> Good. Now: when are governments going to lift restrictions?
Obviously the set of "commonest" systems is not the thing to base such a decision on (e.g. for a hypothetical disease where 90% get a mild cough and 10% drop dead, cough is the most common symptom, but the death symptom is what should drive policy).
> Then we shouldn’t be allowed to drive… or just go out altogether. Too many dangers out there, you see.
No, and don't be ridiculous. Do I have to explicitly spell out every piddling nuance of an idea for you to get it? There's obviously other factors involved, but my point was "most common symptoms" (if they're mild) is not one of them.
If it costs more than zero and you don’t care about euros not visiting your site, it makes sense.
For example if you have ads or external analytics (practically 100% of websites) you need a cookie banner. Best to restrict access than to annoy your innocent users.
Well, you have to know something about the law to know when it does/doesn’t apply, and this student newspaper apparently decided it didn’t care to invest that kind of time. I think this is understandable for those of us who don’t prefer to study other countries’ laws. Perhaps EU subjects should seek to improve their laws.
Nah. Speaking as an American ex-pat, it's about Americans being offended that foreign laws have heft and import. It pierces the sovereignty bubble. The Internet is home-grown. How dare other nations dictate to us Americans how we run our sites, amirite? We're gonna take our toys and home.
This is a silly, shamefully obvious straw man. No one is saying “Americans uniquely shouldn’t have to parse other countries’ laws”, the argument is “it’s ruggedly impractical for ordinary citizens of any country to parse the laws of other countries”.
Those aren’t cases of “ordinary individuals” and thus don’t apply, but yes the general principle also implies the special case that ordinary non-Americans shouldn’t have to parse American law just to go about their lives.
Foreign nationals contending with extraditions to the US for alleged actions performed while in foreign, sovereign lands is a far more serious problem by any measure than having to protect user data or risk not being able to do business in Europe. But go on with your "No True Scotsman" arguments
The "compliance" is quite simple. Don't do this thing. Don't collect personal information without permission. Very, very simple.
If you do collect personal data,
with permission, it's only slightly more complicated. Let the individuals control their data, including deletion. Don't do anything with it without permission. Again, not hard to understand.
The "morass" is for people who are gonna try anyway. "Well, what about if we bury the permission under exhausting legalese?" No, that's unlawful. "What if we collect it but obfuscate it?" Not without permission. Etc.
So, "compliance morass" is not an argument. It's an extremely simple law.
>For example if you have ads or external analytics
It is not about ads or analytics and about collecting private data without consent. Just to remind americans GDPR does not specifically target the Internet, it apples for real world places with physical paper (like you got to a lab and want to do some tests they are forced to tell you what they will do with your private data and you have to agree or not).
You can have no tracking ads or analytics that do not record private data just fine, you can also have non tracking cookies without a popup. But honestly it makes sense that there is a big rich group that spread a lot of FUD about this stuff so many places will just decide not to server EU. If you never seen such GDPR popup maybe you should try to have a look at some of them, see how many "partners" this people share your tracking data with and how scummy the UX patherns they use are.
Btw I am 100% fine with some US resources blocking me, I can go read soemthing else and for sure not try workaround for accessing this people page.
Imagine they locked out afrika there'd be a huge amount of screaming about injustice and isms...
You can identify users by geoip and ASN surprisingly well, don't pretend supporting that has to annoy ameri-land, it's the same as arguing lock off California, it's a bad argument.
A community that doesn’t allow dissent is dead for me. Respectful dissent is key to functioning society and I think HN reflects larger societal trends.
When you execute a random file you got off the internet (even worse, with sudo) you don’t get to complain about the consequences. The rest of the story is pure fluff.
Android enforces robust sandboxing on all programs, so this would not have happened.
This is the security tradeoff that comes with the standard desktop model of computing, and people should be upfront about it when promoting phones running desktop operating systems
Yeah but it was always just an add on, and it's hard to design games for an accessory that maybe 10% of players will have - it's just not worth the effort. If you know that 100% of your userbase will own something, then it can become the core of your experience and design.
In similar vein, Microsoft killed Kinect when they announced that it will no longer be bundled with the Xbox One - suddenly it went from a "must" in terms of integration, to an optional feature that was nearly always cut from any project, since you couldn't guarantee the player would even have it.
Those boards have better moderation, something you need regardless of AI, which is my point.
AI doesn't add more danger to the situation, you just need to moderate as usual. If you are using some computer program to add more content to your web site, you will just have more content to moderate. News aggregators do have this problem for example, as sometimes automated crawlers post sensitive content and that needs to be marked & deleted before being published.
Saying, "oh but our algorithm can cause depression, so we moderate the access to it" doesn't make sense, as any content can cause it and needs to be moderated.
That's why content moderation is one of the hardest problems of this age.
You use computers to do it? Computers develop biases. Humans? Same! It's very hard to scale and is a problem only remotely related to AI-generated content because AI generating content increases the input to your moderation system.
Objectively yes. Information on correctly peeling a pineapple is ok? Processing chicken to cook it? What about a dog? A rat? Fish? Insects? Is killing millions of bacteria with a single drop of chemical okay? Ways to commit suicide? What if this video is for prevention?
When it comes to moderation, we can't even set a consistent rule set to "deal with it all (c)". We just wing it, and hope it matches the expectations of our majority of our users... and the government(s)! Yeah governments have rules, but they tend to change towards the expectations, and a lot of rules for interpretation. It's a very hard task.
> For that matter, can knowledge exist without bias?
Umm... I don't know what that would mean. Isn't science there to reduce the amount of bias in knowledge? So, maybe, no? We can hope to reduce it, but we cannot get rid of it? At this point I don't really know what I'm talking about to be honest :)
My experience only having used old Reddit is that it’s stupidly slow all the time and it goes down at least once a week for me (I’m not looking at it all the time…)
I can’t think of a single website with that many backend problems.
It's 2021 and 80% of the load time is spent generating the page because of slow backend languages such as Python and then 20% of the load time is spent compiling and executing the frontend Javascript. I am sceptical that these improvements will even move the needle.
For the few static websites remaining, this is a great advancement. As long as you don't need to deal with user input, this can be achieved easily for things like blogs, news websites and ads.
Of course, these protocol improvements mostly benefit companies the size of Google. Smaller, independent hosts probably won't get much out of improving the underlying transport outside of a few edge cases.
This blog page loaded very quickly for me compared to most websites, though I don't know how much of that is in the network part and how much of it is because of optimized HTML/CSS/JS.
Python is unnecessarily slow, for sure. But I have rarely had to deal with endpoints slow because of Python, as opposed to slow because of unfortunate IO of some sort.
alternative: In 2021 we still use C et al. for our backend server, and we get hacked every single day. If I am going to leave a wide open door to my house, I at least want confidence that the house is not made out of cardboard
That’s disingenuous. There are languages like php or JavaScript that are much much faster than Python and that don’t require you to give up the keys to your house.
Also pypy is fast, and the speed of php also heavily depends on version. Not that backend speed even makes a difference that much of the time. 3ms vs 8ms won't matter.
He could also not have written libinput to begin with. libinput became the default because of political pressure from Red Hat and now we can’t complain if it’s worse than the project it is replacing?
There isn't any political pressure from Red Hat. They're often the only company that does any work on the input stack in userspace, without them it would probably not even exist or be stuck in a very old state. You can complain but it's unlikely to be of much use when the real issue is lack of manpower and there just aren't enough people to respond to all the complaints users have. A surefire way to solve that would be to start contributing, Red Hat won't stand in your way.
> libinput became the default because of political pressure from Red Hat
I don't know if this is true, but when comparing the KDE configuration screens for both, it sure seems like it must be true. libinput is missing much that synaptics has and doesn't seem to do anything better as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, just because a developer is working hard and pouring his heart and soul into something, doesn't mean the result is actually worthwhile.
It's not really true at all. The libinput developer blogged about why having more configuration options has historically not actually been good for the project, or for users of the synaptics driver:
Particularly, once you add a configuration option, you're now on the hook to support that option indefinitely as long as the project exists and users expect that option to be there. With more maintainers and testers, it may become feasible to have more configuration options, but it's still not a good idea to just keep piling them in. It might be satisfying to see a big configuration panel with a lot of settings but it's a lot less satisfying when you figure out a lot of the configuration options don't work correctly because the underlying system has bugs or is under-maintained or was just never tested with your specific configuration because input is hard and requires near constant testing against an extremely large number of hardware devices.
One-size-all doesn't fit me. synaptics gets the job done and libinput doesn't, it's really that simple as far as I'm concerned.
An example from elsewhere in this thread: "In libinput the edge scrolling is hard coded to 7mm" Somebody please tell this dude that the size of a human finger varies dramatically from person to person. Not everybody has his hands.
As for developer workload, the libinput developer could save himself a lot work by not starting his project in the first place. It doesn't seem to do anything better than synaptics so I don't see why it even exists.
>synaptics gets the job done and libinput doesn't, it's really that simple as far as I'm concerned.
From a maintenance perspective it is unfortunately not that simple. I sympathize with your frustration and personally I too wish it was that simple but it is not. The synaptics driver might be able to do some things better but those things can also cause bugs to manifest in other areas, and have historically done so.
>An example from elsewhere in this thread: "In libinput the edge scrolling is hard coded to 7mm" Somebody please tell this dude that the size of a human finger varies dramatically from person to person. Not everybody has his hands.
Well this is an open source project so you (or anyone else) can tell him if you really want. Have you checked if there is an open feature request on the tracker for this? Or better, can you propose a configuration API that would work well here, and can you help maintain it and test it on the hundreds of devices that it might potentially affect? I checked and I couldn't find any feature requests or proposals for this but maybe I missed something. If you don't want to do this then you may have to wait until somebody else makes the proposal and until the maintainer gets bandwidth to do that non-trivial amount of work, which is prioritized against all the other feature requests that might have been received.
>As for developer workload, the libinput developer could save himself a lot work by not starting his project in the first place. It doesn't seem to do anything better than synaptics so I don't see why it even exists.
But that's not the case at all. I'm sure you understand, there are a lot of other devices out there besides your particular touchpad and synaptics touchpads in general. You may want to read the rest of the libinput developer's blog about some of the motivations behind libinput, it solves very real problems that were directly caused by the synaptics driver. If you never encountered those bugs, that's great for you and you can continue to use it, but this was not how it was for a lot of other users. Remember we're still in this area where a critical project like this is only really being maintained by one developer, if they quit then you're left with no developers working on the input stack at all.
> "In libinput the edge scrolling is hard coded to 7mm and previous attempts at making it configurable were rejected."
I guess I should have quoted that full sentence. If somebody else does the work for him he'll still reject it. I've read the blog post you linked, he's most concerned about keeping the software simple, not making it actually work for real people. I think I have better things to do with my time than try to bring this guy around to my way of thinking. When I said "somebody should tell him" I was being facetious; that different people have different size fingers should have been obvious to him from the start, so he's clearly a lost cause.
> The synaptics driver might be able to do some things better but those things can also cause bugs to manifest in other areas, and have historically done so.
Well hypothetical or historical bugs don't concern me. Synaptics is working for me and always has. And I'm certainly not the only one.
> But that's not the case at all. I'm sure you understand, there are a lot of other devices out there besides your particular touchpad and synaptics touchpads in general.
It's a common misconception that the synaptics driver is only for synaptics touchpads. From the manpage:
> The name "synaptics" is historical and the driver still provides the synaptics protocol parsing code. Under Linux however, the hardware-specifics are handled by the kernel and this driver will work for any touchpad that has a working kernel driver.
Edit: I realize I probably sound unreasonably annoyed by software I don't even use, so let me explain: because of Red Hat, distros are now defaulting to libinput and I now have to work around this to continue using synaptics. It's caused me inconvenience despite me never wanting to use it in the first place. I earnestly wish it would just go away.
> he's most concerned about keeping the software simple, not making it actually work for real people.
You think your use case represents "real people"? Your problem is so niche it's not unreasonable for the developer to recommend you fork it and maintain your change as a fork for as long as you wish to use it. Real people don't fiddle with their touchpad settings to that extent. It's quite alright for you to prefer more complex solutions as well, but the vitriol towards libinput, a fantastic solution for 99.999% of users is undeserved.
This niche is not "real people" because "real people" don't use Linux. At the same time there are a lot of unreasonable requests, and the developer makes something free and shouldn't be bothered with such a low reward. Rudimentary functionality in Linux is quite good, maybe it will be a real issue in usage, but "real linux" users use keyboard. ;)
I just saw your edit and I'll respond to it separately. I don't understand what you mean by "because of Red Hat". Maybe Fedora and RHEL are shipping libinput but other distros don't have to do that, it's their decision to use it and not default to synaptics. You could probably find one that doesn't use libinput, or you could ask your distro not to use libinput by default, but you may have limited success with that because of the other issues with the synaptics driver that weren't really ever fixed. It's an unfortunate decision that distro developers have to make and it's solely their decision, not Red Hat's.
Although it's not really a coincidence if they make a lot of the same decisions that Red Hat does as they also have to field the same type of bug reports in these components and generally they will make similar decisions focused around minimizing bugs, sometimes at the expense of no longer getting to say that they support a giant feature matrix. I'm using debian for example and I don't think there are any other efforts or desire from downstream to focus on fixing the long standing issues in these old xf86 drivers for hardware that a lot of distro developers may not even have access to so they can test their changes. Wishing libinput to go away isn't really an effective problem solving strategy as that won't solve any of the issues with the old drivers that caused them to get removed as the default.
>If somebody else does the work for him he'll still reject it.
I would like to see this statement where he said he would reject it, I searched and couldn't find any statements to that effect. If it was rejected for some technical reasons then a way to proceed would be to address those reasons and then make a proposal from there.
>I think I have better things to do with my time than try to bring this guy around to my way of thinking. When I said "somebody should tell him" I was being facetious; that different people have different size fingers should have been obvious to him from the start, so he's clearly a lost cause.
I don't think you are operating in good faith here. It seems a bit ridiculous to suggest the person who maintained the very synaptics driver you're using doesn't know that finger sizes can vary. Again, if you want to change minds, the best way to do that would be to make a proposal that will actually work and offer to help shoulder the maintenance burden. That goes a lot farther towards convincing people toward your way of thinking than anything else, if you haven't done that I don't think you can honestly say you've made a complete effort. At least that is my view on how these things go when somebody says they're overwhelmed and they need help. This is pretty much exactly what happened with the recent touchpad changes, somebody else raised some money and offered to take up a lot of the work, and that's why we're commenting on this article :)
>Well hypothetical or historical bugs don't concern me. Synaptics is working for me and always has. And I'm certainly not the only one.
Sure, but for some others it hasn't worked, and for the maintainer the historical bugs always concern them. If you intend to work on this and contribute in a meaningful way, you can't ignore those. A good way to start contributing might actually be to go and look at some of those historical bugs so you don't cause a regression.
>It's a common misconception that the synaptics driver is only for synaptics touchpads.
I am aware of this, the scope of libinput is still much larger than the scope of that driver. That was what my point was.
> I would like to see this statement where he said he would reject it, I searched and couldn't find any statements to that effect.
It follows from his reasoning that allowing the user to configure the driver to their personal preference would make his job harder because it increases the number of possible configurations. And also from him rejecting such a proposal already.
Can you please share the email or issue where the proposal was made and where it was rejected? I still can't find it. I'd like to continue this conversation and discuss what can be done about it, but we can't discuss this much further without that because I don't really know what you're talking about. I will even look at the proposal and tell you what can be improved about it so maybe it can be made again in a better way. If the reason it was rejected is it because it made his job harder, a way to solve that would be to offer to contribute so you can make his job easier and take some of the maintenance load off him.
This is what I'd venture to say as well, having had my fair share of experience tinkering with attiny45, which I could run for years on very low power. It doesn't add up.
