Because that cost can be less than dealing with upstream.

When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds.

Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment.

Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors.

It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.

This is probably the best approach.

I submitted a patch to Go once, and never got anything resembling a response. Told me that Go is more or less completely inaccessible; I should treat it as a Google product rather than a FOSS project I can contribute to. The Go standard library documentation bug I submitted a fix to still exists to this day.

This is the way. I disagree with your 24-hour timeline -- give it a week -- but whether and how they respond tells you a lot. Being welcoming to new contributors is crucial for the health of a project.

One time I was interested in contributing to an important part of some project, a part where they were nowhere and in dire need of help. As a first try I submitted a small patch correcting the README's build instructions, which were obviously wrong in one place. I got a lot of attitude and hostility, and they refused to accept the fix. Yeah, bye.

Absolutely. I look at the commit and PR history. Are the maintainers responsive and welcoming?

Have you found this actually works? I wouldn't be surprised if many projects happily accept trivial PRs (because they're easy to deal with) but then ignore or naysay anything more substantial.

The point is only 50% to see if they respond, it's also to start establishing yourself as a known entity to them.

They will ignore a big patch from a rando and obviously process a big patch from themselves.

You can become somehwere in between and no longer be a rando, but have to start from the rando end.

How is that any different than, say, all of human history?

It's not different per se, it's just being made much more difficult i.e. if you had to look for one pearl through a pile of 200 barnacles, how you have to scan through 3000.

At my last job, I found Toradex boards well-supported by Yocto. YMMV

Hm, if I may ask, what were they used for in your last job. To me they seem more entreprise focused than indie focused from a quick glance at their website.

Have you done orienting in the past?

One of the big tricks is to realize that magnetic north (where your compass points) is usually not the same as geographic north (where maps are drawn). The adjustment is local; here, I think magnetic north is 7 degrees off from north.

In the US, the USGS topographic maps contain the required adjustment for the covered area. Not sure about Italy.

I don't think that's it. For me sometimes my phone compass is (roughly) right, but sometimes points in a completely wrong direction, for example 90 degrees off. It calibrates after a while when I start walking but I guess this is what OP had in mind, not a few degree difference.

iPhones can regain the compass fix if you move the phone along a figure eight path while holding it flat and level. Worked pretty well for me in the past.

I'm going to take this as the HN effect, if something isn't doing 500% a year its dead.

Wow. I didn’t know Linux cost that much! /s

Cost isn't only money. In the case of linux it is time to learn to use it (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it). Then you need to download and install it - again windows comes by default so a sunk cost.

> In the case of linux it is time to learn to use it

How much time do you need to take to learn "click on the swirly orange thing for Internet"? It looks just the same as it does in every other OS.

> (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it)

This is actually something I'm coping with at the moment, because I have to learn how to use Windows and it's the most backwards thing ever to use.

If somebody else admins your system. However if not there is a lot to learn. At least every distribution I've used needs manual updates from time to time. (though admittedly most people would replace the computer before I've seen anything hard happen)

Why would it need someone else to "admin" it?

Who currently "admins" your Windows system?

If this effort does not create more “domestic terrorists” than it catches, I will be shocked, because this is crossing way over several lines.

If this truly comes to pass, I expect and endorse violent resistance. If this comment brings them to my house, I will put my money where my mouth is and engage them myself, as I would view that as a fully legal exercise of my second amendment rights.

They want a revolution? Because this is how you incite a revolution.

I went to part one of a two day "street medic" training today.

It's basically like the Wilderness first aid course I took once, but with an emphasis on how to help folks deal with the various chemical weapons that the state uses.

I've been pepper sprayed- it's not so bad.

But I expect it won't be the last time.

I am rather frighted of the idea that there could come a time when the state apparatus won't simply use less-lethal force, because I and a lot of folks are only non-violent because of choice and not capacity and I don't think it would go the way a lot of the fantasies of the III% assholes think it would.

Anyhow, I live in the sticks and am able to find the community of folks who are already at a point of non-compliance phase and who have been willing to suffer physical harm for it.

There are, I understand, a whole lot more folks in cities who feel similarly.

If they bring the situation the point you're describing, please rest assured that it won't be you engaging folks by yourself but you engaging them with your community.

Seek out that community while it's still easy enough that it seems like a wingnut kind of thing to do.

I would guess that a single trial of 200 flips can be treated as one event, so getting 100/100 is but one outcome. It may be the most likely individual outcome, but the odds of getting that exact result feel less likely than all of the other possible outcomes. The 100/100 case should be seen the most over repeated trials, but only marginally over other nearby results.

Intuitively, this seems right to me, but sometime statistics do not follow intuition.

This has echos of “First They Came” [0]. The current status quo begs a question that must have been asked in the time it was written: at what point does it have become morally acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow a violent government?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#

The current dynamic IS based on the new gestapo thinking they're "rising up and overthrowing a violent government", due to a propaganda bubble thirty years in the making. Where do you think "ICE" is getting all of these new recruits from? The red state militias that have been seething about the slow creep of bureaucratic authoritarianism, now deputized and told they get to use their weapons to attack the other tribe. Which is also why said militias are silent now that it's actually time to defend our country from fascists - they are the fascists. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

So we agree, we shouldn't let AI companies mix their products with government or ad-inspired insights, right?

You seem to be stating this like I said something that might imply otherwise, but I can't figure it out even seeing you've got the GGGP comment. This thread kind of went off on a tangent that isn't directly addressing your original point.

But to hopefully answer your question - yes I'm in favor of wholesale importing the GDPR as-written into US law and letting the courts sort it out (sidestepping the corruption^Wlobbying process wherein corpos would make "small" edits that effectively gimp it with loopholes). I'm also in favor of antitrust enforcement against companies that anticompetitively bundle software with hardware and/or services - ie people should be able to choose software which doesn't have ads, rather than being coerced by the pressure of network effects. And if neither if those were enough to stamp out the consumer surveillance industry (aka "Big Tech") as we know it, then I'd support directly banning personalized advertising.

(I would support directly curtailing government from abusing commercial surveillance databases as well, but I don't see a straightforward meta-way to prevent that besides drastically shrinking the commercial databases to begin with)