But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.

This bit I don’t get. Even on Lemmy and Mastodon we need moderation tools and arguably the current provisions aren’t fit for purpose. It’s not something that can just be pushed to the individual users and most hobbyists who want to spin up public servers don’t want to be spending their time wading through reports and CSAM. How to provide a safe environment for users is still an unsolved problem in the fediverse so it’s no wonder people drift to corporate controlled servers which say least nominally have the resources to do something about it.

Yes and no. A lot of the projects I work on the majority of the engineers are funded by companies which have very real commercial drivers to do so. However the fact the code itself is free (as in freedom) means that everyone benefits from the commons and as a result interesting contributions come up which aren’t on the commercial roadmap. Look at git, a source control system Linus built because he needed something to maintain Linux in and he didn’t like any of the alternatives. It solved his itch but is now the basis for a large industry of code forges with git at their heart.

While we have roadmaps for features we want they still don’t get merged until they are ready and acceptable to the upstream which makes for much more sustainable projects in the long run.

Interestingly while we have had academic contributions there are a lot more research projects that use the public code as a base but the work is never upstreamed because the focus is on getting the paper/thesis done. Code can work and prove the thing they investigating but still need significant effort to get it merged.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working on open source. Sure the companies that pay the bills for that maintenance might not be the ones you would work for directly but I satisfy myself that we are improving a commons that everyone can take advantage of.

Ah that will be it. Still grey on transparent isn’t super accessible.

I’m not sure why it rendered so poorly in Lemmy. It’s a terrible colour scheme but at least I could make out the bars when I followed the link.

More passion, more energy…

It was a nice couch co-op game to play with my wife and kids.

If you license a design from someone you’ll still be paying something. Sure there are also free implementations but they are aimed at microcontrollers, you won’t get any server class chips for free.

Now you can install uboot and get a property uefi implementation it shouldn’t take too long: https://social.treehouse.systems/@cas/113539953511804908

I need to check the driver situation but I don’t think there was anything particularly windows only on the SoC.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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

As I understand it is to operate the defensive missile battery they have just shipped.

They are pretty focused on reducing the cost of launches by aggressively re-using components that would normally crash into the sea. Previous launches landed on floating sea platforms but yesterday’s heavy was so big it needed a more stable landing zone. So after boosting the Star Liner the rocket returned down the trajectory it had followed up and then hovered briefly before being caught by two pincers on the very launch pad it had left five minutes before. That’s pretty cool.

Is it worth raising an issue with the project? Also enable logging to see if there are any clues as to why a rescan is being done?

Syncthing should have inotify support which allows it to watch for changes rather than polling. Does that help?