I’m also on Mastodon as https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr .

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

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  • There was an update today.

    I didn’t get an update today. That said, I believe you, but I can’t speak to the stability guarantees of your software provider unless you name (and shame!) them.

    I doubt this would be considered a release-critical bug in Debian, so it is certainly possible for breakage like this to occur between releases. If it was a security issue, then … I hope you are assuaged that your old way was a vulnerability that needed to be disabled for your safety. While distributions and developers try to avoid such breakage, sometimes it is inevitable or just the result to trying to minimize the vulnerability window, chronologically speaking.

    I do think that MS Windows users got surprised when their Notepad experience changed unexpectedly recently. Maybe you don’t consider that equivalent, but it is instability.

    Anyway, my experience is that Debian Stable is more stable than the MS Win 10 laptop issued by my previous employer. And, I don’t know of any rigorous studies comparing the Linux stability with MS Win stability, so I’ll tend to prefer to be guided by my experience. (And, I don’t expect you to abandon your experience in favor of my anecdotes.)

    (Honestly, I’d probably still be using Free Software even if it was less stable that Proprietary Software, but I am glad Debian Stable does focus on stability and I do support most of the policies they use to implement it.)







  • bss03@infosec.pubtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 days ago

    No, I think more MS users = MS shady shit. So, to discourage MS shady shit, I encourage people to not use MS software. I also think that people who are worried about abuse by priests should not tithe or otherwise donate to Catholic churches (belief matters less than action here; and it’s less reasonable to swap out belief system, I guess.)

    That’s why your analogy seems backwards to me.

    Doesn’t matter anyway. I guess I just don’t get it. Have a nice day.





  • I’m been using Linux full time since 2004, and while I think it is good to let people know it is there, I don’t recommend it to people I’m not willing to personally support. But, I also let them know I just can’t help with Windows problems either, and they should address their complaints to their OS vendor.

    I file Debian bugs if I have a problem with my OS, and have received fixes that way. This is better support that I ever received from MS during my first 2 decades of using MS OSes.




  • I never proposed $25/hr. I proposed a living wage based on the poorest/cheapest state of the union.

    You did the math, introducing my state, and illustrating that 17 $/hr is still a bit low, but in the right region. That might be why Sanders chose his 17 $/hr number, but I have no special insight to his process.

    @WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com said it should be 25 $/hr. I agree that would, at this moment, be too high for Arkansas.

    While I’m sure I don’t live up to it, I am trying to be convinced by data, and the data I’ve seen (including the data you cited) shows that increasing the minimum wage to a living wage is good for everybody, even tho it does have trade-offs. I’ve never seen any economic change that didn’t have some negative metric associated with the change in some implementation.


  • Yeah, we’d have to shift tactics. But, without IP law protections, the hacker community would double down on reverse engineering and binary patching. Debian etc. would still be available, but you’d also see spins on Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google software based on decompiling, patching, and rebuilding, or just game genie / PC game cracks binary patching based on offset and signature.

    The DMCA would dissolve and encrypted data that was expected to be decrypted on the fly (“streaming only”) would just be published fully decrypted.

    It would be a revolutionary shift, but I’m not convinced it would be worse.

    What would be worse is keeping IP law, but only having it enforced by million dollar yearly budget teams of lawyers and not protecting creators from having their works fed to “AI” and regurgitated as slop.




  • A higher federal minimum wage […] would destroy lower cost of living states.

    No. It would probably be better for it to come in incrementally, but increasing wages would help, even if it might squeeze some small businesses. Having looked at the balance sheet for more than one small business, wages are rarely the most significant cost, and when they are the profit margins are larger.

    Every time the minimum wage increased while I was a kid, my father (a small business owner) complained, but the county got better overall. Any business that closed was replaced with two that provided the same goods/services within 6 months.

    If you look at the data from states raising their minimum wages, you won’t see either massive price increases (some, tho generally tracking inflation) or a large decrease in small businesses per capita.