Formerly known as arc@lemm.ee / server shuts down end June 25

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2025

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  • 30 years ago the McRib was amazing. They used to take the pork patty and baste it in this stick sweet bbq glue sauce. When you ordered one, they’d fish one out of the basting dish with tongs and slap it into a dressed bun and serve it in a bag. You ate it in the bag because it was just so sloppy.

    These days they just dress the thing like a burger - patty on, squirt of BBQ sauce on top of the patty. There is hardly any mess to it and it’s basically just a pork burger. The experience of eating it and the lack of sauce makes it feel so bland.


  • I still think the web would have been better off if certificates were signed and part of a web of trust like in GPG/PGP. It wouldn’t stop sites from using trusted CAs to increase their trust levels with browsers, but it would mean that tiny websites wouldn’t need to go through layers of mandatory bullshit and inconvenience. Also means that key signers could have meaningful business relationships rather than being some random CA that nobody has a clue about.





  • There is nothing worse than playing multiplayer and having somebody who is cheating. Viable and promising games have been ruined by people cheating.

    But I don’t see an easy way around the issue but these are the usual solutions:

    1. Reporting mechanism and admins able to observe cheaters and impose heavy penalties / permabans
    2. Add anticheat on server side that detect for cheating (e.g. measuring % hit rates / headshots)
    3. Anti cheat software on client that looks for common cheat hacks
    4. Stream everything. It’s all hosted on the server, nobody installs anything, limiting ways to cheat.
    5. Disincentivize cheating by not acknowledging people doing it in any way - no rare loot, no leaderboards, no material gain
    6. Make it a 3rd party problem - release the server or sell hosting and make it somebody else’s problem to police the servers (e.g. Rust / Minecraft servers)

    Personally I’d prefer that multiplayer games obtain consent to install anti cheat and should certify through auditing that the anticheat software is inactive and nonintrusive when the game is not running. Perhaps operating systems could even provide hooks and hard guarantees that this is the case.






  • If the code doesn’t compile, or is badly mangled, or uses the wrong APIs / imports or forgets something really important then it’s broken. I can use AI to inform my opinion and sometimes makes use of what it outputs but critically I know how to program and I know how to spot good and bad code.

    I can’t speak for how you use it, but if you don’t have any real programmers and you’re iterating until something works then you could be producing junk and not know it. Maybe it doesn’t matter in your case if its a bunch for throwaway scripts and helpers but if you have actual code in production where money, lives, reputation, safety or security are at risk then it absolutely does.


  • I have never seen an AI generated code which is correct. Not once. I’ve certainly seen it broadly correct and used it for the gist of something. But normally it fucks something up - imports, dependencies, logic, API calls, or a combination of all them.

    I sure as hell wouldn’t trust to use it without reviewing it thoroughly. And anyone stupid enough to use it blindly through “vibe” programming deserves everything they get. And most likely that will be a massive bill and code which is horribly broken in some serious and subtle way.




  • You think if they used another licence it would be any different? Countless open source projects have a GPLv3 + proprietary licence which is way more evil than Apache - they poison the open source with GPLv3 so no competitor can contribute without revealing their changes while they themselves can use the proprietary licence. e.g. Trolltech and QT for example but there are many others.

    And frankly you should be blessed that you have a fully fledged, open source phone OS you may fork and build from. The OP wants a Linux phone OS and AOSP is a Linux phone OS. There are many forks of Android, closed and open that wouldn’t exist if Google had just decided to be proprietary from the get go. They were under no compulsion to do this but they did. If you have used LineageOS, or GrapheneOS for example then you are a beneficiary of this. You are completely at liberty to have a de-Googled modern phone OS powered by Linux right now.




  • arc99@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux phones are more important now than ever
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    3 months ago

    Android is Linux. It uses a Linux kernel paired with a BSD based user land. Also there is an AOSP version of Android which is Android without all the Google bits. LineageOS and some other security oriented firmwares derive from it. That isn’t to say Google are necessarily happy about this entirely but at the same time, they open sourced most of Android and probably see it as a useful antitrust defence and the impact of flashed devices barely more than background noise.

    The issue of bootloaders is an orthogonal matter since Linux or not does not mean bootloader or not - many black box devices use Linux but you won’t be flashing them any time soon - TVs, set top boxes etc. I would argue that regardless of OS, there should be a right to repair law (e.g. in Europe) that allows people to maintain devices beyond their warranty. And if Samsung et al don’t want to do it, then they should have an obligation to unlock devices upon request.


  • Code signing offers slight protection from malware but not as you might think. If a company signs an installer, or executable then it tells you it came from them but not what it does. It could still be malicious, or it could be inadvertently bundled with malware in DLLs or scripts and you wouldn’t know. You’re just hoping the company has done its due diligence and you trust them to run.

    Microsoft does have an antivirus system on top and fingerprints downloads too and applies some kind of trust score that is better if an exe is signed. There is probably no single mitigation that stops malware infection but apply lots of smaller mitigations in in depth and most people will be safe.

    The irony is Microsoft still lets people run files ending with .scr way too easily. Much of the malware on torrent websites is a file ending with .scr knowing the OS will hide the extension, e.g. movie.mp4.scr appears as movie.mp4 in File Explorer and people click through and get infected.