Good thing I’ve been avoiding the US ever since the Patriot Act.

By the way, highly recommend Canada as a vacation destination.

Quite often even.

They’re usually a lot more insidious and less obvious at it, though.

Trump is making sure the US will be behind the rest of the World in the first big Technological Revolution of the XXI century.

Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).

I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)

Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.

Don’t use Wine directly, just use launcher UIs, such as Steam for Steam store games and Heroic Launcher or Lutris for games not from the Steam store.

You do need Wine installed, but if you use launchers you don’t actually need to figure Wine out or manage it to install and run the vast majority of games unless you’re doing unusual stuff like running pirated games.

At times that shit is pretty much the opposite of what should be done.

Fail Fast is generally a much better way to handle certain risks, especially those around parts of the code which have certain expectations and the code upstream calling it (or even other systems sending it data) gets changed and breaks those expectations: it’s much better to just get “BAAM, error + stack trace” the first time you run the code with those upstream changes than have stuff silently fail to work properly and you only find out about it when the database in Production starts getting junk stored in certain fields or some other high impact problem.

You don’t want to silently suppress error reporting unless the errors are expected and properly dealt with as part of the process (say, network errors), you want to actually have the code validate early certain things coming in from the outside (be it other code or, even more importantly, other systems) for meeting certain expectations (say, check that a list of things which should never be empty is in fact not empty) and immediatly complain about it.

I’ve lost count how many times following this strategy has saved me from a small stupid bug (sometimes not even in my system) snowballing into something much worse because of the code silently ignoring that something is not as it’s supposed to be.

Those sociopaths don’t even care about the judgement of the present generations.

That’s the thing: Prejudice is always bad, be it directly (presuming people are somehow worse or lesser than others based on some characteristics they were born with) or indirectly (presuming people are somehow better than others based on some characteristic they were born with, which means the evil types which are found amongst those people just as much as amongst the rest, get away with far more evildoing than otherwise: a great example of this being how Zionists have taken things to the point of committing Genocide because for decades they were leveraging “positive” prejudices about people who are Jewish to get away with doing seriously evil shit).

That’s why I really like the Dutch take of “those things are irrelevant for judging the character of a person” when it comes to sexual orientation - it totally avoids prejudice in any form, both the obviously bad prejudices AND the supposedly positive but in practice also negative, just indirectly.

People are people are people - best not presume things about them based on traits that have nothing to do with how good or bad they act, even “nice” presumptions.

In terms of people’s own ideology, that’s everywhere, really.

The upside of seeing sexual orientation as irrelevant outside sex and romance is that one has no tendency to assume that just because somebody has a specific sexual orientation, that means they think in a specific way (which is just a variant of “they’re all the same”), most notably in terms of Politics. This stands in contrast with what you see mainly in Anglo-Saxon nations.

So once one looks at the world like that it’s obvious that people whose sexual orientation is one of the less common ones are just as likely to be Nazis as the rest.

The difference in The Netherlands versus other countries is on how free people feel to let society know what their sexual orientation is, rather than the proportion of those who are gay and have Nazi beliefs being higher in The Netherlands than elsewhere - in other words people who have Nazi beliefs there and who happen to be gay are more likely to let others know that they’re gay than elsewhere.

I totally agree that that’s a good thing.

More in general it’s a good thing that the era of rightwing cohalitions governing the country, which lasted almost 2 decades, seems to be finally over, as the other parties of the governing cohalition have all lost votes.

The Netherlands has actually been quite a neoliberal country for a while now, with steadilly degrading public services (still Scandinavia-style personal taxes but ever more American style public services) and one of the worse realestate bubbles in Europe.

Hopefully this is a change in direction back towards traditional social democrat ideals and away from deregulation, trickle-down delusions and even support for the modern version of the Nazis (the Zionists).

The leader of the modern Dutch Far-Right some years ago, when it really took of, was very openly gay.

I suspect that you’re from a society where sexuality and sexual orientation are massively affected by Moralism and heavilly politicized - in other words treated as heavy and important subjects aligned with certain political forces - which is totally different from many other countries, most notably The Netherlands were they just treat all sexual orientations as just normal (which is why Dutch Far-Right muppets couldn’t care less that their leader was gay).

All this to say that your reading about the sexual orientation of a countries top politicians and what it says for populist politics, doesn’t at all apply outside very specific societies with wierd political takes on such subjects.

The Far-Right really took off in the Netherlands under the leadership of Pim Fortuyn who was very openly gay.

Think about it: one of the first leaders of the modern Dutch Far-Right was openly gay and nobody cared to the point that he was politically very successful as a Far-Right leader. In which other country in the World would the Far-Right types be fine with their leader being gay?!

In my own personal experience (I actually lived there for almost a decade), the Dutch have the healthiest take of all when it comes to sexual orientation: it’s all normal and in domains outside sex and romance treated as just about as relevant as people’s eye color (i.e. pretty much nobody cares).

All this to say that from a Dutch point of view the sexual orientation of the prime minister being homosexual is irrelevant.

Beware of projecting the weird Anglo-Saxon viewpoint on sexuality and sexual orientation onto events taking place in a Dutch context.

This is really just a driver which sends a bunch of bytes via I2C to a microcontroller.

I2C is a very standard way of communicating with digital integrated circuits at low speed so this is not specific to the microcontroller used on Synology NAS devices (which is actually a pretty old and simple one) much less specific to drive leds.

So whilst technically this specific Linux Driver ends up controlling LEDs on a very specific device, the technique used in it is way more generic than that, and can be used to control just about any functionality sitting behind a digital integrated circuit that exposes an interface to control it via I2C, be it one that hardcodes it or one which, like this one, is a microcontroller which itself implements it in code.

All this to say that this is a bit bigger than just “LED driver”.

I’m not disagreeing, rather I’m expanding on your point.

Yeah, LLMs kinda-sorta-almost work for nearly anything but their failures are have a uniform distribution in terms of seriousness - LLMs are equally likely to give an answer than will kill people if acted upon as they are to make a minor mistake in an answer.

Statistical text generators don’t have logical consistency checks or contextual awareness, unlike people, and that makes LLM unsuitable for just about any application were there are error modes which could be costly or dangerous, even whilst barely trained people could work there because some things are obviously dangerous or wrong for even the dumbest of humans so they won’t just do them, plus humans tend to put much more effort and attention into not doing the worst kinds of mistakes than they do the lighter kind.

Of course, one has to actually be capable of logically analyzing things to figure this core inherent weakness in how LLMs works when it comes to use them in most domains - as it’s not directly visible and instead is about process - and that’s not something talkie, talkie grifters are good at since they’re used to dealing with people who can be pushed around and subtly manipulated, unlike Mathematics and Logic.

Just to add that Neural Networks have already been used for ages.

For example, early automated mail sorting systems in the 90s used them to recognized postal codes.

For literally decades, slowly and steadilly they’ve been finding more niches were they add value and then somebody comes up with NN styles of model for natural language text generators and “good enough to deceive non-expert” image generation - so with interfaces which are accessible to MBAs - and suddenly all the Venture Capitalist and Oversized Tech Company CEO types latch on to the thing and pump up what seems to be the biggest Tech bubble ever.

I expect that after the bubble bursts and the massive pain of unwinding the gigantic resource misallocation due to it is over, NNs will be back on track at slowly and steadily finding more niches were they add value.

Yeah, that’s much better.

Personally I detest not understanding what’s going on when following a guide to do something, so I really dislike recipe style.

That said, I mentioned recipes because recipes meant to be blindly followed are the style of guide which has the lowest possible “required expertise level” of all.

I supposed a playbook properly done (i.e. a dumbed down set by step “do this” guide but with side annotations which are clearly optional reading, explaining what’s going on for those who have the higher expertise levels needed to understand them) can have as low a “required expertise level” as just a plain recipe whilst being a much nicer option because people who know a bit more can get more from it that they could from just a dumbed down recipe.

That said, it has to be structured so that it’s really clear that those “explanation bits” are optional reading for the curious which have the knowhow to understand them, otherwise it risks scaring less skilled people who would actually be able to successfully do the taks by blindly following the step-by-step recipe part of it.

For “all documentation” to “cater to all levels” it would have to explain to people “how do you use a keyboard” and everything from there upwards, because there are people at that level hence it’s part of “all levels”.

I mean the your own example of good documentation starts with an intro of “goals” saying:

“Visual Studio (VS) does not (currently) provide a blank .NET Multi-platform Application User Interface (MAUI) template which is in C# only. In this post we shall cover how to modify your new MAUI solution to get rid of the XAML, as well as cover how to do in C# code the things which are currently done in XAML (such as binding). We shall also briefly touch on some of the advantages of doing this.”

For 99% of people almost all that is about as understandable as Greek (expect for Greek people, for whom it’s about as understandable as Chinese).

I mean, how many people out there in the whole World (non-IT people as illustrated in the actual article linked by the OP) do you think know what the hell is “Visual Studio”, “.Net”, “Multi-platform Application User Interface”, “template”, “C#”, “XAML”, “binding” (in this context).

I mean, if IT knowledge was a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the greatest, you’re basically thinking it’s “catering to all levels” when an explanation for something that is level 8 knowledge (advanced programming) has a baseline required level of 7 (programming). I mean, throw this at somebody that “knows how to use Excel” which is maybe level 4 and they’ll be totally lost, much less somebody who only knows how to check their e-mail using a browser without even properly understanding the concept of "browser (like my father) which is maybe level 2 (he can actually use a mouse and keyboard, otherwise I would’ve said level 1).

I think you’re so way beyond the average person in your expertise in this domain that you don’t even begin to suspect just how little of our domain the average person knows compared to an mere programmer.

The more advanced the level of knowledge on something the more foundation knowledge somebody has to have to even begin to understand things at that level.

It would be pretty insane to in a tutorial for something at a higher level of expertise, include all the foundational knowledge to get to that level of expertise so that an absolute beginner can understand what’s going on.

Imagine if you were trying to explain something Mathematical that required using Integrals and you started by “There this symbol, ‘1’ which represents a single item, and if you bring another single item, this is calling addition - for which we use the symbol ‘+’ and the count of entities when you have one single entity and ‘added’ another single entity is represented by the symbol ‘2’. There is also the concept of equality, which means two matematical things represent the same and for which the symbol we use is ‘=’ - writting this with Mathematical symbols, ‘1 + 1 = 2’” and built the explanation up from there all the way to Integrals before you could even start to explain what you wanted to explain in the first place.

That said, people can put it in “recipe” format - a set of steps to be blindly followed without understanding - but even there you have some minimal foundational knowlegde required - consider a cooking recipe: have you ever seen any that explains how does one weight ingredients or what is “boiling” or “baking”?

So even IT “recipes” especially designed so that those with a much lower level of expertise than the one required to actually understand what’s going on have some foundational knowledge required to actually execute the steps of the recipe.

Last but not least I get the impression that most people who go to the trouble of writting about how to do something prefere to do explanations rather than recipes, because there’s some enjoyment in teaching about something to others, which you get when you explain it but seldom from merely providing a list of steps for others to blindly follow without understanding.

So, if one wants to do something way above the level of expertise one has, look for “recipe” style things rather than explanations - the foundational expertise required to execute recipes is way lower than the one required to undertand explanations - and expect that there are fewer recipes out there than explanations. Further, if you don’t understand what’s in a recipe then your expertise is below even the base level of that recipe (for example, if somebody writes “enter so and so in the command prompt” and you have no fucking clue what a “command prompt” is, you don’t meet the base requirements to even blindly follow the recipe), so either seek recipes with an even lower base level or try and learn those base elements.

Further, don’t even try and understand the recipe if your expertise level is well below what you’re trying to achieve: sorry but you’re not going to get IT’s “Integrals” stuff if your expertise is at the level of understanding “multiplication”.

The Paradox Of Tolerance is about how we should not tolerate the intolerant, not about what sacrificing ourselves to inconvenience the intolerant, must less sacrifice others to inconvenience the intolerant.

It’s really only about the Tolerant tolerating the Intolerance leads to an increase of Intolerance, and doesn’t really cover how far and justified is to make onself or others lose something to inconvenience the Intolerant, or in other word, the devil in the details part of any solution.

That said, your idea has merit and it has parallels to what some of the right does - for example, how the right creates spaces which they pass as leftwing to attract leftwing people and then when enough of a critical mass arises they use it to spread rightwing-distortions of leftwing ideas or even just outright rightwing ideas: look at Twitter or, even better, Reddit or even what the DNC has done to the Democrat Party in the US.

The discussion there is not anymore “how much is right to sacrifice the rest to inconvenience the NAZIs”, but instead is “how moral and ethical it is to create fake NAZI spaces to fuck with the NAZIS” - so it doesn’t involve sacrificing the rest at all - and personally I think it’s pretty damn ethical and moral to fuck with the NAZIs like that (after all, they want to do far worse to other people than merelly honeypot them into an online space that just gets closed after a while, so it’s not even close to how harshly they deserve to be treated)

How easy or hard it is to pull that off, especially repeatedly, is a different matter, as the Technical bit of setting up such instances is easy, the hard part is to attract the NAZIs to the honeypots, which is a Marketing problem.