There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.

Off the deluge of Star Wars content post-Disney acquisition Andor was one of the best. I’m looking forward to season 2.

We already do - and play it with them on our family creative and survival servers.

I just want to buy home automation gadgets that don’t need a bloody cloud account to work.

I regret ever giving my kids access to Roblox. They haven’t had any bad interactions as far as I know but the content mill of poor knock offs is just depressing. They learnt the highlights of Squid Game from “games” that went viral on the platform.

My youngest wants to graduate to Fortnite and hyper-monetisation aside I’ve agreed they can have it on the family playstation if they drop Roblox.

So the entire article basically comes down to democracy is messy and with PR you can’t necessarily predict who you are going to get in coalitions.

I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.

For portability Vulkan is the way (it also gets you GPU compute for free without needing vendor libraries). That said the ruttabaga encapsulation is useful for things like Wayland over virtio-gpu which is useful for some use cases.

I should note for even closer to native performance you want virtio-gpu with native context. Patches for that are currently being reviewed on the mailing list: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20241024233355.136867-1-dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com/

It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.

I don’t think algorithms themselves are to blame but what they are tuned for. While engagement/eyeball hours for the adserver is the prime metric the quality of experience will be subservient to it. If the algorithms could better measure your mood and stimulation levels and maximise for that the effect would be less toxic. Ideally if it realised you were just mindlessly consuming it could suggest maybe you’ve done enough today and to try something else. But that I fear that is not something the owners of the various ecosystems want.

He has certainly been weirdly selective in the data he quotes while trying not to come across as complete loon.

So this is like extending mastodon replies into your blog post, but with more syndication options?

I met a man who’s focus was on making ASIC fabrication accessible to students and hobbyists. The audacity of the ambition made me smile and the fact they have succeeded using an open source workflow made me happy.

In all DRM devices there are private signed certificates that can be used to establish a secure authenticated connection. To get at them you need to crack/hack/file the top of the chip to exfiltrate the certificate. More modern “Trusted Computing” like platforms include verified boot chains so even if you extract the certificate you couldn’t use it because you also need to sign the boot chain to ensure no code has been altered.

Absolutely - modern pirates are extracting the digital streams with the DRM removed. However they closely guard the methods of operation because once the exploits or compromised keys are known they can be revoked and they have to start cracking again. They likely have hardware with reverse engineered firmware which won’t honour key revocation but still needs to be kept upto date with recent-ish keys.

For example the Blu-Ray encryption protocols are well enough known you can get things working if you have the volume keys. However getting hold of them is tricky and you have to be careful your Blu-Ray doesn’t read a disk that revokes the old keys.

For streaming things are a little easier because if you get the right side of the DRM you can simply copy the stream. However things like HDCP and moving DRM into secure enclaves are trying to ensure that the decryption process cannot be watched from the outside. I’m sure their are compromised HDCP devices but again once their keys get leaked they will no longer be able to accept a digital stream of data (or may negotiate down to a sub-HD rate).

I remember programming the VCR when VHS was first a thing and I’m definitely not nostalgic for it. It was the best most people could afford at the time but it certainly wasn’t good.

When did people get nostalgic for the crappy analogue definition that was VHS? What’s next betamax special editions?

I do pretty much everything in Firefox but during the week I keep a Chrome window up for Hangouts and Jira.

Church of England? They are pretty vanilla and low key in my experience.