litchralee

Was this question also posted a few weeks ago?

In any case, what exactly are the requirements here? You mentioned encrypted journaling app, but also gave an example of burning a handwritten sheet. Do you need to recover the text after it is written, or can it simply be discarded into the void once it's been fully written out?

If encryption is to protect the document while it's still a draft, then obviously that won't work for handwritten pages.

At least for Lemmy -- I have no idea about kbin or other ActivityPub software -- there isn't a user-accessible way to back up one's account on an instance, nor to preserve any communities that you're a mod for. So yeah, if the instance goes down unexpectedly like due to data loss or an FBI raid, the communities and users that were on that instance will disappear.

It's true that other servers will have a cache of some of the existing community posts and the users on the departed server. But it's exactly that: a cache, which will eventually be evicted.

A similar situation occurs when a Lemmy instance changes domain name: all prior posts to the community (and the community itself) were homed to the old domain. So a new domain cannot have the same identity as the old; it will simply be a separate entity, even if all posts were somehow preserved and reposted on the new instance.

Is this Lemmy-specific? No, Mastodon and I think all other ActivityPub software, plus BlueSky have this property, because they anchor identities to DNS names. From that, the posts to a community are anchored to the instance, and the instance is anchored to DNS.

So if the domain is lost, then it's game over. But if the domain is still there but the disk got wiped, then it would be a matter of recovery from a backup. You do have a 3-2-1 backup strategy, right?

I will note that Mastodon has a user-initiated export feature, which functions as a backup, something that Lemmy doesn't have. A Mastodon user can export their data and then move their identity to a new instance. Lemmy can't do that today, but it should be possible. Though in both cases, only the saved account is preserved. To restore a Lemmy community would require a disk-level backup image.

(this is all conjecture based on my limited knowledge of Lemmy. A better answer would come from an instance admin or one of the Lemmy devs)

128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash

FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it's only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you're using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it's the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.

I wish you the best of luck in your search.

some people

they say that it's definitely a thing

To borrow a phrase from the largest encyclopedia project in the world, citation needed.

This is not to say that you, OP, need to provide the evidence of a problem. But rather, whoever you're hearing this from needs to proffer up more than just weasel words.

There is only so much time before each of us shuffles off our mortal coil, so why spend it contemplating nebulous "issues" when the real issues are readily visible: a pattern of physical violence against LGBTQ+ communities. It's not exactly difficult to do a web search for "lgbtq violence".

And to be abundantly clear, proof of "a pattern" has to show a pervasive, widespread, or organized/systemic series of events. LGBTQ+ violence easily meets this criteria, sadly. Whereas violence against white people because they're white or violence against straight people because they're straight is none of these things.

Demand better evidence from your vendor of talking points. Perhaps switch suppliers if you're not satisfied.

I think it depends on which Amish community, since they all adopt different degrees of self-sufficiency. See https://nebula.tv/videos/hai-how-amish-people-get-around-not-using-electricity/ (or on YT).

When looking through the history of Windows, some of the major milestones included the very concept of a windowed user interface in 3.1, refining the concept into a complete desktop-oriented (as in, a physical table top, with files and folders and a recycling bin) experience in Windows 95, huge backend improvements in the kernel (eg networking) by merging in the NT kernel (last used intact in Windows 2000) and giving us Windows XP.

Note well that XP was the first juncture between a consumer-oriented OS (a la Win 95/98) and a business-oriented OS (a la NT Server or Windows 2000). The missing link here is Windows ME, which was the next consumer OS after 98 but it flopped so hard when it became apparent that this artificial consumer/business division wasn't going to scale. Specifically, the Windows 9x kernel had too many DOS-isms whereas the NT kernel had no such issues. Hence, Microsoft undertook the massive effort to bring the two kernels together for XP.

In that sense, XP coupled a newer kernel with a polished UI. In essence, the company bet all its chips on XP. And fortunately for them, it paid off. But this came with a cost: XP has to carry the lineage of both the DOS/95/98/ME and NT/2000 into the 21st Century. This means the same OS has to support things like Active Directory (a feature only used by corporate customers) and Fax for Windows (used by anyone that wanted to use their dial-up modem for faxing, but also on fax servers, which are somehow still relevant today), while also supporting DirectX for the consumer gaming segment, plus multi-user support for "home computer" customers that still share a single machine for a household, despite a market trend towards personalized computing, and everything else under the sun.

And that's before we get to some of the backwards-compatibility support they still have to upkeep, like 32-bit support on the x86 family of CPUs, and BIOS (in spite of UEFI being a decade old). Notably, Windows on ARM has never kept such backwards compatibility, with ARM32 being completely deprecated and only ARM64 being supported by Windows 10 and beyond (hence, Windows on Raspberry Pi).

And then, of course, the Microsoft own-goals and mistakes: somewhere around 8.1, they decided to meet the tablet/touchscreen market by having Windows be touch-oriented. But as was blitheringly obvious then and now, the desktop concept cannot possibly be similar when the controls (keyboard/mouse versus touchscreen) are swapped out. Thus, this compromised the desktop experience in pursuit of a relatively niche target market. Meanwhile, Apple essentially forked their Mac OS to support mobile, tablet, and smartwatches as iOS, and aren't exactly itching to merge iOS back into the desktop OS.

A better execution might have been to port Windows for ARM (which is what most/all phones and tablets use today) earlier than they did, use that as the basis of a tablet-experience OS (like how Windows Media Center was just an application atop Windows XP), and then later introduce compatibility with desktop apps (like how Apple can now do full-speed x86 emulation using special ARM extensions baked into their custom silicon). That said, the latter was only technically achievable in the 2020s, but seeing as Microsoft was the market leader well into the 2010s, they would have been in the same position as Apple is in today.

So to summarize my long-winded comment, Windows carries a lot of weight. It is the result of successfully merging two very-real market segments into one product (business users and consumer users), then MSFT dropped the ball by chasing the Next Big Thing and adding more diametrically-opposed objectives to an over-burdened OS, with nary a plan for how to eventually relieve it. Had they instead did a separate OS for tablet and mobile (rip Windows Phone), they could have merged that one into the XP-based kernel and got the refined best-of-both-worlds.

Instead, they now have the worst of both. The Windows 11 desktop experience sucks, with bad icons, near-invisible text boxes, confusion where there wasn't any, and all while pushing consumers towards web browser-based apps. And to make it sting harder, because they've been feeding this mess to their corporate customers, those customers now demand that everything be kept the same ("better the enemy that you know") which prevents Microsoft from making XP-level wholesale improvements.

They're stuck, they know it, and they can't really fix it unless great leadership shows up to take command of the ship. But similar to Amazon (which makes most of its revenue through AWS, not selling/shipping products), Microsoft makes the majority of its revenue in two segments: Azure cloud and Office 365. It's hard to revamp Windows when it's now playing third-fiddle.

(I'm sure I've got some of the historical details wrong, but it's Saturday morning so full send)

The absolute first thing is to establish the jurisdiction of this scenario. The answer will be vastly different if the jurisdiction is California/USA than if the jurisdiction were South Susan. No shade against South Sudan, but we are talking about criminal and civil law, so the details might be very different.

But supposing this is a jurisdiction that follows in the Anglo-American common law (such as California, and I'll proceed using California as the setting), then we can make some generally-true statement, some of which confirm what you're already written:

1. Criminal law exists to punish bad acts committed against society at-large
2. Criminal law can only punish the persons or entities which have committed an act or omission that is proscribed in law, and only those persons or entities within the territory
3. Dead people or dissolved corporations are beyond the reach of criminal law
4. The notion that the next-of-kin will "inherit" the criminal liability was abolished long ago; see US Constitution "Bill of Attainder" prohibition, and equivalent in other jurisdiction like the UK or Australia
5. Anyone that is still alive and collaborated to aid or supply the dead assailant can be pursued using criminal law or civil lawsuits, or both
6. In parallel to the criminal law system, civil lawsuits can be filed against the remaining property of the dead assailant. This is known as the "estate" of that person, and the lawsuit would be captioned as "XYZ v the Estate of [dead assailant]"
7. A civil lawsuit can only win as much property as the respondent (ie person being sued) has, or any insurance policy they had which might apply, or any debt which was owed to the respondent at the time of their death.
8. Mass murder commonly result in civil lawsuits that do not obtain anywhere near the full amount to compensate for the victims' families' loss.
9. As a result, the target of civil lawsuits can be expanded to include adjacent parties, such as the manufacturer of the weapon or materials used, under a claim of product liability or something similar. This is not a guaranteed result, but they often have deeper pockets and good insurance policies.
10. Civil lawsuits can only bring a monetary compensation. The law cannot revive the dead, cannot erase or amend history, and cannot salve the void left when victims are removed from this world unjustly.

With all that said, the entire line of inquiry into the dead assailant's will, or to their parent's will, or anything like that, is entirely inapplicable. Children or parents do not inherit the sins of others, at least where criminal liability and civil lawsuits are concerned. Unless, of course, the parents participated somehow or willfully neglected a duty to report (very few of these exist in California, unless the victims were undoubtedly known to be children; see mandatory reporting laws). Thus, these other people cannot be sued nor criminally punished, usually.

The other commenter correctly said that what we call the "justice system" is more accurately called "harm reduction". That's not wrong, but I would post that the crimimal law system is about harm reduction (nb: I do not endorse the carcereal state of imprisoning huge segments of the population, disproportionately by race), whereas civil lawsuits are about equity and compensation.

Both systems exist in tandem to prevent people from achieving a bloodier form of justice in the streets, like in days of yore: pistols at dawn, dueling in general, lynching, "bigger army" diplomacy, shakedowns, midnight slaughters of whole families, and other such unpleasantries. It's definitely not perfect, and it needs reforms in many parts, but the structure serves a purpose and so far, it's what we have and the best that we have.

I think this would easily qualify for !brandnewsentence@lemmy.world

I've even seen people vibe code ethernet drivers for freeBSD.

Please make sure to read what considerations that developer had before undertaking that effort using an LLM: https://github.com/Aquantia/aqtion-freebsd/issues/32#issuecomment-3997341698

Specifically, they (the human) were kept in the loop for the entire process, which included referencing the working Linux driver to do a clean-room reimplementation. This already means they have some experience with software engineering to spot any issues in the specifications that the LLM might generate.

Also, Aquantia (before the merger) already had a published FreeBSD driver but it hasn't been updated. So this port wouldn't have to start from zero, but would be a matter of addition support for new NICs that have been released since, but Aquatia hadn't updated the driver.

This is very much not an example of an Ethernet NIC driver being "vibe coded" from scratch, but a seasoned engineer porting Linux support over to FreeBSD, a kernel that already has a lot of support for easily adding new drivers in a fairly safe manner, and then undertaking a test plan to make sure the changes wouldn't be abject slop. That's someone using their tools with reasonable care. In the industry, this is called engineering.

Admiration for what people can do with the right tools must always be put into the right context. Even with the finest tools, it's likely that neither you nor I could build a cathedral.

I don't think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes

This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: https://opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn't bother writing out a CoC.

it's not fair to hold people to standards they didn't personally agree to

Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it's hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.

this guy might have just decided to make a project

Starting any project -- as in, inviting other people to join in -- is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.

I've not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don't think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what "open source" means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term "free speech" and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.

Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.

The second concerns "norms" that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work -- until they don't.

Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie "political") but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.

So laying that foundation, I address your points.

Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing.

This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights ("we al have the choice to use it or not" and "anyone can write anything") with open-source values ("for fun or seriously" and "doesn't matter if it's silly or useful"). The statement of "open source means open" does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.

To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that's a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that "Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project" means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.

How they were contributing is irrelevant

This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that's also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

I would draw the focus much more narrowly: "We should all feel ashamed ~~that an open source project was shuttered~~ because of how our community acted". Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.

To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.

I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don't want the repos to be checked out, use "git clone -n" to not do that. It'll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.

You won't have PR features nor a web UI though.