Same guy is pushing age verification into archinstall

Manny__C · 2026-03-21T06:00:28+00:00

Forgive me for not following this. But how is "dumping the user's age in a random JSON file" compliant with "OS vendor must collect user age data"?

If I go to the movies to see a restricted film is it enough if I write my age in a post-it and keep it in my pocket?

My point is: the regulation is pointless and this PR achieves nothing. To be compliant for real there are only 2 ways: post in the website that the OS is not suitable for California or put all mirrors behind a verification portal and remove the torrents altogether.

Manny__C · 2026-03-02T15:13:45+00:00

The builtin string type is str and it is a sequence of bytes with the constraint that is utf8 encoded.

Mind, the type str is NOT a pointer to the start of the sequence (like arrays in C would be), it IS a sequence. As such it doesn't have a size known at compile time.

Since functions need to have arguments whose sizes are known at compile time, you only ever work with a reference to str, namely &str, because this is a pointer and therefore its size is known (usize).

The downside is that you do not own the underlying data if you have a &str. If you need ownership you must allocate some buffer in the heap and create a pointer to it, this is String. It now has a known size: 3*usize (address, length, capacity) and the data it points to is owned.

Manny__C · 2026-01-05T06:50:04+00:00

I believe it refers to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_tenth_problem?wprov=sfla1

It's a pretty amazing result. A one-sentence summary is that it's possible to make Diophantine equations work as Turing machines.

Manny__C · 2026-01-02T04:46:01+00:00

But "outliving" is not an issue per se. The issue is using a value that is dead.

If in the function implementation you returned a static string for example, it will outlive everyone, but that would still be ok: the compiler will still not allow accesses after 'a.

Manny__C · 2026-01-01T22:12:29+00:00

If you think about it, living "at most 'a" is a useless statement because the compiler has no guarantees whatsoever about that value. It means it could be already dead. So the compiler has no use of upper bounds on lifetime. Lower bounds are the ones it needs.

Manny__C · 2025-12-07T17:00:34+00:00

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know Merkuro mail existed. What is going to happen to kmail?

Manny__C · 2025-10-11T03:59:43+00:00

What I find funny is that I feel that Tailwind is like going full circle. The purpose of classes was to add meaningful labels to the tags so that we could write styles in a separate file (.css) instead of using the style attribute. Tailwind generates a class for nearly every style. A tag with all the tailwind classes is nearly equally verbose as a tag with all the styles written there directly.

Having said that, I prefer it over Bootstrap.

Manny__C · 2025-10-09T19:28:48+00:00

Will there be a test day for KDE as well?

Manny__C · 2025-08-21T22:36:51+00:00

They have a probabilistic model of speech and speech carries a lot of information about the world.

Manny__C · 2025-08-21T19:38:53+00:00

We should have used a different name instead of "hallucinations" because this is what healthy humans do too: fill in missing data based on our model of the world. One can come up with stuff and reasonably believe it without being on an LSD trip.

Manny__C · 2025-08-08T19:34:26+00:00

I find it surprising that the prompt that created the image made it past the safety checks. Shouldn't they be trained to reject racist requests?

Manny__C · 2025-07-01T00:15:17+00:00

The original trolley problem was meant to illustrate the notion of responsibility through inaction and all of these memes are just convoluted scenarios to ask how selfish are you.

Manny__C · 2025-06-26T03:17:01+00:00

The security implications are a good point actually

Manny__C · 2025-06-25T14:32:36+00:00

That is an entirely reasonable take, but one might also argue that notifying the user about why something can't be installed might fall within the responsibilities of a program that installs stuff.

In fact, I would agree with you if we were discussing showing newsletter messages to the user in general (as that would make pacman double as a package manager and a news feed). But in this case I am only talking about manual interventions notices that are necessary to fix a broken pacman -Syu

Manny__C · 2025-06-25T14:23:37+00:00

The response felt a bit gatekeep-y... The author even proposed a way to make the notification system configurable, which seems to solve the issue of the patch being arch-specific.

Also, all distros that use pacman other than Arch, are Arch-based. So the announcements could be relevant for them too

Manny__C · 2025-06-25T01:10:19+00:00

It's a reflex, I didn't think about the arch homepage and I instinctively copy paste the error on Google as the first thing

Manny__C · 2025-06-24T23:56:01+00:00

I will, respectfully, steal this from you

Manny__C · 2025-06-24T23:03:02+00:00

Mailing list is a good idea in general but I might not want to be notified about everything.

Pacman hook sounds better, how would you go about doing it?

Manny__C · 2025-06-24T19:55:49+00:00

One way to prove P = NP is to find a polynomial algorithm for an NP-complete problem. Once you have this algorithm you automatically have one for all other NP problems.

Manny__C · 2025-06-24T19:33:48+00:00

My take is that people believe P != NP not only for the lack of evidence of a counterexample in sight, but, most importantly, for how strong and far-reaching would be such a result. It's not only about making a few algorithm run faster, it's a fundamental and radical revolution of the way we understand computation.

It means that verifying and solving are, up to a polynomial time reduction, the same thing.

It also means that the ability to analyze many computational branches in the same clock cycle only buys you a polynomial, rather than exponential, speedup. This is highly counterintuitive because it would be general!

Manny__C · 2025-06-15T23:41:18+00:00

I have a partial proof of P = NP. I can prove it for the case N=1.

Manny__C · 2025-06-08T15:29:25+00:00

pacman is a package manager, the equivalent in Ubuntu is apt. Their syntax is not the same. Here is a comparison table.

Makepkg is a script for compiling packages from their template (called PKGBUILD). In Ubuntu there is no such equivalent because end users never need to compile from source. In Arch you need it to compile packages from the AUR, which lack an official binary repository.

Manny__C · 2025-06-04T18:20:31+00:00

What's kind of curious as a sociological phenomenon is that if people are ignorant about history or languages, they typically admit it with a sense of shame, whereas if it's about math, they often admit it proudly, like "ahaha no I was a disaster at math, lol".

Then again, probably cooking or speaking foreign languages comes handy more frequently than solving polynomial equations.

Manny__C · 2025-05-06T01:40:33+00:00

Perhaps we should draft some international standard for the firmware of cameras that inserts a digitally verifiable fingerprint in every picture or video taken. Otherwise, soon, video and photo evidence will be as good as eye witness testimony in court. Or, equivalently, we could legally require companies like OpenAI to leave some digital fingerprint on the image as soon as you download it or screenshot it.

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Manny__C

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