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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • There are only so many ways “I don’t care if Hitler is active in my community as long as he doesn’t talk about the gassing in my discord” can be interpreted and “I just want to code” is not one of them. For starters, the practical issues of moderation and whether he wants to do it are never relevant to his argument throughout the blog post. He’s saying that “we should not care about people’s political views on a community unrelated to politics, as long as they do not use it to spread their agenda”. The words “we”, “should”, and “care” are pretty clear. This is a moral statement.

    There are many more quotes that make it clear he is not talking about moderating his own community. His point about Hitler is clearly used to demonstrate his thoughts on how communities in general should be run, and why FOSS communities are getting it wrong.

    Inclusive communities, in the eyes of such advocates, are often the opposite of inclusive. They will try and find things that you do outside of your proffessional persona, or often infer, guess, meddle with, or lie about what you say and stand for. Then, once they have the “ammo”, they will ostracize you. Ban, kick, call for removal, censorship.

    Unlike those people, I stand by my stance that even if you are something that the country I live in disagrees with, you still are free to use, contribute to, and be a part of the greater FOSS community.

    It’s also sad to see that the inclusive communities for which such people “fight for”, are accepting this type of, ultimately hateful and bigoted, behavior

    Bonus points for explicitly listing LGBT issues as a topic one might disagree with.

    It’s important to note that there are many people who disagree on topics like religion, economic systems, LGBT issues, geopolitics, and other

    It’s all unambiguous. Vaxry is at no point talking about the practicalities of keeping Hitler out of his community. He is explaining why he thinks Hitler should be welcome into his community and the FOSS community in general, just as long as he doesn’t use these communities to further his goal of gassing people. If there was ever any confusion over whether Vaxry doesn’t care about the toxicity or just can’t deal with it, this blog post definitely clears it up. He doesn’t care. He’s welcoming evil and harmful people in his community and in all communities and he takes a stance against the people who have an issue with this.

    Your interpretation doesn’t work unless you ignore all the words he uses, the logic of his arguments, and even the fucking title. Not to mention all the other times he’s talked about these issues. In so many blog posts about how his community is unfairly represented and how his ban was unwarranted, Vaxry has not once just simply stated in any terms that he is not okay with evil and harmful people in his community, or that he even acknowledges trans rights. The only thing I’ve seen him say on the incident of harassing a trans person by editing their profile to change their pronouns is that it was “unprofessional”. No mention of ethics or possible harm done.

    And if the far-right is bad (“you’re either with us or against us; death to you!”), the far-left is bad too (“you’re either with us or against us; cancelled!”)

    Ah yes, seeking people to harm because of their race and innate characteristics and banning people from your platform because of their morals and behavior. Equally bad things. I see the rights and wrongs of both sides now.


  • I’ve also read Vaxry’s response and it’s complete nonsense. It’s even apparent in your condensed version.

    Uh, we don’t have a CoC

    Exactly. This is more than “an incident” as you put it. It’s a long-lasting pattern of Vaxry refusing to commit to any standards of behavior. He explicitly calls “upholding any value” nothing but an inconvenience. His only reaction to his community ridiculing the concept of a CoC is to say “nice one”.

    What’s funny is that the person who opened the issue said “Instead of attacking the post, could you provide some evidence against it? (e.g. say “Trans rights are human rights”)” and it was completely ignored. See, the CoC is not about the text itself. It’s about taking an open stance against bigotry. Vaxry can cry all day about how this one incident is misrepresented and how moderation has become more strict now, but nowhere in this discussion or the FDO emails or his own blog about the issue have I seen him take an actual moral stance on the issue.

    we don’t belong to your organization

    What does this have to do with anything? FDO, a space that aims to be LGBTQ+ friendly, banned a bigoted person from participating, as they should. It’s such a stupid childish argument to say “but I didn’t out myself as a bigot in a commit message I submitted to you, checkmate!”. No-one cares. You can’t leave your “fuck trans people, lol” sign at the door and walk in, mate. You’re still a toxic asshole and you’re still a threat to the LBGTQ+ people we want to participate in our community.

    He also said that the misrepresentation got to such point that a another transgender coder made a contribution to Vaxry’s project, expecting that it would be rejected, and got surprised that her PR got merged.

    This is just so funny to hear from Vaxry himself. After people have repeatedly tried to explain to him that not enforcing any code of conduct on a toxic community is going to make it an unsafe space for LGBTQ+ people, Vaxry is shocked to find that LGBTQ+ people are afraid of being discriminated against!

    Oh, but no, you see it’s because of the “misrepresentation”! Vaxry’s had made it so clear through his words and actions that trans rights are human rights and that bigotry is unacceptable, so it can’t possibly be on him. Even as he’s posting pictures this conversation where he’s accused of being a transphobe, and a trans person is expecting to get rejected, does he point out how he’s not a transphobe and how he respects all human rights? Nope, he only says that he only cares about the code.

    But that’s just me picking apart his comments in a few specific discussions. What if he has in fact taken a moral stance, but just not in these particular discussions where’s he’s felt attacked and pressured into making a statement?

    He did post this in one of his blog posts:

    With that, I believe that every human’s opinion is valuable and important, and most crucially, equal. There is no point in having some people’s opinions be more important than others. That is the essence of discrimination.

    Hey, that’s not bad. There’s mention of equality here and he seems against discrimination! Now let’s read the rest of this Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS blog post and see what it’s really about! Oh no, the above statement was only to set the stage for accusing SJWs of not understanding that not everyone agrees with them and how they shouldn’t “cancel” us for “saying bad words”. So he does think to talk about equality and discrimination, just not in any of the above discussions. But he’ll do it here to defense people acting like assholes on the internet!

    And then he says this:

    if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

    that is inclusivity

    So there you have it. Vaxry will literally accept Hilter into his community, just casually interacting with Jewish people (presumably he doesn’t ban them from participating). It’s all fine, just as long as the gassing happens outside his own platform. Gosh, I wonder why people are feeling unwelcome in his community. Surely it is the misrepresentation of his views.

    Here’s an archive link for the above article just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20240511145845/https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists


  • And now in the r/linux thread about these news people are defending Vaxry, misrepresenting what the ban was about, and hating FDO.

    Indicatively, this blatantly wrong comment chain is upvoted:

    Is this the project where some red Hat dev started dropping legal threats from their corporate account over offline activities by third parties in unrelated communities years past?

    Sort of. You got some details wrong but essentially, yes.

    But this is downvoted and has replies telling them they’re wrong:

    Congratulations to the hyprland project, but I definitely will not be using or contributing to the project as long as it’s an exclusionary and intolerant space.


  • This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.

    Right, but the original mail from FDO basically said “we know about these examples of bad behavior, we want to notify you that they are definitely unacceptable and we expect to never see something like it again”. And Vaxry had a meltdown over that. Among other things, he doesn’t get why he should be held accountable for behaviors outside FDO. He has also rejected and commented negatively on the idea of any code of conduct at all for his project. Vaxry is making it as clear as possible that he will make zero commitment to oppose toxicity in his community and people took his word for it. The idea that he was punished solely for a couple of comments that happened years ago and are definitely “fixed” is Vaxry’s own misleading interpretation.




  • For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

    Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

    A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?



  • Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.





  • I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it’s not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP’s copy). I can verify:

    • that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies
    • after that commit, OP’s copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant

    So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github!

    Clarifications:

    • This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally
    • I did not check branches other than master (yet?)
    • I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo
    • You don’t have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP… It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies.

    I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.



  • Grub can load booster images, the issue is about incorrect grub.cfg generation.

    What they’re saying in the issue is that grub-mkconfig will not create a correct “Arch Linux” menu entry for booster, but if you go to “Advanced options” and choose the “booster” menu entry it works. I can confirm this. It happened on the system I’m currently using.

    Specifically, the problem is that grub-mkconfig does not add the booster image to the initrd of the default menu entry. You can add it manually. For example I had to change this

    initrd  /intel-ucode.img
    

    to this

    initrd  /intel-ucode.img /booster-linux-zen.img
    

    If I recall correctly this issue was not present last time I set up a system with booster. It might be a regression or maybe it only happens in specific system configurations.


  • I use booster and it’s cool. I don’t see any noticeable difference in boot times but the image generation is much faster. mkinitcpio would take several seconds while booster takes about one.

    First time I tried it it didn’t boot because of something missing in the generated image. I tried a universal booster image (set universal: True in /etc/booster.yaml) and it worked. Technically this builds a larger image than necessary but it’s still only 34MB and takes a second to build, so I never bothered to troubleshoot what was missing. The universal image even handles luks encrypted root partitions without additional configuration of booster (you still have to configure kernel parameters).

    Another issue I noticed is that if you use grub-mkconfig and your only initramfs is booster, it will generate an incorrect main boot entry. It will add booster as an option in “advanced options” so your system is still bootable if this happens to you. The quick fix is to manually add the initrd entry under the main menuentry in grub.cfg.




  • If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

    Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

    In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I’m not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

    If you don’t think that’s true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I’m “completely wrong” means nothing.


  • So help me out here, what am I missing?

    You’re forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You’re just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

    I’ll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

    • You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
    • The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino’s favor
    • You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

    So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let’s see what the outcomes are:

    • You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
    • You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
    • You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
    • You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

    So the expected outcome for you is:

    $1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + … = -$0.1328…

    So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

    Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can’t do this. That’s wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.