I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
I'm not sure what the current state of most distributions is, but I remember update applications providing an option to accept or reject individual packages. Even without that, you could preview the list of pending updates and delay them indefinitely, do manual updates of individual packages, or configure it to ignore particular packages during updates. Historically, I believe that you could block certain updates on Windows as well - or maybe you could just rollback and update. Of course none of this is considered user friendly so things may have changed.
But where does the original compiler come from? Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them. That's the point of Trusting Trust. If you build with a backdoored compiler and I reproduce your build with the same backdoored compiler, that solves nothing. This is why full-source bootstrap is important[0].
It would be very very hard to actually accomplish something like that on mainstream x86/arm compilers. And hide it from every debugger in the world. If it diminishes the value of reproducible builds, it's by something like 1%.
> Reproducible builds are only as good as the compiler used to compile them.
Which is so so so much better than "as good as nothing".
"Ubuntu will apply security updates automatically, without user interaction. This is done via the unattended-upgrades package, which is installed by default."
Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with:
sudo apt-get remove --purge unattended-upgrades
(doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space).
OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
There are a lot more distros than RH, Ubuntu, Gentoo and LFS. And none of them will show you ads except maybe Ubuntu. Plus you can also look at *BSD.
None of them comes close to what Microsoft is doing. To me, your comment looks like you do not understand the Linux eco-system. Plus IIRC, LFS can now come with compiled binaries.
> Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo
In the case of Ubuntu and Debian, and to a lesser extent RedHat, I trust the developers not to do that because they have a history of not "just pushing whatever".
Also in many cases I actually know these developers, and I can go round and ask them / remonstrate with them / put a brick through their window / other response if required about it.
> That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?
AI OK: Code
AI Bad: Art, Music.
It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative. They still think of us as monkeys banging on keyboards.
It is silly, considering there is obviously much higher chance that code-generating LLM generates copy of existing copyrighted code than image-generating diffusion model generates copy of existing copyrighted image.
> It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative.
It's more like the code is the scaffolding and support, the art and experience is the core product. When you're watching a play you don't generally give a thought to the technical expertise that went into building the stage and the hall and its logistics, you are only there to appreciate the performance itself - even if said performance would have been impossible to deliver without the aforementioned factors.
I would disagree, code is as much the product in games as the assets.
Games always have their game engine touch and often for indie games it's a good part of the process. See for example Clair Obscur here which clearly has the UE5 caracter hair. It's what the game can and cannot do and shapes the experience.
Then the gameplay itself depend a lot on how the code was made and iterations on the code also shape the gameplay.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
It's not about stupid people, there are stupid people everywhere, it's about the .1% elite controlling all the wealth and power, using flaws in the ways humans work (stupid or not every human has to have shelter and food to survive).
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.
Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
This is just an extrapolation of NAEP testing. It's more or less a chart of SES and how many students in each state need English language supports.
People tend to believe without questioning it that there are geographical/regional surveys of "IQ". But have you ever been compelled to take an IQ test as part of a survey like that? I've never heard of that happening. In fact: those kinds of surveys do not exist.
Yeah. The linked source is upfront about that, but its the closest thing we have to a real study sadly. As I said, the averages are close anyhow.
Scholars have from time to time thrown their careers away by trying to get better numbers, inevitably some group doesn't like the outcome and they become embroiled in endless debate while their career implodes. For example, the major sources cited in The Bell Curve have had their titles stripped and been hounded to the ends of the earth.
All these years later people are still specifically authoring papers to debunk their work.
We will never see real numbers. This, or other things like it, are literally the best it will ever get unless someone sacrifices their career, and maybe their own safety, to gather better data.
There's a persistent myth that it's impossible to do science in this field and that people who try are cancelled. That's obviously false. You can just look this up. It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles --- just watch arguments between behavioral and molecular geneticists on Twitter some time.
The people who actually are (/were) hounded are people like Richard Lynn, the godfather of "average IQ by country" data sets. That's because their data sets are fraudulent; not in a subtle way, but very directly: for instance, data for Sub-Saharan African countries are taken in many cases exclusively from mental health facilities, the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places.
> the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places.
> It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles
One of these things must not be 100% accurate. Do you know of any real dataset thats based on actual testing? I can't find one for the life of me. I've looked.
If someone just... tested people we would have numbers. They aren't. Its been 30 years since the bell curve and our data is no better now than it was then as far as I can find.
There must be some reason for that discrepency.
*EDIT* To clarify, I don't think Lynn was right, and even if he was he was an asshole. I'm just annoyed that nobody followed up and did it properly.
No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it.
It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue.
Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you?
I dont think the problem is intractable at all. We have the internet now and can just test people. We don't.
Yes, that would be less accurate than a test administered in office by a professional, but it would also be more accurate than basing it on educational attainment or standardized tests intended for other purposes.
With a little effort the tests true purposes could easily be disguised. These very clever researchers know this, they just won't.
I don't know what to tell you about reducing this problem to an online survey and hoping for the best. There are people doing actual science --- including with modern IQ tests --- working on these problems. I think the bigger thing here is that, outside of message boards and Twitter, there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
> there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias.
It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it.
Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards.
The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.
> But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.
I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap.
> Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about.
I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though.
Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday!
Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier.
These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.
The Go team has a lot of old school nerd cred thats why it gets away with a lot of stupid shit. Then a fan base of nerd hero worshippers beat down any discussion about doing things a better way with: SIMPLICITY.
Its frustrating and I say this as someone who has been writing Go for around a decade.
Yes. HN was created as "Startup News" by a Silicon Valley startup incubator and plenty of people here make gaming visibility a central part of their strategy for promoting their startup or promoting themselves as thought leaders to YC. I think the young'uns call it "aura farming."
A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."
HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.
Passkey just suck, end of story. The UX for them is so bad. I have no idea how many active pass keys I have. I just have to trust the provider knows what they're doing. Sometimes my authenticator app seems to forget my pass keys which is even more annoying.
If I was late-career with a good solid financial foundation im place and just looking to work to cover living expenses the Federal Gov as fucked as it may be doesn't seem like a bad gig. Since the bar is so incredibly fucking low you just mail it in and collect the money and when youre furloughed you play golf or do extra hobbies. The ball just needs to keep moving, it doesn't actually need to move quickly. Heck it doesn't even need to necessarily move forward.
I am 51 “late career” and there is no way in hell I would work for the federal government now.
Even if I didn’t care about the politics, I have made more than the posted salaries working full time for outside consulting companies contracting with the federal government over the last five years and I wasn’t working at the whims of the government
There are way more people calling it in at large orgs or FAANGs. Clearly you've never worked in a civil service position given your foolish caricature of one.
It really says a lot about our society in general. I believe there's a small portion of bad actors pushing stupid policies for their own agenda, but then I also believe there's a huge number of actual people who have lost any ability to reason critically and learn. What we're seeing is those people learning via trial and error while subjecting us to their live trials because they couldn't be bothered to pick up a book or trust the existing experts.
I don't know how to square "populism" with the metric asston of propaganda coming from people whose job is literally to know better but instead chose to feed people bad information and amplify stupidity. This ain't grass roots populism...at all.
Obviously getting people hooked on harmful lies was not originally populism. But now it sort of functions like populism. Now it hurts when the lies stop.
I think we've all been the one who got fooled in some relationship. Maybe for you it wasn't a political party. But I bet it still hurt.
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