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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • To add, let’s do some math!

    Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.

    s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.

    We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.

    For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.

    If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.

    In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.







  • I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don’t know enough about the particulars.

    However, I think the “user choice” argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn’t be.

    For instance, in this case, it’s not the user’s choice at all, but a developer’s choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.

    I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it’s already been done for me.

    There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I’m generally receptive to those arguments way more than “user choice.”



  • I spent an hour and a half arguing with my brother about probability, because he asked ChatGPT what the probability that he and his daughter were born on the same day.

    ChatGPT said 1/113465 which it claimed was 1/365^2 (this value is actually 1/133225) because there’s a 1/365 chance he was born on such and such day, and a 1/365 chance his daughter was too.

    But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of probability would know that it’s just 1/365, because it doesn’t actually matter on which day they both happened to be born.

    He wanted to feel special, and ChatGPT confirmed his biases hard, and I got to be the dickhead and say it is special, but it’s 1/400 special not 1/100000. I don’t believe he’s completely forgiven me over disillusioning him.

    So yeah, I’ve had a minor family falling out over ChatGPT hallucinations.






  • So please forgive me if this is a rather naive question. I haven’t seriously used Windows in nearly 15 years.

    I seem to recall runas being a lot like su, in that you enter the target user’s credentials, rather than your own as in sudo. This works because sudo is a setuid executable, and reads from configuration to find out what you’re allowed to do as the switched user.

    Is the behavior of windows sudo like unix su or unix sudo with regard to the credentials you enter? Can you limit the user to only certain commands?




  • Because the nix package manager places all system packages under /nix/store/uniquehash-packagename-version/

    Where the unique hash is obtained via a Merkel tree of all the inputs. So in particular, binaries and libraries exist underneath those directories, not in the places you would expect from FHS.

    In order to make the system actually work, environment variables are set up and executables are patched to refer to specific paths within the Nix Store.