Article note: Oh that's fucked, they bought job matching software for teachers from some carpetbagger, and now 1. It is broken such that when someone is displaced as the top pick for a position they don't get put back in the pool for other positions, 2. The UX on both the teacher and admin end is sufficiently bad and confusing that it is frequently ingesting garbage, and 3. it isn't adequately human supported because the implementers believed it would magically just work.
This happens all the time, but the education sector seems particularly succeptable.
Article note: I'm kind of hoping Wayland gets PipeWire'd (motivates infrastructure cleanup like PulseAudio did, then gets quickly leapfrogged by a more competent design once the lay of the land is clear). It would be about on schedule, it's coming up on 15 years of being the next thing.
The plan to address basic functionality like input plumbing for shortcuts and virtual inputs, pixel peeking for screen shots/sharing, screen/input grabbing for full screen programs, etc. with a flotilla of uncoordinated extensions adopted (or not) by different compositors is, was, and always has been dumb, and having it fragment among compositors instead of anchoring to a first party (or at least blessed) reference library is making it worse, so now we have a bunch of software that runs exclusively under subsets of compositors. (And I realize the pacman systemd criticism and this complaint seem contraty, but this design got most of the worst features of a single integrated system and the worst parts of an ecosystem of interoperable interchangeable parts in one go because they tight coupled the wrong things... or along the wrong axis? I'm not even sure what to call it).
MOST of the critical stuff is getting pretty hashed out, so maybe it'll settle and be the norm for a while before it collapses under the weight of questionable architecture choices. Some problems are being worked around elsewhere in the stack eg. keyd that intercepts all your HID activity at the kernel interfaces and emits events via virtual devices, which may or may not be a better allocation of trust than having the display server do it, but at least has a config format not developed by the accreted output of jibbering madmen like the XKB shit.
Article note: TWO stupid censorious internet laws, rife with terrible privacy/security implications, motivated by "Think of the children!1!" in stupid censorious western municipalities knocked down in one week.
The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law.
US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they convinced Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release.
“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”
Several years ago I picked up a used Dell Chromebook 11 3189 (model code “Kefka”) to play with. At the time it was still receiving ChromeOS updates, had a sticky hinge that required some lubrication and manipulation to get working, and cost around $100 including the separately purchased power adapter. I’ve hacked on it in a wide variety of ways over the years, and the main interesting result is that I’m starting to think a hacked out-of-support x86 Chromebook is, in many ways, now better and cheaper than a Raspberry Pi in that role as a modern accessible extra computer to enable fearless play the Pi was intended to fill. I’ve been taking notes, so way too much detail below.
Article note: Holy crap, common sense prevailed, a western country is backing away from overbearing internet legislation motivated by "Think of the children!"
Article note: There is, as always, a problem of extremes. Thinking about long-term ramifications is _generally_ a good thing, but you run into camps of true believers who spend too much time huffing their own farts and get to some weird places.
Long-term: "Perhaps we should accept some short-term economic contraction in order to head off the effects of increasing climate instability" - I'm totally on board.
Long-term: "We should let billions of the poor die horribly to accelerate the possibility that our progeny's progeny might live forever in pleasure domes floating through space" - Go fuck yourself.
Long-term: "We should think about sustainable, humane ways to distribute material goods a society in which automation performs most of the actual labor." - Yup, that's a thing to think about before it becomes any more of a problem.
Long-term: "BRO DID YOU SEE TERMINATOR AND THE MATRIX? OUR SHITTY CHATTERBOTS ARE TOTALLY ON THE CUSP OF AGI AND WILL KILL US ALL!1!" - no. touch grass.
Article note: Oooh, from the guy who wrote the excellent Micro editor, which I use on a daily basis.
In D with no runtime (they call it "betterC" mode, in the vein of Rusts' #![no_std] or -nostdlib in C++), something that many of the modern "systems languages" are struggling with handling well.
This should be instructive to watch.
Article note: Gettin' ready to spend a chunk of my day tomorrow in a mandatory RCR ("Responsible Conduct of Research") training session.
...Meanwhile, the median paper I've looked deeply at in the last 5 years is "fraud-adjacent" (usually via hand-waives like "we model $EFFECT_IN_TITLE as $VASTLY_EASIER_UNRELATED_PROBLEM" or "Using voodoo amplification, we boost signals with the desired property right through the noise floor"), and ... you know. This.
Most papers are noise, and according to the structural incentives of academia, it _literally doesn't matter if they're fake_ because no one reads, much less believes, them anyway.
Article note: The tablet and mini-laptop formfactors are cute and appealing.
The fact that the RISC-V ecosystem is _already_ having problems with "the TH1520 in these parts shipped pre-standard extensions so you'll be stuck with a weird GCC fork" while still insisting that cobbling an instruction set that way wasn't dumb.
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don’t try and burn the planet down. There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist
![Texas law requiring age verification on porn sites ruled unconstitutional [Updated]](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/texas-peach-800x450.jpg)
