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HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
black_puppydog · 3 years ago
Not all are, but they can be. There's typically a bias (can't remember the name, but it's a known concept) to not change the legality of past actions. But there have been and could be situations where previously-legal actions were retroactively outlawed and punished. It comes down to a decision per situation: what is a higher good: the individual's ability to rely on my current action to be legal in the future if it is legal now, or rather the ability of society to deter from things even though the laws haven't been updated yet. Prominent examples of this (sorry for the Godwin spin here) are punishments of Nazis post-war, for actions that were technically legal during the Nazi years. The argument being "being able to rely on the law not being applied retroactively is not a higher good that stopping people from doing clearly immoral things."
HidyBush · 3 years ago
Nazi warcrimes were punished retroactively for a number or reasons, political and not. One of the most important ones was that what the Nazis did was blatanly wrong. You can't seriously claim that killing millions of people can be justified simply because there isn't a law about it, it's something so intrinsically evil that you can't rely on pure formality.

Arguably, refusing to publish literally every single document pertaining to proprietary hardware is not on the same level of obivous malpractice as a genocide, so I think you could have proposed a milder example to argue your point.

HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
rwmj · 3 years ago
Laws can say you cannot sell any more X unless it complies with Y. That's not a retroactive law.
HidyBush · 3 years ago
I don't think you've read my reply correctly. If a law were to come out that said "you can't sell any more X unless it complies with Y" we would still have billions of devices that don't comply with Y. So even if a law about open hardware/firmware were to pass in the next few years, we would still need a huge reverse engineering effort to open up all the older devices. Unless you want to argue that, yes, we should forget about those older devices and all jump on the new compliant platform, I think pushing hard for good reverse engineers is a very implortant priority
HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
kzrdude · 3 years ago
What about if we just form a class of programmers that exclusively work with Linux and buy Linux compatible laptops? That would be my preference.
HidyBush · 3 years ago
What's the point of that? One of the benefit of having a FOSS platform is that you can keep supporting and updating hardware and software that in the normal proprietary economy would have been abandoned a mere few years after entering the market. If instead of pushing for reverse engineering we simply made more and more people buy Linux-compatible devices (which still doesn't mean they'd run FOSS) we would have a humongous amount of perfectly fine hardware locked down and unable to be properly used.
HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
rwmj · 3 years ago
That's not how laws work.
HidyBush · 3 years ago
Are all laws retroactive? The EU has now mandated the use of USB-C, does that mean I can bring my iPhone 4 to Apple and have them solder the new port?
HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
black_puppydog · 3 years ago
What a waste of human potential that would be.

Don't get me wrong those peoe are heroes. They're literally sacrificing their life time for a good cause. But like with many such many hero stories, some bureaucrat could have resolved the issue with the stroke of a pen.

What we need is an extreme push against a culture of secrecy and disempowerement of device owners.

HidyBush · 3 years ago
What is done is done. Even if some piece of legislation were to come out tomorrow all the older devices would still be completely closed off. Would we have to collectively just push to move to the new open-by-default devices or should we persist in reverse engineering the older stuff?
HidyBush commented on The growing image-processor unpleasantness   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/90... · Posted by u/pabs3
HidyBush · 3 years ago
It seems to me that what the FOSS world needs in order to succeed is an extreme push towards forming a class of programmers specialized in reverse engineering. We already have plenty of capable coders who have written so much useful software, but does is matter if we can't use all the hardware at our disposal? Our devices are filled to the brim with accelerators, sensors and assorted specialized hardware that we could be taking advantage of, but they are all buried behind proprietary drivers or just plain inaccessible firmware.
HidyBush commented on Why I left Pine64   blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
TylerE · 3 years ago
Are your feet sore from moving the goalposts that far?
HidyBush · 3 years ago
Are you seriously telling me you expect an ARM board running mainline Linux to play virtualized Android games? This is beyond beyond disingenuous, is somebody paying you to write this or what?
HidyBush commented on Why I left Pine64   blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
criddell · 3 years ago
It depends on what you were expecting. On their A64 Kickstarter they said the graphics capabilities are higher than the original XBox's level of performance. That might lead a person to expect it to play games well. The screenshot included a Netflix icon. The Kickstarter FAQ says it can play UHD 4K video. That might lead you to believe you could watch Netflix on it.

As I understand it, the phone is based on the A64 board.

On top of all this, on the PinePhone page they link to a video titled something like "This $200 phone can do ANYTHING!".

HidyBush · 3 years ago
It can play 4k videos and it can play games, but expecting it to play 4k videos through an unoptimized browser with DRM and play virtualized games is extremely disingenuous.
HidyBush commented on Why I left Pine64   blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
criddell · 3 years ago
These are things lots of people, even developers, do on their phones - play games and watch videos.
HidyBush · 3 years ago
Don't you think there's a difference between "it's annoying I can't watch full blown movies on this experimental phone" and "it's garbage because no Netflix"?
HidyBush commented on Why I left Pine64   blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
sgbeal · 3 years ago
Anecdote: i backed pine64's first-ever Kickstarter and got two of their A+ boards (i think they were called). They claimed high performance and full HD video. In the end i couldn't get a single Android game, no matter how primitive, to run at more than a couple of frames per second and Netflix was too jittery to watch. They've been on my poo-list ever since.

About 18 months ago i pulled them back out and ran XFCE on one of them. It crashed with the X11 error (i kid you not): "event arrived before it was sent (your hardware is too slow!)" (going from memory - it might have been phrased differently). i ended up giving them away to someone who wanted to use one for a pihole server, and i was glad to be rid of them. Utter garbage, they were.

HidyBush · 3 years ago
So you backed a developer-oriented project all about open source software and your test to see if it was garbage or not is to consume proprietary video content and play video games through virtualization?

u/HidyBush

KarmaCake day559January 26, 2022View Original