicitly closing <li>, <p>, <dd>, <dt>, <head>, <body> tags which is one of the best features of HTML if you're handwriting it. I assume it doesn't support implicitly opening <html>, <head>, and <body> either. Why do I have to skip indenting those levels when I can simply not open the tags?
HTML is a terrible language and I'd rather write some strict superset of it that includes template tags to make it functional. If HTML features are treated as errors, that's not a superset.
