Education has gone a long way to improving user response and caution against default trust of unverified contact

If that were true, nobody would run agentic tools.

I guess this is marketing, too.

Isn’t there an IPO planned?

Unfortunately, social engineering works incredibly well.

Note that AUR is generally untrusted, and is not an part of the Arch distro (but included in some derivatives). Arch users always were and are warned not to install packages from it without proper inspection. [Added: And adequate inspection just did become very hard!]

I think AUR is great for trying out things and sharing with people you know personally - and not much more.

For installing or distributing established, trusted software that is not part of the Arch distribution, I think Guix is better (which runs fine as an extra package manager in Arch).

But the general thing is one just cannot run untrusted, unverified code. Regardless from where - regardless whether it is AUR or pip or Anaconda or MELPA or Guix or crates.io . In terms of computing, it is like giving a stranger on the street the keys to your house.

Having a competent community reviewing software before it becomes part of a distro is what makes using Linux relatively safe (but not foolproof).

So, better to use a safe language, and use

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs/ | sh

• right??

(I copied that from https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/ just a second ago…)

I want to call to your attention this article by Marcus Ranum titled “The six dumbest ideas in computer security” and within it, the section #2 on “enumerating badness”.

This is what you try here.

Here is more info on this:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1077035/c7e7c14fbd60fae9/

(I hope sharing this link is OK, Linux Weekly News is high-quality, ad-free, and funds itself with subscriptions.)

There exist speculations that this could be a clumsy attempt of an attack similar to xz-utils, where the project was taken over overworked maintainer by a malicious actor that inserted exploit code (well hidden in binary test data) which was triggered on distributions build servers.

Could happen with pip too.

We are encouraged to use them at work, but it’s always a coin toss. Will it nail the task at hand on the first attempt?

A digital slot machine.

Addictive by design.

And moreover, it makes you believe that it did the work, while in reality you do all the difficult stuff and on top take extra responsibility for it. Like self-checkout supermarket counters.

You don’t say! It might cause more job cuts though when the costs rise so much that there is no money left to pay actual people.

I have only one data point:

I am an embedded software developer. Recently, I had to attach and debug a stepper motor with a serial interface to an embedded control system. A bog standard task - basically, you need to initialize the motor, send it a home / referencing command, tell it to which position it has to go, and wait until it is there. Luckily for science, I had to do practically the same seven years ago with a lab system at a research institute. And in the current job, the senior engineer responsible for the motor interface is a heavy proponent of AI tools and uses these whenever he can.

Oh, and there are a few more pesky little differences:

• In the first job, I had to write the driver myself, as I had no working code, but some examples in Python and Java.
• I had only a partial protocol from the vendor and had to reverse-engineer important parts myself, as the vendor preferred to supply a closed-source windows driver.
• in the second job, we already had working though a bit old C++98 code written by somebody who had left the company, for an earlier iteration of that embedded system, which was in production for about 8 years.
• in the second case, the responsible engineer relied heavily on AI
• he told me that in multi-threaded C++ code, you don’t need locks for shared access, because the AI didn’t tell him. I had to educate him a bit about undefined behaviour in C++.

In both cases, the result had to be reliable, ad it was part of expensive and heavy machinery with high cost of failures.

The outcome? The task took less than four weeks in the first job, and over six months in the second job. In the first case, the result was very reliable. In the second, it is still not fully reliable.

You can point out that the second was a legacy system, which is more difficult to evolve. But that’s the point - AI does not “understand” legacy systems at all, and worse its use brings down and inhibits communication and knowledge transfer.

At best, you can conclude that AI is no substitute at all for a lack of knowledge and working institutional processes.

Isn’t it more like buying a seat on Oceangate’s Titan ? Because the primary problem of these companies is, as we all know, too much red tape!

The automobile has been a net benefit to society

Automobiles are also in practice quite harmful to public health because their addictive and user-lock-in effects and the resulting total lack of exercise. US Americans are mostly not aware of that because the notion to walk half an hour to get somewhere is already completely alien to them. Like somebody who first drinks two bottles of beer in the morning, in order to barely function, can possibly not understand that somebody can just drink whater when they are thirsty.

AI as it is forced on people today will probably be worse for both critical thinking, and social cognitive abilities.

No no.

• Manual tiling works far better for me than the automated control in i3/sway. This is because I use some established layouts, for example Emacs Window with Rust code in the right half, in the left either firefox with docs, or a shell running cargo test, or another shell running jiujiutsu commands, or refreshing test files, and so on. And I switch rapidly between these all the time.
• A tiling WM makes much better use of screen estate, especially on my 40 inch 4K screen, but also on the laptop.
• I do most of the time programming, writing or reading, and for this, it is ideal to switch views back and forth with a single keypress.
• I like to focus on one thing at a time, and this is required if I want to work in a nice flow state. For this, StumpWMs ability to switch workspaces fast is great.
• I found it is great to automate frequent actions with wm-generated input from the wm. Say I am in the browser and want to capture the current URL for a project-specific bookmark list. So, I make s function that goes to the address bar, selects all, copies to clipboard, selects or creates an emacsclient window, finds a file called bookmark.org, pastes the URL there and lets me add a description.

What could also work for me is the tiling style like in GNOME PaperWM or Niri. But I haven’t tried it extensively due to GNOME breaking on my last Debian stable upgrade and unwillingness to spend more time on it. And I am more than happy with StumpWM.

An inportant general fact is this: Things that you use all the time, do not necessarily have the same shape and UI as things that one uses once every three months. For the first, terminal interfaces with a lot of hotkeys might be suitable, for the latter, perhaps GUIs with menus.

I had, 17 years ago, a D-Link DNS 232 NAS with an Arm CPU. It ran a pirated (GPL violating) version of Linux. A lawsuit happened, and people published a free version which could install debian in a chroot. I ran an nginx webserver on it, and MoinMoin wiki. The wiki was a tad slow because the box had only 32 Megabyte of RAM (yes, Megabytes). But it worked nicely for years. Had to take it down when Python2 was not supported any more, since MoinMoin developers never managed to port it to Python 3.

Yes. Keep the old box for games on Windows only and try out stuff on Linux.

Be sure the laptop hardware is fully compatible. It is not worth thetime to work around crappy hardware. If it isn’t, buy a refurbished Thinkpad.

I use mainly StumpWM, a tiling window manager which uses concepts very similar to Emacs. For example, one can define key chords, bind keys to lisp functions, and auto-generate input for a program window.

If it isn’t available, I use i3, or occasionally GNOME.

As in the 2008 saying: “All that money has not really disappeared. It is just in the pockets of different people”.

I totally get that it can be overload or even crushing for hiring managers, personal department people, and serious recruiters.

But as things look, companies absolutely want that useless oversupply, as if they want to actively devalue and disrespect people. Take Siemens for an example. They have introduced AI into thier hiring portal. They offer to give you messages about new roles. But that subscription does not even allow to filter their open positions by continent. If I look for a job in Germany, I get open positions in India. And one cannot filter this. What the fuck?

And pretty much in general, companies, job sites, and recruiters do not allow any useful specifity. I cannot filter offers by post code. This already makes most offers useless if I don’t use a car. Offers do not specify the actual place of work. They are often not clear about home office rules. They go all wishy-washy about the desired use of AI in software development - which is a huge differentiator for both sides of the table. I could go on. I once had two rounds of interviews until the HR people told me that they required - for a position of developing complex mathematical software - mandatory on-call service every seven weeks, 24/7 for a full week, on top of the normal work. Hard no from me. Excuse me? They could have saved me, and themselves substantial time if they had put that right into the job description.

And one more thing, you speak of job seekers as “talent”. But “talent” means at the root that somebody who isn’t fully trained yet on something appears to have the natural capability to eventually learn it well, probably. For experienced professionals which have put many thousands of hours into studying something, practicing it, and actually becoming masters in it, that’s devaluating, too. The whole process is obviously designed to devalue people.

What is “OA” ?