Thurstylark

Some extra fun details from the staff discussions around this: Valve is not interested in control of the distro, but are mainly interested in funding work on projects that are chosen by Arch staff, and are already things that Arch staff wants to implement. The projects chosen are indeed things that Valve also want to be part of the distro’s infrastructure, but the process has been totally in the hands of Arch staff.

I gotta say, it’s been really cool to see Valve go through the process of considering OSS as not just a useful tool or worthwhile target, but as a robust collaborator.

First, they build and maintain their client on Linux, and build their games to run natively on Linux, learning that things aren’t actually as difficult as it’s commonly made out to be, and the things that are more difficult than they need to be can be fixed by working with and contributing to the existing community.

Then they consider building their own hardware, but try the half-way approach of building SteamOS on top of Debian, and depending on existing hardware vendors to build machines with SteamOS in mind, learning that there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity around both of those approaches to that goal.

Then they learn how to develop and build 1st party hardware with the SteamLink and Steam Controller.

Then they put the lessons from the Steam Machine project into practice by dumping loads of time and effort into Proton, knowing that they won’t have the market unless they can get Windows games to run on Linux in a reliable and seamless way.

Then they put all that knowledge and effort together to do the impossible: unite PC gamers of both Windows and Linux flavors under the banner of the SteamDeck, a fully gaming-focused, high-quality, and owner-friendly piece of kit that kicks so much ass that it single-handedly pulls a whole category of PC hardware out of obsurity and into the mainstream.

And what do they do with that success? Literally pay it forward by funding work on the free software that forms the plinth that their success stands upon.

Good on Valve.

It’s not about actually caring about making minors safer on their platform, or caring about giving tools to guardians to help keep minors safer on their platform.

It is about having something to point to the next time Meta is called in front of a congressional subcommittee to discuss proposed regulations. Look, we did positive things to our platform in the name of protecting minors, and we did it voluntarily, despite what losses we saw in that demographic! We definitely can (and so totally do) put the control of those protections in the hands of parents, where it belongs! We don’t need to be regulated, because we’re doing it ourselves already!

I think it would be naive to think that they don’t know this already. Not to say that I think you’re making that argument, but that I think the losses are calculated against the benefit of the appearance of care that this move affords them. Sure, these new restrictions and tooling means that some parents will be more willing to allow their teens to engage with the platform, but there’s no way that will outweigh the active user reduction in the targeted age range.

The real benefit is looking like they’re doing stuff in a positive direction in the context of minors. I’m definitely expecting them to point at this move (and its voluntary nature) as an argument against future regulation proposals. Especially the part where they’re ostensibly putting that control in parents’ hands.

Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.

That depends on which audio system you’re running.

Since this can vary depending on your distro, the easiest place to look for that info is going to be your distro’s documentation. That documentation may also include instructions for how to accomplish exactly what you want.

On top of this, your account gets penalized if you refuse to take an offered ride.

The complexity is the point. The less people willing or able to jump through all the necessary hoops to receive their healthcare through the system, the less money they have to pay out. Adding more complexity in the form of yet another opaque approval system adds many more hoops to get through, which is actually the entire purpose of that system. Deloitte knew this going in.

Yes, I have sympathy for the individuals who have to build this system, however I have absolutely zero sympathy for the company that put it into practice.

Yes, the medicare system is needlessly complex, however Deloitte decided to replace manpower with cheaper automation which had the side effect of saving them work by increasing rejections.

The world also happens to be complex. Enough so that both things can be true.

As a former rideshare driver: Fuckin’ based.

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I already don’t own an xbox and am happy about it. Checkmate, MS.

My city recently renamed a street after Nelson Hackett, who was a local slave, but more notably, was the first and only escaped slave to have made it to Canada, and then be extradited back to the US. The road was previously named after Archibald Yell, the governor of Arkansas at the time, who wrote the extradition order. Canadian laws at the time forced the government to respect the extradition, but they found this situation so distasteful that they immediately changed the law to basically make Canada a safe haven for escaped slaves.

Lots of locals didn’t know who Archibald Yell was, but now they do, and the road is now named after the slave whose case laid the groundwork for the Underground Railroad because of the governor’s actions.

Not just a correction to the person who should really be celebrated, but also an S-tier snub, if you ask me.

I use vcsh and myrepos.

vcsh allows you to run multiple git repos that share ~ as their root, and mr simplifies/automates the management of those multiple repos. You can check out my setup here.

Oh yeah, I remember having to watch those for onboarding. They weren’t as cheesy as they could have been for an informational video.

I do appreciate how they’re handling it, though. A public post-mortem is much more reassuring than damage control PR. Plus, being honest means they gain the IT folks who actually have to use their stuff as allies.

My guess: Because they reviewed and signed the kernel space code which calls code that is unreviewed and unsigned (or, at the very least, pulls directly from files that are unreviewed and unsigned without proper validation or error checking), calling out CrowdStrike’s failure puts them on the hook too.

Apologies, hostility wasn’t my intention, only seeking understanding.

Ya know, in the context of the software in a vacuum, sure. But I think I’ll ammend what I said earlier about what constitutes a distro:

IMO, It’s not just software that glues other existing software together into a contiguous OS, but also a staff, a community, a philosophy cast on that collection of software. A way of doing things and thinking about them. Decisions and the rationale for them, a history of iteration, user needs and how those needs are filled. Us soft squishy humans that make, maintain, modify, administer, use, and complain about the software.

Because I think that reducing a distro to only the software it produces or uses fails to paint the whole picture. The mechanisms used for managing the collection of software on any specific machine is only one part of a larger system.

Pacman isn’t the only part of Arch, and Arch isn’t just pacman. The same is true if you s/Arch/MSYS2/g on that statement.

I mean… Yeah…? It’s not all that controversial to say that any distro is essentially just glue between several pieces of software…

What’s your point?

I’m genuinely not sure what you’re saying here…

Pacman was birthed from the Arch ecosystem, but it’s built to be generalized so any project can use it if they choose.

Well, you see, the front fell off.

Yeah, this is why I added a hardware key to my db. The hardware key is required not just for reading the db, but writing to it as well.

Another tip: use something like an OnlyKey that has its own locking and self-destruct mechanisms so this method isn’t foiled by simply acquiring the key.