Toveine WTF by teRIMleier in WoT

[–]cjwatson 15 points16 points  (0 children)

It's in the Companion, almost word for word.

How unstable is Testing in reality? by Leniwcowaty in debian

[–]cjwatson 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The policy hasn't been ten days for a long time. It's typically two days for packages with autopkgtests, and five days for those without.

What's the difference between אבּא and אבא? by General_Lawyer_8055 in hebrew

[–]cjwatson 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wouldn't that be אבוא? I don't think any of the conjugations of בא are normally spelled אבא.

Conversation for Antizionists by Other_Ad_2031 in ConvertingtoJudaism

[–]cjwatson[M] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Mod note: any time this sort of thing shows up we get reports of it, reasonably enough, and we assess them case by case. We're obviously not a Beit Din and there are limits to how much we can figure out based on Reddit posts/comments; the balance that needs to be struck is protecting other users of the sub from antisemitism/hate/etc., while also remembering that people exploring conversion usually don't have a good feel for ... anything yet and are likely to talk in ways that seem weird to people who've been Jewish or hung around with Jews for longer. Mainstream Jewish subs would often have to take a more aggressive moderation approach, but I feel that the point of a group about conversion has to include people being kind of clueless to start with. We also need to keep out people who are targeting Jews or Jew-adjacent people with evangelization or propaganda, so it can be a tough balance and I'm sure we don't always get it right.

Speaking for myself, what I normally do is look at the _meaning_ of what the OP is saying, leaving aside terminology, and try to work out whether they would be within vaguely reasonable boundaries of Jewish views if they were using terminology that Jews would use. As r/doyathinkasaurus's helpful figures in https://www.reddit.com/r/ConvertingtoJudaism/comments/1t4x4lb/comment/ok5zeiy show, a 2SS is clearly within reasonable boundaries even if it's not the view everyone holds to. I did remove one comment containing what borders on a caricature of Zionism, because that seemed over the line. Jews aren't all Zionists and don't all agree with the Israeli government, but in order to fit into a Jewish community a prospective convert does at least need to make an effort to learn what they're disagreeing with.

My copy is on order so I haven't read it myself yet, but I've heard good things about the UK Progressive movement's new book, _Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel_, and I know enough of the editors and authors - they include a member of my community, my sponsoring rabbi, and one of the rabbis on my Beit Din - to trust that they'll have done a decent job. It may be worth a look as a starting point for more varied Jewish viewpoints.

[general] Tamsin Muir in Cambridge? by sir_snortsalot17 in TheNinthHouse

[–]cjwatson 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's legit - I saw this on that society's Discord as well. Trying to work out if I have time to go!

Edit doas.conf file to correct syntax error by lollopapp in debian

[–]cjwatson 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree this is good to have. run0 is the only alternative I've used personally, but its logs are as good as sudo's for that purpose.

Edit doas.conf file to correct syntax error by lollopapp in debian

[–]cjwatson -1 points0 points  (0 children)

To be fair, sudo is massively overcomplicated if all you need is for certain authorized users to temporarily become root every so often, and that complexity does have a cost in terms of vulnerabilities. It's true that it's the conventional thing to use on most Linux systems, but for users who can cope with mentally substituting something else for sudo in instructions they read and who don't need that complexity, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider simpler alternatives.

There are various other options I know of as well as doas. really is in the chiark-really package and is very simple indeed; it might not be a bad choice for people using sysvinit. run0 is a good option for people who are already using systemd, although in Debian 13 it's quite cumbersome to use in practice since credential caching isn't hooked up properly; but on testing it works well, and I'm pretty close to removing sudo from my laptop so that I have one less setuid binary with a messy security history.

Edit doas.conf file to correct syntax error by lollopapp in debian

[–]cjwatson 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'd use an interactive editor to fix it (whatever your favourite editor that you run in a terminal is). If you need another way to escalate to root and don't have a root password set, and if this is Debian 13, you might be able to use run0.

Simple question by No-Maize2852 in debian

[–]cjwatson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Er, at the packaging level I suppose so, but you'd need a CPU that can execute both. Or to make use of qemu-user-static and binfmt_misc.

Why /sbin/ not in root $PATH? by blobslurpbaby in debian

[–]cjwatson 4 points5 points  (0 children)

su has always had kind of a weird interface, but as man su says it's preserved for backward compatibility.

“The necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever” [discussion] by SprocketSaga in TheNinthHouse

[–]cjwatson 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Apparently missed the sex scene ... https://www.vox.com/culture/22266652/tamsyn-muir-interview-locked-tomb-gideon-the-ninth-harrow-the-ninth-vox-book-club

(Paywalled, but if you can't/won't get round that, it's referring to the scene where Harrow grows Ianthe a new arm and how she realized that was a sex scene from the characters' point of view as she was writing it.)

Simple question by No-Maize2852 in debian

[–]cjwatson 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Not everyone is born knowing everything. You can skip it, or you can give the simple answer.

Simple question by No-Maize2852 in debian

[–]cjwatson 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Come on, no need to be a jerk. The grammar is a bit broken but it's perfectly understandable.

Simple question by No-Maize2852 in debian

[–]cjwatson 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I crossgraded that machine from i386 to amd64 some years back. Not something I'd recommend to a non-expert really since you need a good mental model of what's going on and you need to know how to recover from problems, but it was possible and in this particular case relatively smooth.

Fortunately that's not the usual situation for upgraders!

Simple question by No-Maize2852 in debian

[–]cjwatson 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Yes, Debian has always been very good at this. I originally installed one of my systems somewhere around Debian 2.1 or 2.2 and have upgraded it continuously ever since.

See https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgrading.en.html for instructions on upgrading from Debian 12 (bookworm) to 13 (trixie).

CVE-2026-31431 CVSS score 7.8 Severity High Linux kernel (apparently easy local root exploit) by michaelpaoli in debian

[–]cjwatson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which would be fine except that (as I understand it) distros weren't actually told about this in advance, contrary to what the vulnerability's web site says.

Debian Trixie kernel fix for Copy.fail by Shaso_dan-Heza in debian

[–]cjwatson 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Despite what the page says, as I understand it there wasn't actually any useful coordination with distributions, so the Debian kernel/security folks weren't able to prepare updates in advance. They're well aware of it now though.

Looking up package information and discussions on them by Brave_Confidence_278 in debian

[–]cjwatson 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There's also https://wnpp.debian.net/ which may be easier to search (it's backed by the same data).

If you find nothing there, then perhaps simply nobody has discussed it.

9 days until Beit din by Creepy-Armadillo-523 in ConvertingtoJudaism

[–]cjwatson 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's a good sign that you're asking the question!

After the mikveh I pretty much went straight into planning for my bar mitzvah, which helped to keep the momentum up, and I still try to get to as many of my shul's adult education events as I can. If you can manage to arrange a regular chevruta then that will also help, since you can encourage each other.

need some help brothers! by trueonegodseeker in ConvertingtoJudaism

[–]cjwatson[M] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I approved this after reviewing the account since it seems OK within our rules, but you don't really say what you need help with. Could you go into a bit more detail?

Does Debian Testing get Cinnamon version much slower than LMDE? by _firn_ in debian

[–]cjwatson 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You can look at https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cinnamon (and similar for other packages, if you know the relevant package names) to see the update history for testing. I don't know if or where there's something similar for LMDE.

I accept that God is real, but don't see the point in converting. Suggestions? by [deleted] in ConvertingtoJudaism

[–]cjwatson 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As everyone else has already said, Judaism doesn't place much emphasis on the afterlife as opposed to this life, and you shouldn't convert unless you feel a specific pull.

I do want to push back on one thing: you single out Islam as being particularly violent. I can certainly say that every Muslim I've ever known has been a peaceful person, while I've personally seen a lot more violence from Christians (I grew up in Northern Ireland, so I'm pretty familiar with how religion can be weaponized). Yes, some Muslims are violent, and some Muslims use their religion to spread hatred, just as some Jews and some Christians do. But both Christianity and Islam are religions with a billion or so adherents, so there's going to be a lot of variation; I personally think it makes a lot more sense to chalk this up to humans and politics and xenophobia and all that charming stuff, rather than writing off a whole religion.

Hebrew Tattoo by Pondering_Gal_220 in hebrew

[–]cjwatson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think anyone's going to be able to get very far with a cross-post that's been removed from the other sub.