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When someone responds like this, it's not to specific features, but to the general over-saturation of "AI" features because they are trendy, despite the majority of such features being poorly thought out, misleading, poorly integrated, provide serious privacy concerns, don't address concerns about bias or hallucination, etc.

If the marketing copy actually referred to specific features, rather than the "AI" buzzword of the day, people might be less likely to interpret it as a negative signal.


In some cases it could be as flimsy as they were pacing nervously while black: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/deas-cold-cons...

Because they claim that these are "consensual", they claim that they don't need any particular criteria for an encounter, but of course the "consent" was not ever really freely given here, they would either trick or bully people into giving consent.


Feels like a general police stop abuse in a new context: You're free to go as long as you don't actually try to go, because exercising your rights makes you "suspicious."


"You can decline to consent, but you'll miss your flight because we'll detain you for an hour". It's so clear that no one can meaningfully "consent" in a situation where one person has the power to deeply fuck you over like that.


It’s not consent if you’re not allowed to say no.


> it could be as flimsy as they were pacing nervously while black

Judging by the picture on the poster's website, I doubt being black had much to do with it: https://josephscott.org/


That was an example to illustrate how little basis they needed for these searches in previous cases, not intended to be a guess for what the reason the person at the start of this thread was stopped.

The point is, this whole "cold consensual search" policy was based on nothing other than the officer's personal opinion for who should be approached and searched; because it was theoretically "consensual", they didn't need any kind of basis for making the determination.


Also to be fair, the Biden DOJ did just stop it, after the DEA failed to uphold their promises to track each such encounter and provide adequate training and oversight.

https://oig.justice.gov/news/doj-oig-releases-management-ale...


Did they stop it? Maybe in airports, maybe. The practice is still very much alive.


The order to stop the program of "consensual searches" at mass transportation facilities was sent out on November 12, and the more detailed report that I linked to on November 21st. Do you have knowledge of these DEA consensual searches happening at airports or other mass transit hubs after November 12?

Or are you referring to broader law enforcement attempts to do consensual searches or civil asset forfeiture seizures, which are absolutely still a problem?

I guess my point is, there are still massive problems with the way policing happens in this country. But the Biden administration has ordered this particular problematic behavior to end, specifically in response to the incident brought up in this article.

So, are you just making vague generalizations, or do you have actual knowledge that this program has not ended?


Civil asset forfeiture, including by the DEA, is still very much a thing. Having a President end it in airports affects some tiny fraction of the broader problem.

And it only ends it until a future admin un-ends it. I could see both democrats and republicans deciding that they will allow this practice again.

I think it's much more correct to call the practice "paused" until we legislate it away. "Ending" implies a finality we cannot possibly be comfortable with.


Yeah, I agree with you that there are larger problems that still need to be addressed; and that this stop isn't necessarily permanent, but something temporary that might come back once there are more controls in place.

But situations like this are nuanced and complex, and we are in a better position than we were a month ago, due to actions by the Biden administration.

It is easy, especially in cases of such long running problems like civil asset forfeiture, to get cynical and fall into the mentality that there's nothing that can be done. That's not the case. It is possible to improve things, through political and legal processes. Not always as easy as you would like. Frequently slower, and with regressions. But progress is possible, and it's worth keeping track of who makes that progress to inform future voting patterns.

Cynicism can be an effective tool to blunt efforts at reform.


I believe it's possible to improve things. I don't think this is an example of a material change. I, personally, find both the incoming and outgoing administrations to be truly repellant.

But where it makes sense to do so, I will give credit.

This just feels like something that can be undone with a few minutes of trump's time. If it stays paused then great. And I'm sure halting the practice even for a few months does material good for people, I just can't give more credit when the Biden admin could do much more to halt it.


Jesus christ, that video is so fucking infuriating.

The absolute disdain that that cop has for constitutional rights is appalling.

And what's more appalling is that this kind of thing happens so much; that there's nothing stopping it. Cops seize property with no justification all the time, and there's so little recourse.

Sure, occasionally a program like this might be stopped, but there's nothing stopping them from starting it back up again in a slightly different form.

They spend years seizing money from thousands of people and paying kickbacks for it; maybe some of the folks were doing it for illicit purpose, maybe some weren't, it's hard to know because there's no due process of law, civil forfeiture just lets cops take money from people on the flimsiest of suspicion.

The 4th amendment is meaningless as long as civil asset forfeiture exists.


Yeah, I've been adding `just help` as an alias for `just --list` and making it the first recipe for this reason.


Yes. It is. And if the casino realizes that you're doing it, you'll be banned from the casino.

So most people who do this come up with clever ways to continue to do so while being less easy to detect, like having multiple people work together. One person stays at the table, betting at a fairly constant rate, while signaling to a partner when the odds are in the players favor so the partner joins the table and places big bets.

The thing is, this all takes a good amount of work and effort, requires a sufficient bankroll to begin with so you don't just have a small run if bad luck and run out of money, and does have some risk of gambler's ruin or just getting detected by the casino and banned.

At some point, it's just a risky investment combined with a job. And you can probably do better by just starting a company or investing your money and getting a job.


> Yes. It is. And if the casino realizes that you're doing it, you'll be banned from the casino.

This is true on Fremont Street, where the pit bosses are fossils and you can probably still get a one way free ride to the desert if you piss off the wrong people. Meanwhile, in Paradise, nobody cares unless it's team play. At least not at the tables the public can get to (so max bet around 20k).


Note that as recommended by John Regehr, author of C-Reduce, for this use case you might also want to try Shrinkray, a tool that was written to be format independent and works well for cases that C-Reduce dow not: https://mastodon.social/@regehr/113489759789563570


Is this[0] the official repo of Shrinkray?

[0]: https://github.com/DRMacIver/shrinkray


Interesting, isn't that also the author of Python's hypothesis?


Yes, that's me.

I accidentally got obsessed with test-case reduction as a result of writing Hypothesis, and wrote shrinkray because I thought it was ridiculous that I hadn't put all of the things I'd learned about test-case reduction into some general purpose tool that other people could benefit from.

Shrinkray is still a bit under-advertised and rough around the edges in places, but I think that basically there's no good reason to use C-reduce over shrinkray for things that aren't C or C++. Shrinkray has very good generic heuristics that should work in most languages (it even works pretty well on binary files apparently, although I've not tested this myself), a couple of language specific passes for other languages, and is much more fun to watch.

It might even be the case that you should use shrinkray for C and C++ too (because I use C-Reduce's transformations for those languages), but I'm less confident that that's true. The best I'll confidently claim is "probably more competitive than you'd expect".


Yes, hypothesis also does minimization of failed test cases, so it's kind of a similar problem, just a question if what format the data is in and how you invoke your test.


Yep!


Looking forward to try it! A shout out to cvise (https://github.com/marxin/cvise) as a python alternative that works well too for non c languages.


The even more frustrating part is that the Boston Police learned nothing from this and a few months later arrested Star Simpson for wearing a breadboard with a few LEDs on it to the airport: https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Student_arrested_over_%22art%...


> she is lucky we did not use deadly force because we had machine guns on scene," said authorities during a press conference


An overall truthful statement to be fair to the authorities. Perhaps less fair to those at the other end though.


Putting marks on the chip with high precision is much easier; that's done by the same kind of lithographic process that's used for building up all the other layers of the chip, which is generally via exposing a photosensitive layer of material with light through a mask, and they already have ways of keeping those mask layers in alignment.

But aligning multiple chips together is a different process, and while it sounds like they previously had ways to do this via simple optical inspection of those alignment marks, that's less accurate than a holographic alignment using a laser.


Gates on chips are essentially precise marks.

In metal machine shops there are apparently certain things you do all at the same time before you move the parts around because once you move them you can’t ever get them in exactly the same spot again - due to tolerances in the tools.

If for instance you want to grind a precision bolt out of solid stock, you slap an oversized piece of bar into the chuck. If it’s slightly off-center it doesn’t matter. If it’s slightly skewed it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to grind a (nearly) perfectly straight section out of the middle of the bar, and at exactly a 90° angle to the chuck. Then cut the threads.

And then, you’re going to take the bolt out of the chuck, and use a different tool to cut the head of the bolt. But it doesn’t matter if the head is four thousandths of an inch off of dead center of the bolt because it’s just a surface for the tool and a surface to spread the force of the tension in the bolt.

Which is very similar to the idea of building a bunch of chiplets and putting targeting marks on them at the same time, then putting those chips into a device that slices them up and prepares the surfaces for assembly.


The thing is, the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work.

They didn't used to "just work" like that before systemd.

System boot is faster. I can have fewer things started up in the background, and instead have them start up when needed. Restarting services works consistently. Every application doesn't have its own bespoke and half baked management scripts which don't work half the time. They don't all have to invent their own daemonization support and logging; you just log to the journal.

And that's just core systemd. Things like systemd-resolved give me proper support for split-DNS when using VPNs. systemd-networkd gives me consistent, powerful configurable networking setup that works across distros.

Is it perfect? No, I do still have some complaints with it. But it's a hell of a lot better than what it's replacing. I wouldn't ever go back to sysvinit or upstart, and many other parts of systemd are compelling alternatives to the things they replace, like systemd-networkd over ifupdown.


>the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work

sorry, no, at least in any meaningful sense, because init already just worked for me.

and when something didn't, I could find how to fix it in a way that was transparent and I understood and could even modify or make better, without being connected to the internet looking for cargo cult incantations on stack overflow

init was a tool; systemd is an adversary


Okay, I'll bite.

What kind of problems do you have with the part of systemd that replicates sysvinit /every other day/?


My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended, and unexplained/unexplainable changes to the order of boot of some components. For the former I have given up playing whackamole with all the timeouts you need to reconfigure, for the latter I didn't even try because I know that there's something peculiar about my setup that will never work nicely with systemd, there's simply not enough systems configured like that for upstream to care. I have accepted this new reality, but I know that before systemd I was able to fix any highly customised setup of mine, now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.


> now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.

I think this right here hits at the crux of the issue.

There are people who like systemd because it's integration-tested with itself and its own defaults, so if you never change those defaults you don't have many problems.

Then there are people who don't like systemd because if you do have to change any of its defaults, it often doesn't go well. And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.


> it often doesn't go well

Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.

Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”

It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?


> Plenty of people changes systemd configuration all the time and it just goes fine. You live in fantasy.

"since I have never experienced what you say, it must be fantasy"

> Even op is basically saying: “my issue with systemd is that I dislike the timeout configuration of some services but I stubbornly refuse to change these configurable timeout durations because it would show that the problem was myself and I prefer blaming systemd.”

This is a perfect example of toxicity; I have been successfully using systemd for years and I am entitled to point out what I dislike, I do not have to love everything of it, it's not a religion nor a cult. Your reply tells more about yourself than the topic of the discussion at hand.

> It takes no time whatsoever to get a boot graph with each services name and starting time. That’s an actual feature documented in the manual of systemd which solves OP issue. But of course it would require actually understanding something new and everything new is bad, isn’t it?

You're missing the point, the problem is not changing timeouts but preventing failure and achieving an overall deterministic behaviour out of your system, without ignoring failures. But I refuse further eating these baits, you seem more interested in creating some flames rather than having constructive discussions.


> I have been successfully using systemd for years

You are writing that you have been unsuccessfully using systemd for years because of the annoying timeout. I'm replying that it's entierely your fault because it takes seconds to make these timeouts disappear.

That's not toxicity. That's calling out some non sense on the internet.


> And, of course, the latter behavior as a box users are expected to live in is poisonous, because everyone is being conditioned to be passive and uniform.

No, it's not, this assumes that the other camp are all idiots.

Mainstream distros should be rock solid and boring.

Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.

Tinkering is a different mindset (and has a different place) than professional engineering work.

Systemd is basically engineering, SysV & co. were basically old school tinkering/hacking.

In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level. That should be the nature of humanity.


> Linux never got anywhere with the standard distros because they're all so different.

This is eliding the difference in what you want to be standardized.

Take system logging for example. You definitely want some standard interface to do it so all the different daemons and things can implement it once regardless of which system logger the distribution is using. But once it passes that data to the other program, it's under a different dominion of control which should operate as a black box with respect to the program generating the data and the rest of the system.

Because that's how you prevent ossification -- which is engineering. You want to make it so the other component can be improved or substituted. One system logger is designed to store the logs on a central server instead of the local machine, another supports modules so other people can easily write log-parsing scripts. And when you come up with a new idea for a third, you don't have to be on the systemd team to publish an independent implementation that other people can use as a drop-in replacement, instead of (not in addition to) the default one, without requiring it to be separately integrated with a dozen moving targets in the systemd repository.

What you're trying to do is to allow this:

> In the same vein, don't be creative with bolt sizes. Be creative with what those bolts allow you to achieve. Be creative at a higher level.

You want to standardize the bolt sizes, i.e. the interfaces between components. What you explicitly don't want is to replace bolts with having everything epoxied together.

But that's what happens when you e.g. integrate the logging system with the service manager, which is the sort of thing people are complaining about.


We've had Unix for what, close to 55 years now? Nobody standardized and got widespread adoption for those standards, which BTW, especially when you look at corporate interests regarding the web, are easily sabotaged.

So I'd rather have the epoxy open source standard than no standard.


And now we're back to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42039273

There are things that systemd does better than SysV and other things it does worse and you can want it to stop doing the things that are worse while still doing the things that are better.


Yes, I think your analysis is spot-on.


"See Figure 1".


    /etc/systemd/{user,system}.conf.d/dont-wait.conf:
    [Manager]
    DefaultTimeoutStopSec=5s
There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value.

You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.

[1] https://community.kde.org/Distributions/Packaging_Recommenda...


> There, done. That's all the timeouts you'll ever need. Go and complain to your distribution they are setting the wrong defaults, even desktop environment(s) already recommend[1] setting it to a low value. You can stop hating on systemd now, everything you needed was in `man systemd-system.conf` all along.

Here's another example of cultism repressing any dissent.

Let me make a bullet points list for you:

* I do not hate systemd, I have never stated that, I have been using it for possibly longer time than you and love most of it

* I am entitled to write about what I don't like, you can disagree and move on, we all need to do this exercise on a daily basis

* there are cases where systemd will change the order of dependencies during boot, that's by design because systemd works in a way that tries to achieve states. It's not really enforcing a graph with order

* in a sufficiently complex system, this constitutes a source of non-determinism and it is basically undebuggable: you see the failure, learn about the corresponding configuration, change it and hope that you did the correct change (you have no way to test this until next random occurrence)

That's all, it's based on my experience; I write plenty units on a regular basis and 99% of the times everything goes very well.


> My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended

That’s an issue with a daemon, not systemd. Anyone who used NFS saw that routinely on SysV init during the era when Red Hat distributions shut down networking before ensuring that the network mounts were unmounted.


I regularly see it also on a system not using NFS, and it seems related to console seats. Never went to the bottom of it because it's sporadic/non-reproducible.


Yes - my point was simply that the shut down process tells things to stop but most sysadmins have war stories about that not working well for all kinds of things.

The problem is that there isn’t a universally correct way to do this: if my web server has hung, SIGKILL is what I want to get the system back in a usable state as quickly as possible but if it’s a file system, database, etc. you have questions like losing data which aren’t trivial to answer (e.g. if it’s a transient error, waiting for it flush is good but if my storage had an irrecoverable error I might want write off that data as lost and focus on getting the service back up).


I've got the waiting ages for shutdown feature on reboot, so I tend to force reboot it. I never bothered trying to fix it because firstly I don't know where to start and secondly I only reboot after updates once every few months.


well, systemd is doing things that init did not do, so that's not a replication, but if I kill something, it should stay dead till I restart it; if I dismount a volume, it should stay dismounted; if I set the permissions on something, they should not reset back. Don't treat me like I'm the anomoly.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."


Yeah, the two systemd components GP mentioned have given me no end of trouble.


> They didn't used to "just work" like that before systemd.

They used to "just work" for _decades_ before systemd. Like, everything.

I see reasons for systemd as PID1 and it's great in that role, hands down.

Everything else looks like a malignant growth to me, including much praised journald and DoA pieces like resolved.


> systemd-resolved give me

gives me #1 source of troubles on any desktop computer I have ever ran under the systemd era. I feel like resolved is specifically designed to be removed from fresh installations, sort of like a transparent peel on new devices' screens.

In my strong opinion, resolved is the most brain damaged part of systemd. Unconfigurable, unmaintainable, unmanageable.

> systemd-networkd gives me

Oh, there is no point in learning systemd-networkd. By the time you do Ubuntu folks will swap the set of the network initialization tools once again and you'll have to start over. Thankfully, 'apt install ifupdown' still works kind of like `apt install upstart` worked a few years ago.


i don't think many distros use networkd. they all ship it disabled with nm instead


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