Quoting: gabberBecause it even is a consideration.

Last I checked I did neither need my genitals nor my sexuality to program. This is a politically motivated power grab and only brings division and drama, not better code. Equality starts when you do not differentiate. Now they have to ask for gender and divide the projects into those categories.

But the fact it's under secondary gives me a bit of hope this cancer will soon die off.

FOSS projects survive based on the number of motivated and talented developers available. Women represent about 50% of the population but are under-represented in software development. And you believe there is no reason to even wonder why that might be the case or attempt to leverage a new demographic in order to increase the size of the developer pool?

Also, not in a single part of that text you quoted, nor in the context of that quote, is there a demand to "ask for gender". They are showing an interest in entries that engage under-represented communities but if you read the actual text it's not even a strict requirement.

As for division and drama, I rarely hear about Outreachy participants causing drama and division. People in article comments about Outreachy and the like on the other hand...

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI do find it funny that snap is geared more toward commercial software than flatpak is. Which enabled someone to upload a 2048 game with an embedded bitcoin miner.

Is there honestly that big of a difference? Basically any software source with little to no curation will eventually get garbage on it. This has happened on AUR as well and I bet someone could sneak a Bitcoin miner on the Flathub as well.

To me Flatpak and Snap don't seem that different. They both aim to solve more or less the same problems, provide more or less the same mechanisms for solving those problems and to me they both seem annoying to use and I'm not fully convinced they actually solve a real problem.

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Quoting: DanglingPointer

Quoting: slaapliedjeInstall base != company size.

Yeah, they have a lot working on and riding on Openstack their cloud stuff. What they don't have is a lot of dedicated developers to work on their desktop system. And that's what we're talking about here, right?

Not many dedicated developers for desktop compared to who? IBM-Redhat? Suse? System76? gLinux?

If I'm not mistaken, Canonical employed desktop-developer numbers are only second to IBM-Redhat employeed numbers, with Suse 3rd.

Comparing the number of devs in individual companies isn't necessarily a good metric either. Ubuntu has historically tried to push a lot of their own things (Mir, Unity, Snap) and in those cases the development and maintenance burden falls mainly on their developers as opposed to collaborators in existing projects or collaborators from multiple projects working on a shared solution. Basically, Canonical devs get spread pretty thin working on multiple home-grown solutions. The more interesting thing to look at is the amount of redundant work that could be avoided by collaborating with existing solutions rather than doing everything yourself.

However, Ubuntu has gotten better about this. Unity is dead and buried and Mir became a Wayland compositor and is relatively irrelevant at the moment. As for Snap and Flatpak, I personally don't see an issue with the duplication there, since I don't think either project is super complicated and in critical need of developer resources.

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Quoting: The_AquabatSNIP

If you could stop spreading hysteria and encouraging panic buying vitamin supplements that would be great. Maintaining your vitamin levels is good for your health, just like maintaining your fluid levels is good for your health. That doesn't mean vitamin D suddenly became a magic bullet of some sort.

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Quoting: lqe5433If you have Intel with AMD dGPU then how do you select your AMD gpu?

Seems to work the same way as with Nvidia. You just need to have the switcheroo-control service running and then you can right-click an application from Activities and click "Launch with Dedicated Graphics". All it seemingly does is set the DRI_PRIME environment variable.

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I streamed a bit of it and found it was pretty neat and challenging but it's not really programming because there isn't really a logic system to it, you are just putting the instructions in the right order. It is fun to try and make efficient pipelines with multiple bots while keeping things in sync, but I think if you want a programming game Human Resource Machine and the Zachtronics programming games (TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, EXAPUNKS) are a better option.

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Quoting: BielFPsThis somehow makes me a little happy to still be using an old Athlon II X3 (which "transform" into a Phenon II X4 after using Asus Core Unlocker)

I wonder if this will result in another performance hit for linux users.

It won't and it can't, since the flaw is in the boot ROM. The problem cannot be mitigated from the outside, therefore mitigations cannot cause performance loss. Secondly, it's a flaw in the CSME so it's unlikely the vulnerable code and a possible mitigation would be relevant to a hot code path that would cause a performance regression.

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Quoting: rkfgWhy do you think AMD is more secure? Sure, their CPUs/chipsets don't have these exact Intel technologies but they have other things that might be vulnerable. Also, many of those CPU data leaks were not Intel-specific.

Absence of evidence is naturally not evidence of absence but I think it's still worth considering that with the amount of negative press towards Intel due to the vulnerabilities discovered in their products, Intel would be motivated to throw money at security research into AMD CPUs to alleviate the PR pressure on them. The fact that results of such research have revealed relatively few vulnerabilities would suggest that either Intel isn't paying them enough or the architecture is more sound when it comes to modern side-channel attacks.

The AMD PSP has been revealed to have had security vulnerabilities though, although apparently those were mitigated via firmware updates rather than requiring silicon changes. It would still be nice if we didn't have these co-processors on our CPUs when we don't even use them for anything in consumer computing.

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Quoting: fagnerlnA little off topic, I was talking with someone about Proton and how intrusive anti cheats blocks it, and I was thinking about why there's no anti cheat based on AI.

On CSGO I do some "overwatchs" and there's a lot of obvious cheaters, with wallhacks, aim, speed hacks, etc, really easy to catch, so an IA can do the job. Looks like it's really easy to bypass VAC, but I think that it's a lot harder to bypass a AI.

Maybe an IA can detect a toxic player too

To a degree an AI could be used to detect these sorts of things and such AI approaches have already been used in the past. Hell, who knows, maybe you doing overwatches is already training an AI model behind the scenes? But AI isn't a silver bullet, despite how much some marketing teams in tech may want you to believe it is. Particularly in terms of toxic language, AI will have serious trouble deriving context to make determinations on what is and isn't toxic. It'll either let toxic stuff pass or you end up with a Scunthorpe problem. You can ask YouTubers what they think of Google's monetization AI and how well it works (or rather, how poorly it does). Some problems are just best dealt with by humans.

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Quoting: BeamboomOh dear me, that was a load of obscurities as far as I'm concerned. So much so that I can't even vote - I've not even heard of the vast majority here.
Not the fault of anyone of us course, but a rather depressing picture of Linux gaming anno 2019.

I thank the gaming gods for Steam Play... When maybe I should curse it?

Don't think that's the first GOTY award article where you've made this comment. Also, there exists a website where you could have heard of these games but I don't remember exactly what that site was...

Snark aside, the game selections this year are not bad. Yes they are indie, but at least to me this indie stuff is more interesting anyway because indie games feel like they at least have some soul. Not to mention games like DUSK, Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons play awesomely well, have really good soundtracks and are simply fun.

I would recommend looking beyond the mass-marketed AAA stuff and consider widening your palette to slightly more exotic options. Who knows, you might find something that you would actually like.

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