dj_mc_merlin

Are you happy? Ignoring everything else that's been said, I truly mean this: are you happy with the person you are?

> You still, however, know that the author is who they say they are

This doesn't mean anything since "who they say they are" is an anonymous username with no real life correlation. Might as well be completely anonymous.

> that other people (the distro maintainers) believe that author to be the correct entity

No? Anyone can make an account and upload to AUR and it has exactly 0% to do with the distro maintainers. Packages can be removed if they're malicious, but websites can also be removed via browser-controlled blacklists (which I don't like btw but it's how it works nowadays).

> And any such compromise would, by definition, affect all users of the repo and presumably be detected by them and not by you in the overwhelmingly common case.

This is true of a popular website that advertises install instructions using curl | bash as well.

I've been using Linux for the past 2 decades and my general experience is that it is in no way more secure than Windows or Mac, just way less popular and with a more tech savvy userbase.

Arch has pacman and that worked so well that it had to have AUR which is just glorified curl | bash. Linux distros managed it for decades when the vast majority of binaries you would run are made by nerds for nerds. If the original maintainer isn't willing to securely package it then you're often SOL.

No, I agree with him. Everyone knows Russia has territory inside Europe. Does that make it European? Post-Ukraine not a lot of people would call it European. It's just a word at the end of the day, the politics are more important to people that geography since both are made up. Why does Europe end at the Ural mountains? Because we said so.

All Europeans know what is meant by Europe. We just don't agree on it. But it does mean "not US or someone hostile to us" and that's enough of a definition without splitting hairs about Belarus.

This is a really interesting question. Is it? My intuition would say no since you have no inherent duty to protect or help others. I have no clue though.

Is this the first time you have ever thought about the idea of supply chain attacks? This is the first thought 90% of people have and it doesn't work. Too much work to manually verify diffs and LLMs aren't good enough at this yet.

If ChatGPT can make a good plan for you from 5 bullet points, why was there a ticket for making a plan in the first place? If it makes a bad plan then the coworker submitted a bad plan and there's already avenues for when coworkers do bad work.

If the documents they're putting out are bad, then they're doing bad work and that eventually comes with consequences from your coworkers and superiors. If they're doing good work, then great! Who cares if an LLM wrote most of it and they just edit it? That's not super different than the current relationship between senior and line workers.

> The unstated elephant in the room is that you can't possibly know how much thought the originator has given to this.

You can just ask them if they reviewed it in detail.

> So I guess the takeaway is: if elections are so close that a tiny amount of voters sway them, the problem of polarization is already pretty extensive enough that AI probably isn’t going to make it much worse than it already is.

To rephrase: things are so bad they can't get worse. But the beauty of life is that they always can!

Very well could be.

BTW, despite disagreeing with you on this topic, I read other parts of your blog and, as somebody else who experiences manic episodes, I actually more or less 100% agree with your "Core Beliefs" section. I've seen this before in other people I've met like me, but it does make me wonder about the nature of manic states and nature/nurture. Do these beliefs trigger individuals to enter manic states, or is predisposition to manic states something that makes individuals adopt this set of beliefs? The subtitle of your blog is "wired differently", but the weird part is many people are wired differently but in vastly similar ways.

> If consumers actually want unique local flavors an non-frozen foods, and are willing to pay a premium for it, sysco would have never gotten a foothold.

This is rooted in the assumption that capitalism provides what people want, rather than the worst that they will still accept. Endlessly cutting costs and then blaming the tastes of the consumer is why people put out anti-corporation pieces like the original video. That is not to say that Sysco is not operating logically.. but if the best move in a system leads to an unfavourable outcome for those that should benefit from it, then the system itself is the problem. Or another way to phrase it: there is a reason why that video resonated with many people that goes beyond trying to blame others for your problems.