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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Generally speaking, you need to use social signals: does it seem like other people are using the software? Is it recommended by people you trust? Does the author look legit (other projects, a presence on social media, etc)?

    That’s because it’s really easy to hide malware. Developers can’t read an entire codebase, and the codebase of every library required by the tool.

    In the ideal scenario, permissions on your home directory are configured appropriately so an attacker can’t do too much damage. I’m not sure if that’s realistic, however.

    There have been lots of stories about supply chain attacks that steal developer’s crypto wallets, which is a perfect illustration of the problem.

    Edit: running everything in a VM is probably the safest way to deal with untrusted code.








  • I suggest Peter Watts.

    most SF stories there are usually one or two central issues to grapple with—an evil AI, an empire, climate collapse—but rarely the overwhelming stack of interlocking failures we see in reality. Even dystopias often feel strangely cleaner and more legible than real life.

    Writers try to build tight narratives. Portraying a polycrisis is hard. It’s even harder if you want to focus on one or two factors. Decent editors try to cut extraneous stuff out of stories, so they’ll try to trim out factors that aren’t necessary to the main story arc.

    And then you need to consider the audience. Can a writer portray a polycrisis in a way that viewers or readers will stick with? Or will the audience get tired of a laundry list of problems?

    I suggest Peter Watts because he writes (wrote?) good genre fiction that’s depressing and includes multiple reasons to be depressed.










  • sbv@sh.itjust.workstoProgrammer Humor@programming.devfoss
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    1 month ago

    “most” is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they’re just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there’s a tiny fraction that make it big.



  • We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

    lol