How is chess not fully specified?
They said chess was an example of something that is fully specified.
Readit NewsBrian_K_White commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright
And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.
But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.
I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.
I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)
It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.
And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.
Brian_K_White commented on Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS github.com/microsoft/lite... · Posted by u/aktau
Aliens come to visit. I have to tell one the difference between an app linked against a "library os" running on a hypervisor, and an app running on a kernel. I couldn't do it with a straight face.
Brian_K_White commented on Things Unix can do atomically (2010) rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/t... · Posted by u/onurkanbkrc
Not technically related to atomicity, but I was looking for a way to do arbitrary filesystem operations based on some condition (like adding a file to a directory, and having some operation be performed on it). The usual recommendation for this is to use inotify/watchman, but something about it seems clunky to me. I want to write a virtual filesystem, where you pass it a trigger condition and a function, and it applies the function to all files based on the trigger condition. Does something like this exist?
incron
Brian_K_White commented on AI is killing B2B SaaS nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2... · Posted by u/namanyayg
It’s funny you complain about the sales pitch the guy gave you, but the comment itself sounds like a sales pitch :)
I think you need to calibrate your perception of things you read.
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
You need both, because there really is no such thing as kill it in it's crib. The people that want this will continue to want it forever, and will continue to propose it forever. And eventually it works.
I get so annoyed by this Socratic line of questioning because it’s extremely obvious.
Terrorist has plans and contacts on laptop/phone. Society has a very reasonable interest in that information.
But of course there is the rational counter argument of “the government designates who is a terrorist”, and the Trump admin has gleefully flouted norms around that designation endangering rule of law.
So all of us are adults here and we understand this is complicated. People have a vested interest in privacy protections. Society and government often have reasonable interest in going after bad guys.
Mediating this clear tension is what makes this so hard and silly lines of questioning like this try to pretend it’s simple.
This means there are no valid concerns.
There are just things some people want and the reasons they want them.
So the question that you are so annoyed by remains unanswered (by you anyway), and so, valid, to all of us adults.
@hypfer gives a valid concern, but it's based on a different facet of lockdown. The concern is not that the rest of us should be able to break into your phone for our safety, it's the opposite, that you are not the final authority of your own property, and must simply trust Apple and the entire rest of society via our ability to compel Apple, not to break into your phone or it's backup.
I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
Brian_K_White commented on Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support lists.linuxfromscratch.or... · Posted by u/cf100clunk
I know this is a bit tongue in cheek, but the systemd hate is so old and tiresome at this point.
I need my systems to work. Not once in my career have I experienced a showstopping issue with systemd. I cannot say the same for sysV.
I can absolutely say that I've never had a showstopping problem with sysv. That is about 30 years as a unix & linux admin and developer.
The whole point of sysv is the components are too small and too simple to make it possible for "showstoppers". Each component, including init, does so little that there is no room for it to do something wrong that you as the end user at run-time don't have the final power to both diagnose and address. And to do so in a approximately infinite different ways that the original authors never had to try to think up and account for ahead of time.
You have god power to see into the workings, and modify them, 50 years later in some crazy new context that the original authors never imagined. Which is exactly why they did it that way, not by accident nor because it was cave man times and they would invent fancier wheels later.
You're tired of hearing complaints? People still complain because the problem did not go away. I'm tired of still having to live with the fact that all the major distros bought in to this crap and by now a lot of individual packages don't even pretend to support any other option, and my choices are now to eat this crap or go off and live in some totally unsupported hut in the wilderness.
You can just go on suffering the intolerable boring complaints as far as I'm concerned until you grow some consideration for anyone else to earn some for yourself.
The company also ran a mail filter called Baracuda or something similar that followed links in emails to see if they were malicious.
I was quite annoyed when I was called to do the mandatory training as "I" had clicked a link (on an email I hadn't seen) and more so when told I had no other recourse than to sit through it.
I resigned shortly afterwards.