There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.

I just want to buy home automation gadgets that don’t need a bloody cloud account to work.

I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.

It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.

I don’t think algorithms themselves are to blame but what they are tuned for. While engagement/eyeball hours for the adserver is the prime metric the quality of experience will be subservient to it. If the algorithms could better measure your mood and stimulation levels and maximise for that the effect would be less toxic. Ideally if it realised you were just mindlessly consuming it could suggest maybe you’ve done enough today and to try something else. But that I fear that is not something the owners of the various ecosystems want.

In all DRM devices there are private signed certificates that can be used to establish a secure authenticated connection. To get at them you need to crack/hack/file the top of the chip to exfiltrate the certificate. More modern “Trusted Computing” like platforms include verified boot chains so even if you extract the certificate you couldn’t use it because you also need to sign the boot chain to ensure no code has been altered.

Absolutely - modern pirates are extracting the digital streams with the DRM removed. However they closely guard the methods of operation because once the exploits or compromised keys are known they can be revoked and they have to start cracking again. They likely have hardware with reverse engineered firmware which won’t honour key revocation but still needs to be kept upto date with recent-ish keys.

For example the Blu-Ray encryption protocols are well enough known you can get things working if you have the volume keys. However getting hold of them is tricky and you have to be careful your Blu-Ray doesn’t read a disk that revokes the old keys.

For streaming things are a little easier because if you get the right side of the DRM you can simply copy the stream. However things like HDCP and moving DRM into secure enclaves are trying to ensure that the decryption process cannot be watched from the outside. I’m sure their are compromised HDCP devices but again once their keys get leaked they will no longer be able to accept a digital stream of data (or may negotiate down to a sub-HD rate).

Church of England? They are pretty vanilla and low key in my experience.

As I understand it is to operate the defensive missile battery they have just shipped.

They are pretty focused on reducing the cost of launches by aggressively re-using components that would normally crash into the sea. Previous launches landed on floating sea platforms but yesterday’s heavy was so big it needed a more stable landing zone. So after boosting the Star Liner the rocket returned down the trajectory it had followed up and then hovered briefly before being caught by two pincers on the very launch pad it had left five minutes before. That’s pretty cool.

Is it worth raising an issue with the project? Also enable logging to see if there are any clues as to why a rescan is being done?

Syncthing should have inotify support which allows it to watch for changes rather than polling. Does that help?

How can Google vet an app store without vetting everything it could serve?

What do people expect? Those servers aren’t free to run and they’re is only so much VC money to burn. That said I wouldn’t pay the various subscription levels that are currently being asked for. I pay for API use which is basically pay as you go. It also makes you think “does this task really need the non-free tier to complete?”.

I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.

Magic Wormhole - it’s been around awhile but it’s super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.

That’s how it starts. Before you know it you’ll be buying no-name smart bulbs from Ali Baba and investigating custom firmware for full local only control.

Quite. Go to the big services that know how to moderate and maintain (and importantly pay for) a public square. But also encourage the interesting ones enable federation for wider coverage.

There are some advantages to algorithms for discovery - it’s certainly is more user friendly. It’s just a shame they tend to enshitify or become toxic. Bluesky seem to offer an API of sorts to plug in feeds you create. Perhaps open algorithms are more accountable?

QEMU is always going to focus on emulation fidelity first and there are few shortcuts. With floating point the differences aren’t generally in the numbers but in how the NaNs and other edge cases are handled. If you want to execute FP heavy code you should be cross compiling anyway.