Spyke

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linux

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KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

Alternatively, instead of reading a Phoronix article that has a couple of short snippets from a much longer blog post, you can read the original blog post yourself to see the full context.

Edit: Also, it is worth noting that the author of the original blog post had previously written another relatively recent post criticizing the way in which Wayland was developed, so it's not like they are refusing to see its problems.

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*Permanently Deleted*

The title of the post, as opposed to the title of the executive order, is very misleading: this executive order only applies to the AIs that are allowed to be procured and used by the federal government, not to all AI in general.

(Having said that, the underlying motivation behind it is still nonsense, just as it has been for all of the other executive orders.)

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I'm good, thanks

See, this is why I prefer the (terribly named) "Many Worlds" interpretation. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, it does not privilege measurement over other types of interactions between systems. That is, the wave function never collapses, it only seems to because you, as the observer, are part of the system.

The easy way to see this is to imagine that you put some other experimenter inside of a box. When they perform a measurement, from your perspective the wave function has not yet collapsed, but from the experimenter's perspective the wave has collapsed. Essentially, it is as if the system in a box has branched so that there are multiple copies of the experimenter within, one who sees each possible measurement result, but because you are outside of it you could, in theory, reverse the measurement and unite the two branches. However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.

(Also, if it seems implausible that a macroscopic system in a box could remain in a superposition of multiple states, you actually are not wrong! However, the reason is not theoretical but practical: any system inside the box will interact thermally with the box itself, so unless it is perfectly insulated you cannot help but interact with it and therefore measure it yourself. This keeps going until essentially the entire world cannot help but perform a measurement of your system. Preventing this tendency from screwing things up is one of the things that makes building quantum computers hard.)

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I don't feel strongly positively or negatively about Woz, but I agree with his message that, to the extent that life is about collecting anything, it is about collecting happiness points rather than money points. (Having said that, money does a very good job of taking away obstacles that get in the way of happiness.)

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Google’s Fingerprinting Returns In 8 Weeks And It Will Track Your Devices

What's scary is all of the ways they can track you even without your browser actively cooperating. For example, they can create an HTML5 canvas, render a bunch of shapes, and then probe individual pixels to get a read on your graphics card and drivers. The EFF has a very educational test you can subject your browser to in order to see how easy it is to fingerprint it based on these kinds of things.

linux

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GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" With x86_64, SMP & ~75% Of Debian Packages Building

Hurd has always seemed cool from the purist viewpoint of, "Let's prove to the world that we can do everything using a microkernel!"-- and to be frank, as a Haskell lover, it would be hypocritical for me to fault anyone for this level of purity!--but development has been plodding along for decades, with the article claiming (unless I misread it) that they are still working on things like SMP and 64-bit support.

I mean, as long as the people tinkering with this are having fun then that is all that really matters, and more power to them! However, that really seems to be the entirety of its purpose at this point, which is a shame given the lofty ambitions with which the project was launched.

linux

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X.Org Server May Create A New Selective Git Branch With Hopes Of A New Release This Year

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You missed the part where the reason why they are doing this is because the person who started XLibre had previously committed so much bad code to XOrg that needed to be rolled back that the git history is now a mess that is hindering forward progress. The goal of the new release is to start over from 2024 and cherry-pick the commits they want to keep in order to clean the history up.

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What mistakes did your parents make while raising you that you will be careful to avoid in your own parenting?

I really wish that my parents had mentioned much earlier in my life that mental illness runs in the family and what the signs were so that I could have started getting treatment right away, rather than wasting years of my life confusing feelings of depression for proof that I was a terrible person. (Just to be clear, there was no malice involved; my mom just felt really self-consious about it, so she did not want to bring it up.)