We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Wyoming. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
Kubernetes is complex but arguably a good way to do things – even if you aren't using it directly, many popular services were enabled or inspired by its API and workflow. It should be noted that Kubernetes is inspired by, but not Borg, the internal workload (not Docker) scheduler used by Google. Very few services at Google run on Kubernetes. So in a way, it wasn't really "the Google way of doing things."
We finally give Brent his new laptop and get his reaction. Plus our best pick for replacing stock Android with something private.
Adam Jacob is the Cofounder & CTO of Chef, the infrastructure automation platform, and CEO of System Initiative.
So I was thinking rc7 might end up larger than usual due to travel hitting rc6, but it doesn't really seem to have happened.
Yeah, maybe it's marginally bigger than the historical average for this time of the release cycle, but it definitely isn't some outlier, and it looks fairly normal. Which is all good, and makes me think that the final release will happen right on schedule next weekend, unless something unexpected happens. Knock wood.
Incidentally, rc7 is also (I think) the first time we have a clean 'make allmodconfig' build with no warnings from clang, since the patches for frame size problems in the amd display code got merged. The stack frame size is still pretty big (and the code isn't exactly pretty), but now it's below the level we warn about.
So that's nice to see.
Anyway, full shortlog below - a lot of it is GPU and network drivers, but there's various random other fixes in there too.
Let's give this one (hopefully) final week of testing, but it all looks pretty good.
Linus
Audacity audio editor got a new major update few days ago, features real-time effects and VST3 support.
In the new 3.2.0 release, there’s a new “Effects” button in the tracks menu, allowing to place realtime effects. However, it does not yet ship with any effect so far. User has to get effects via plugins, though only Audio Units (macOS only), VST3, LV2, and LADSPA formats are supported at the moment.
RSS fans rejoice for a brand-new version of NewsFlash, a GTK RSS reader for Linux desktops, is out!
NewsFlash 2.0 is the biggest update to this nifty news reader for a while. It sees devs finish work on the much-anticipated GTK 4 & libadwaita port.
As a result, NewsFlash looks sharper, more refined, and a lot more consistent within itself. The app now boasts an adaptive layout that responds to screen width, letting the app work on mobile.
We are proud to announce the first alpha release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.0.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KeePassXC on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KeePassXC is a free open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. It is built using Qt5 libraries, making it a multi-platform application that can be run on Linux, Windows, and macOS. KeePassXC also offers many features, including creating multiple databases, encrypting databases with a master key, and generating strong passwords. In addition, KeePassXC provides support for plugin development, allowing users to extend the application’s functionality.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the KeePassXC password manager on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Macros are technically the execution sequence of some operations and are usually created to perform the frequently occurring tasks quickly. In Microsoft Windows, you can find the MS Word, which has the functionality to let you create macros. In the Linux-based systems, you will see the VIM Editor and you can, like in MS word, create macros in VIM. It can also be recorded, which can later be played in a file. It is also called the record and play feature of the VIM editor.
While you are using the nano editor and copying text, it is saved in a buffer called the Cutbuffer, and it is not the same as the clipboard because Gnome maintains the clipboard. You cannot paste anything from the nano editor to the other applications. Nano is a command line text editor that comes pre-installed in almost all Linux-based systems. It has a good set of features that make it above the others. But, how can you copy from the clipboard to the nano editor in Linux? This article will go through how to copy the text from the Cutbuffer and clipboard (Gnome) to the nano editor.
Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.
Did you know that you can back up your Linux files directly to Google Drive? It’s true! The Duplicati application makes sending your important Linux files to Google Drive incredibly easy. Here’s how to do it on your Linux system.
The development of software is a very common practice these days. Software is a requirement in almost all fields, be it a small-scale business or a large organization.
Hence, in today’s fast-growing world, it is important to take into consideration the aspect of speed where software delivery and distribution are concerned. Several tools, such as the JFrog distribution, GitLab, AWS CodeDeploy, etc., can be installed on Linux to speed up software delivery.
I'm still playing with monitoring programs, and I've been remembered about Netdata. What an improvement over the last 8 years!
This tutorial explains how to get Netdata installed on NixOS, and how to register your node in Netdata cloud.
We've had a central syslog server for a long time, and recently we've set up a Grafana Loki server as well, where we're sending pretty much a duplicate of the logs that go to the syslog server. After using Loki for a while, I've come to the conclusion that the two serve different purposes and neither makes the other unnecessary.
(Grafana Loki is concisely called "Prometheus for logs", or to quote its website it's 'a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from all your applications and infrastructure'. You can see how this might sound like it duplicates a central syslog server.)
VidCutter is a free, open-source application that can be used to cut video and audio files. It has tools for cutting all sorts of media, but it’s not a full-blown video editor; instead, its focus lies solely on slicing up videos into clips you could then upload onto your website (or send someone).
VidCutter has features that make it easy to get the exact clip you want. It supports many video and audio formats, so you’re not limited to just mp4 files. You can also use it to extract audio from a video file if you want the audio track. Once you’ve imported your media file, you can use the built-in player to preview it and mark out your clip’s start and end points using the easy-to-use interface. When you’re happy with your selection, hit the “cut” button, and VidCutter will do the rest. The output file can be saved in any format you like, so you’re not stuck with whatever format your source file is in. Whether you need to trim down a long video or extract a short clip for use elsewhere, VidCutter is the perfect tool for the job.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VidCutter on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using two different methods, PPA or the alternative third-party Flatpak package manager.
Stellarium is an open-source planetarium app that you install on your Linux system to give you a realistic 3D view of the sky. It is similar to how you would view the sky using your eyes or telescope. With Stellarium, you will get a powerful close view of the sky and plenty of features are at your disposal to spice your view. This guide presents how to install Stellarium on Ubuntu 22.04.
Disk space on Linux can be expanded by adding a new LUN or resizing an existing LUN on the system.
In most cases, the online resizing of the multipath device involves two things: resizing the the logical unit (LUN) size and reflecting the size on the corresponding multipath device.
In this article, we will show you how to resize an online multipath device on Linux.
Between 2022-09-19 and 2022-09-26 there were 204 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We have developed a series of filters to help you find the Best Steam Deck Games in those, based on the available Steam Ratings, their respective popularity, and a few other criteria. We hope it can help you find games that you would have otherwise never known, so that you won’t be running out of games to play on your Steam Deck anytime soon!
Are you ready to be sent to Camp ChillyWawa and Dr. Periowinkle's mansion as an intelligence agent?
Armed with a book of knowledge, or Pink Digital Assistant, your mission will be to save children from dangerous threats and undo a spell cast on a little girl who has been transformed into a wombat. To succeed you will need to visit several countries and even travel into the past. On your way you will encounter historical monuments and exhibits.
Don’t hate me but I’ve some bad (if not entirely unsurprising) news for the Pop!_OS fans who plan to pounce on the presumed-to-be upcoming 22.10 release: you can’t.
Before anyone groan: no, I’m not about to deliver a trite “…cOz vAnILLa ‘bUnTu is beTtEr” punchline.
Sadly, Pop!_OS 22.10 is not going to be released this autumn — heck, it’s not even in development.
System76’s software engineers want to take the time and effort prepping the next release would take and instead plough it in constructing their home-grown, Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment.
System76’s Micheal Murphy confirmed the news in a Reddit comment, explaining: “We are going to focus our development time onto the Rust implementation of COSMIC instead of 22.10.”
I read this wonderful article on mainframe OSes.
I've been meaning to do something like it for years, but I may use this as a jumping off point.
I think, for me, what I find intriguing about mainframe OSes in the 21st century is this:
On the one hand, there have been so many great OSes and languages and interfaces and ideas in tech history, and most are forgotten. Mainframes were and are expensive. Very, very expensive. Minicomputers were cheaper – that’s why they thrived, briefly, and are now totally extinct – and microcomputers were very cheap.
All modern computers are microcomputers. Maybe evolved to look like minis and mainframes, like ostriches and emus and cassowaries evolved to look a bit like theropod dinosaurs, but they aren’t. They’re still birds. No teeth, no claws on their arms/wings, no live young. Still birds.
One of the defining characteristics of micros is that’s they are cheap, built down to a price, and there’s very little R&D money.
But mainframes aren’t. They cost a lot, and rental and licensing costs a lot, and running them costs a lot… everything costs a lot. Meaning you don’t use them if you care about costs that much. You have other reasons. What those are doesn’t matter so much.
This month I accepted 375 and rejected 25 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 386.
I also had a closer look at the RM-bugs. All in all I addressed about 90 of them and either simply removed the package or added a moreinfo tag. In total I spent 13 hours for this task.
Anyway, if you want to have your RM-bug processed in a timely manner, please have a look at the removal page and check whether the created dak command is really what you wanted. It would also help if you check the reverse dependencies and write a comment whether they are important or can be ignored or also file a new bug for them. Each removal must have one bug!
I’ve stayed away from Chrome because, soon after its release, Firefox became the underdog, and it was still the more customizable browser. But even to this Firefox fan it became clear that Chrome was superior — for example, when the Flash plugin or some tab or extension crashed, it wouldn’t crash the whole browser.
The pgexporter community is happy to announce version 0.3.0.
The pgmoneta community is happy to announce version 0.6.0.
This tutorial will help you to create mail merge with LibreOffice explained step by step with pictures and examples. Mail merge is a method of making stuffs consisted of multiple personalized copies like official letters, invitations, envelops, identity cards, student score reports etc. using word processor, spreadsheet and database. Finally, in this exercise we will make school letters for students' parents as an example so you can practice and then adapt it to your own needs. Let's study now!
This week in the Business News, a popular browser extension is bought by Avast, CA power wall bursts into flames, and Google founding group to open source audio codecs. Also, Mac users may be charged for LibreOffice.
Durden is a program that identifies, counts and, optionally, marks and/or cuts out and saves unique tiles in a given image file.
Sometimes complex software is simple when you go a few layers down.
For example, take the container image. There's so much complexity around building, deploying, and managing containers at scale. Yet, container images are just tarballs. With a few metadata files, you could quickly build one without any special tooling. In an unprivileged environment, in code, or even by hand.
Or git's object model. Git is known for its terrible UX, so sometimes, we assume that everything under the porcelain is also complex. Yet Git's object model is pretty simple – content-addressed blobs (file-like), trees (folder-like), and commits that get stored in a .git/objects folder.
Fortunately, we have an interesting counterfactual – GitLab, which among other things, is GitHub but de-emphasizes the social features – it's more likely to be deployed on-prem and overall has significantly fewer consumer public users and projects. GitLab's current market cap is $8.5b (GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2019 for $7.5b).
When I wrote the "build a distributed PostgreSQL proof of concept" post I first had to figure out how to use Hashicorp's Raft implementation.
There weren't any examples I could find in the Hashicorp repo itself. And the only example I could find was Philip O'Toole's hraftd. It's great! However, I have a hard time following multi-file examples in general.
So I built my own single-file example. It's not perfect but it helped me get started and may help you too. We'll walk through that code, ~260 lines of Go, in this post.
Another name for a debugger would be a debugging utility. By spotting the code problems at different phases of an operating system or an application creation, it is considered to be a computer program that may enhance the process of building a software. A trial run may be examined by certain debuggers to determine which sections of code were skipped. The GNU Debugger is one of the many debugging tools that is available for C programmers and is the greatest debugging tool. It offers some tools that let the user view and assess a program while it is being run. Another excellent debugging functionality is to support many programming languages including C, C++, Ada, Fortron, and Pascal
Although there are a lot of libraries in C, the POSIX library is very well-known among the developers due to its wide range of system call functions, especially the system function calls for “files”. POSIX library for Linux operating system provides you with a variety of functions. There is an open() function that is purposely used to open a specific file from a system in one of those POSIX calls. It utilizes many options to create, open, read, write, and do many things on the Linux files.
Part 1 of this series laid out some ideas for how one might structure a {plumber} application as an R package, inspired by solutions such as {golem} and {leprechaun} for {shiny}. In this installment of the series we look at adding some functions to our package that will take care of logging as our application runs. If you haven’t already, we recommend reading the first installment of this series as the example package created for that post will form the basis of the starting point for this one.
Although this looks like a video game, I did not write any game code.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here.
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
When should you reuse code and modify it to your requirements? When should you roll your own? There's no general answer to this question, but a few guidelines that I've picked up over the years.
Teacher: Hello class! Welcome to your first day of functional programming. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to write the classic "Hello, World!" program in Haskell. It’ll be slightly more involved as we’ll ask for the user’s name and then greet them. I’m sure many of you have heard scary things about Haskell, but I promise you it’ll be fun.
Student: I heard we have to learn about IO. That sounds scary!
Teacher: What? No, there’s no need to worry about IO. In Haskell, when we want to perform an effect, we simply define a GADT to represent the capabilities of the effect.
We briefly review the two classical problems of distribution estimation and identity testing (in the context of property testing), then propose to extend them to a Markovian setting. We will see that the sample complexity depends not only on the number of states, but also on the stationary and mixing properties of the chains.
There’s no doubt that Phpstorm is by far the best IDE for PHP language with framework support. However, IDEs can get rather dull to work with sometimes or may lack the necessary optimization. The solution for that is to browse through Phpstorm themes and activate the one you like best.
IntelliJ, Phpstorm and Webstorm are all Jetbrains products. They are all integrated development environments compatible with different languages. However, having the same parent company, IntelliJ-based templates are usable as Phpstorm and Webstorm themes. That said, our focus remains on Phpstorm only today – so let’s explore the options it has in store.
Kephra, an editor for programming (mostly Perl) written in WxPerl is my main project since I stumbled into the Perl community. Most people I know already heard of it - but I want to write about a new development that might be helpful for some, which might consider to use it even if it has a very limited feature set (forth rewrite baby!).
It was silent for some time - because being my main project - I tried to cram all my other ideas, mainly KBOS into it which bogged progress down. Maybe there will be an Object System just for Kephra, solving some issues I saw nowhere else dressed. But for now I'm surprised how much progress is possible, If you just focus on churning out features.
I took stage sed (which is the bare minimal editor I once wrote as proof of concept) and just started to adding features and fixing issues. Sed stands for Single document EDitor and that is all what next release will bring. Am I serious ? and why should you care? Well I'm German - we never joke and it has strengths in its editing capability which sound like - 'duh its an editor - but if you see how many so called Editors and IDE neglect this area while focusing on the big guns like refactoring, debugging and git integration.
DjangoCon US is a six-day international conference for the community by the community about the Django web framework, held each year in North America.
split-overlap.py is a tool to split a binary file in parts of a given size.
For example: split-overlap.py 1000 test.data
When test.data is a binary file with size 2500 bytes, the above command will create 2 files of 1000 bytes and one file of 500 bytes.
It’s also possible to split a file with some overlap.
Java 19 is now released, and it’s a big deal, as it ships with Virtual Threads (JEP 425), among other goodies, like structured concurrency (JEP 428), or improvements to pattern matching (JEPs 405, 427). I haven’t been as excited about a Java release in a long time.
A criticism that I have of Rust is that it creates very large binaries. Yes, there are websites that explain how to reduce the size, but have to go through a lot of steps.
This evening I was looking at this site, and compiled the first example:
A few years ago I wrote about how to get better at Rust by knowing when what you want to do is impossible. Sadly in many ways I don't learn from my own mistakes and I keep running into a particular issue over and over again: Rust's restrictions about being able to abstract over the borrow status / ownership of a values in some hard to discover situations involving higher-kinded type bounds.
A few days ago I wrote a (now unpublished) article about how you can't express a certain problem I keep manuvering myself with Rust's lifetimes. However that post set in motion a chain of events that lead to a solution that actually works. Yet at the same time even though I thought it was impossible I don't think the solution is obvious, I could have found it myself and it does not even work reliably. But more about that later.
Let's set the stage first: The problem I'm talking about relates to abstracting over borrows and owned values when combined with functions or something that uses higher-kinded trait bounds. In other words: one wants to create an API where it's possible to either borrow or clone out of some input value. Think of a generic function that can produce both a String and a &str.
Marie Kondo took a polite but well-orchestrated torch to people’s junk piles a few years ago, with a book and American TV series that challenged people to think about what they’re carrying around. I’d been an avid reader of The Minimalists at this time, and had read about people who’s lives were crippled by hoarding. Marie Kondo spoke to the middle, which is why I think so many took it personally.
The Internet’s general reaction was telling, if not surprising. Most people memed and sarcastically summarised her view into “does this spark joy?” because it was easier than answering her pointed and difficult questions, some of which cut to the core of how we’re conditioned to live our lives.
There are entire industries that are built on the backs of, as George Carlin put it, people spending money they don’t have, on stuff they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like. How much of our economy would collapse overnight if people didn’t overextend themselves?
Over 3.92 lakh Indians gave up their citizenship in the last three years and 1.70 lakh of them, the highest, took up American citizenship, Lok Sabha was informed on Tuesday. Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said that according to details provided by the Ministry of External Affairs, individuals renounced Indian citizenship for reasons personal to them and took citizenship in over 120 countries.
A total of 3,92,643 Indians gave up their citizenship in 2019, 2020 and 2021, he said in a written reply to a question.
Similarly, much of the 2000s’ discourse around social media and web 2.0 was also imbued with a dogged sense of hope and enthusiasm.
[...]
In one sense, the continued promotion of ‘Tech For Social Good’ reveals some fundamental flaws in how technology is conceived by ‘big tech’ actors and associated groups responsible for developing and installing IT across society. As Alison Powell (2022) and colleagues reason, these narrowly-framed ideas of ‘For Good’ are rooted in highly limited understandings of technology ethics, values and virtue.
For millions of people who participate in activities such as snorkeling and scuba diving each year, hand signals are the only option for communicating safety and directional information underwater. While recreational divers may employ around 20 signals, professional divers’ vocabulary can exceed 200 signals on topics ranging from oxygen level, to the proximity of aquatic species, to the performance of cooperative tasks.
The visual nature of these hand signals limits their effectiveness at distance and in low visibility. Two-way text messaging is a potential alternative, but one that requires expensive custom hardware that is not widely available.
Researchers at the University of Washington show how to achieve underwater messaging on billions of existing smartphones and smartwatches using only software. The team developed AquaApp, the first mobile app for acoustic-based communication and networking underwater that can be used with existing devices such as smartphones and smartwatches.
Why do physicists believe there are universes besides our own? I get a lot of questions about the idea that we live in this “multiverse”. Is it science, religion, pseudoscience, or just wrong? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Over the past five years, there has been undeniable hype around quantum computing—hype around approaches, timelines, applications, and more. As far back as 2017, vendors were claiming the commercialization of the technology was just a couple of years away. There was even what I’d call antihype, with some questioning if quantum computers would materialize at all. I hope they end up being wrong.
More recently, companies have shifted their timelines from a few years to a decade, but they continue to release road maps showing commercially viable systems as early as 2029. And these hype-fueled expectations are becoming institutionalized: The Department of Homeland Security even released a road map to protect against the threats of quantum computing, in an effort to help institutions transition to new security systems. This creates an “adopt or you’ll fall behind” mentality for both quantum-computing applications and postquantum cryptography security.
We might be able to predict big earthquakes in the near future better than we thought, according to research that used machine learning to analyse decades of past earthquakes in California.
There have been many attempts to predict earthquakes using real-world signals, such as changing water levels, or data catalogues, such as the time intervals between earthquakes, but there has been no consistently reliable method.
I’ll spare the details, but as I eluded to on Wednesday, stuff is rubbish right now. It’s the most challenging time since my late mum passed away, for a host of complicated or unavoidable reasons. At any given moment I’m desperate, upset, blue, or frustrated.
I don’t mean to worry anyone! Nor do I want to wallow in self pity, nor am I fishing for compliments or reassurance, it’s just life right now. Given how the world is, I suspect you might be in a similar boat, or far worse.
What I do want to raise is something I’ve observed in my head, especially over the last week, which has weirdly helped.
When you get a bit of bad news, it hits you. When you get two or three bits of bad news, it feels twice or three times as bad. But after the forth, and fifth, and twelfth, the trajectory of pain and frustration seems to level off. Each new item is merely relegated to the stack. At least, that’s how it’s shook out for me lately.
Mandiant is tracking multiple self-proclaimed hacktivist groups working in support of Russian interests. These groups have primarily conducted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and leaked stolen data from victim organizations. Although some of these actors are almost certainly operating independently of the Russian state, we have identified multiple so-called hacktivist groups whose moderators we suspect are either a front for, or operating in coordination with, the Russian state.
A while back I wrote about how large scale SSH brute force attacks seem to have stopped here. SSH isn't the only form of authentication that we have exposed to the Internet; we also have both an IMAP server and an authenticated SMTP server, and unsurprisingly they also seem activity. To my surprise, the activity patterns are quite different (which took some time to discover, since they both actually authenticate through Dovecot).
Our authenticated SMTP server sees widespread and determined probes from a wide range of IP addresses that appear to be attempting to brute force email addresses here; basically the kind of activity that I expected to see for SSH. However, many of these brute force attacks have no chance of success because they're being directed against either logins that no longer exist or email addresses that were never logins in the first place, and were only aliases or mailing lists. The obvious guess is that attackers targeting authenticated SMTP simply scrape every From: address from your domain that they can find and then set their hordes loose on brute force attacks.
Every time an advertiser pays YouTube or Facebook or Twitter to place an ad in your feed, your data is the selling point. And if you pay a subscription fee to avoid the ads, your data is still being used. Big Tech wins either way, but it’s your data, writes cyber security expert Manal al-Sharif.
When you use social media for free in exchange for allowing the networks to collect and share your personal information, you are handing the tech moguls your information for free, Meanwhile Big Tech tells you they don’t “sell” your data.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is going to court over the EU’s attempt to retroactively legalise large amounts of data Europol illegally collected on unsuspected citizens, including mobile phone and air traveller data. The EDPS is reacting to the heavily criticised Europol reform, which has given the agency broad powers since June 2022.
Federal Court Justice Wheelahan has given the Information Commissioner a wrap across the knuckles for delaying a trial into her FOI review delays.
Just over 12 months ago the then Senator Patrick filed an application in the Federal Court asking the court to order the Information Commissioner to make a decision on 23 FOI reviews which she had unreasonably delayed. Some of them had not been concluded after two years.
The Information Commissioner was supposed to, within 14 days of his application, file any concerns as to the ‘competency’ of then Senator Patrick’s application. She did not.
So-called electricity markets were created to help private capital, not people. It is time we wound up these bogus markets and returned public services to people, to run cooperatively for their benefit.
Imagine you want to stream some music. On today's Web, you would sign up for a service such as Spotify or Apple Music. These platforms have obtained copyright licenses from record companies and artists, and they offer you that music for a monthly subscription. The music streaming services are centralized intermediaries. They exist to connect musicians and fans, and in exchange they take a substantial cut of the money.
But a growing number of technology enthusiasts have a different vision, which they call Web3. To them, it "represents the next phase of the Internet and, perhaps, of organizing society.'a One of the pillars of the Web3 vision is tokenization: using representing ownership of different assets using cryptographic tokens that can be exchanged on a blockchain or other decentralized system. Only the person who knows the private key associated with a token can use or transfer it. A token can be used to represent anything, from frequent-flyer miles to hotel reservations. By transferring a token from user to user, it can record who owns an associated asset.
The price of dairy milk is now at parity with oat-milk and soya-milk. Yes, I'm sure there are some things for which plant milk is unsuitable.
Even if you ignore all the environmental benefits of switching from cow-milk to plant-milk, it's hard to ignore the benefit to your bank balance.
For years, economics textbooks have included a "money story": once upon a time, we bartered, trading chickens for cows. This was hard. If the going rate is 8 chickens for a cow and you only need 6 chickens, how could the chicken farmer make change?
The answer was gold, variously said to have been chosen for its rarity, or its divisibility, or its shininess, or the ease of working such a soft metal. Whatever the reason, these anonymous prehistoric traders all agreed that gold would be our medium of exchange, our store of value and our unit of account.
This story was handed down to generations of economics students, despite the fact that there is no evidence for it. The basis for this story was pure reasoning: "What circumstances could have given us money?"
For those who haven’t heard of him, D.B. Cooper, as the press dubbed him, successfully hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971, and parachuted out the plane’s rear airstairs mid-flight with millions of dollars. The man, and most of the money, have never been found.
The Qantas board has gifted themselves and chief executive Alan Joyce handsome pay rises despite trashing customers, staff and the reputation of the national carrier. Michael Sainsbury analyses Qantas’ bonus scheme.
They socialised the losses – and now they are about to privatise the profits. The eight-member Qantas board has gifted itself a collective 5% pay rise of a collective $2.4 million, including two retiring members who are not being replaced. This has added insult to the injury of tens of thousands of its customers, many of whom have struggled in recent weeks to get back from Asia after being stranded by multiple Jetstar cancellations and to workers being offered a pay rise of 6% over five years (1.2% each year).
The company’s chairman Richard Goyder last year earned $658,000 (including post employment benefits) for his part-time job. This is now more than his 2019 financial year earnings of $584,000. It also makes him the highest paid Qantas director ever, besting his predecessor Leigh Clifford’s $654,000 in his final full year as chairman in 2018-2019. Goyder also chairs energy giant Woodside, currently absorbing its purchase of BHP’s petroleum assets and the Australian Football League, which has just completed a $4.5 billion broadcast and digital rights deal and is searching for a new chief executive.
India is one of the largest democracies in the world, and Indian elections are a sight worthy of attention. The grand and vibrant elections, however, are not easy to win. Data analytics and AI are major factors in the back end of these elections.
[...]
Social media is undoubtedly one way to get information, but it also presents a significant obstacle. It is very challenging to determine whether the opinion and input of a given account are valid or useful due to the anonymity of the account, doubts about whether the account is owned by a real person or a bot...
Reports that Labor is in talks with Peter Dutton over the looming Federal Integrity Commission laws have spread alarm Anthony Albanese might walk back on his pledge for a credible anti-corruption body. Callum Foote reports on the timing, the critical detail, the delays and the latest scare. Call it what you like: a Federal ICAC, a Commonwealth Integrity Commission or Bloody Well About Time, the introduction of an anti-corruption body to root out the dodgy business which has plagued Australian federal politics for years, and increasingly so, was one of the major issues at the 2022 election.
After both lost their fathers suddenly in 1952, Rupert Murdoch and Queen Elizabeth were thrust into unexpected positions of power. Seventy years later, that is just one of many similarities between the pair.
My brain is going offline until next Tuesday to show respect during the Necroqueen's procession into the Western Lands.
After a short mummification there will be an economic (but not metabolic) recovery.
Meanwhile, I had a dream, and it went someething like this ...
Tackling disinformation and misinformation is a problem that is important, timely, hard… and, in no way new. Throughout history, different forms of propaganda, manipulation, and biased reporting have been present and deployed — consciously or not; maliciously or not — to steer political discourse and to goad public outrage. The issue has admittedly become more urgent lately and we do need to do something about it. I believe, however, that so far we’ve been focusing on the wrong parts of it.
Consider the term “fake news” itself. It feels like a new invention even though its literal use was first recorded in 1890. On its face it means “news that is untrue”, but of course, it has been twisted and abused to claim that certain factual reporting is false or manufactured — to a point where its very use might suggest that a person using it not being entirely forthright.
That’s the crux of it; in a way, “fake” is in the eye of the beholder.
The series on why Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is a bad solution in search of a real problem has thus far focused on three issues: the risk to the free flow of information stemming from mandatory compensation for linking, how the bill encourages clickbait and other low quality news given the absence of standards in the definition of “news content”, and the unprecedented government intervention in a sector where independence is essential. Today’s post raises an unlikely issue given that Bill C-18 is the responsibility of Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who also has part responsibility for copyright law in Canada. Buried within the bill is Section 24, a short provision with big copyright implications:
For greater certainty, limitations and exceptions to copyright under the Copyright Act do not limit the scope of the bargaining process.
What does this mean and why is it in the bill?
Bill C-18 is designed to force Internet platforms (called “digital news intermediaries”) to negotiate agreements with news organizations making news available. However, one of the problems with this approach is that platforms don’t typically use the news in a manner that would be compensable. For example, the platforms may link to the news, feature a headline with the link or sometimes offer a one-or-two sentence summary or quote from the article. The reality is that these uses are generally permitted under Canada’s fair dealing copyright law rules and does not require a licence or compensation. This presents a quandary for the government, which wants to require payment but it knows that the platforms are permitted to make use of the works without payment.
I have an abundance of source material - photos, memories, thoughts swirling in my head - from the recent trip. What I'm lacking is the motivation to write about it. I'm confident that motivation arrive at some point. I just need to distract myself until it does, and stop letting myself feeling bad about it.
In the meantime, I'll continue to walk, and to try and find photos in amongst the now-familiar spaces I travel in. I'm fortunate to have the time, right?
Masséna and I are proud to presend The Yoyo of Zonk, a crazy asymetrical two-player zelda-like roguelite featuring a strong gen Z sense of humor.
What the fuck does any of that mean? could you ask. Well, even I am not sure how to explain it clearly. I gotta say, I don't know what gendra this game is supposed to be in, and I'm perfectly fine with that (I hate the concept of game gendra).
I recon you should probably read the game booklet, it will give you a good idea of how fucked up this game is. Trust me on this one: it's worth it.
I've been really enjoying myself neck-deep in Forth. After implementing the basics of a i386 Forth, to the point of being able to define new words and load files, I started digging through my pre-covid notes from my last Forth bender, and uncovered a bunch of forgotten treasures...
I do the round of languages with an orbital period of a few years. I'll tinker with some Forth-like language for a bit. Then, depending on which direction I was pushing, I will spend some time with Lisp, or maybe Smalltalk... Lisp if I was frustrated with being unable to transform and reason about code; Smalltalk if I was getting into the token interpreter aspects of Forth...
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.