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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Licensing the source as GPL doesn’t really force the copyright holder (which is 100% BitWarden due to their Contributors Agreement^*, no matter who contributed the code) to do anything - they are absolutely free to release binaries built on the same codebase as proprietary software without any mention of the GPL.

    For example if I write a hello world terminal program, release its source code under GPLv3 and then build it and give the built binary to you (and a permission to use it), you cannot force me to give you the source code for that build because I never gave you a GPL licensed binary.

    If you were to take my GPLv3 source code and distribute a build of it however, you would have to license your binaries under GPLv3, because that’s the terms of the license I provided the source code to you under. Your users would then have the right to request the source code of those binaries from you. And if you released the build under an incompatible license, I (but not the users) could sue you for violating my license.

    Their previous versions, still being under the GPL, would require them to release a change to make it usable on desktops.

    License violations are usually not resolved by making the violator comply retroactively, just going forward. And it’s the copyright holder (so BitWarden themselves) who needs to force the violator to comply.

    ^* this is the relevant part of the CA:

    By submitting a Contribution, you assign to Bitwarden all right, title, and interest in any copyright in the Contribution and you waive any rights, including any moral rights or database rights, that may affect our ownership of the copyright in the Contribution.

    It is followed by a workaround license for parts of the world where copyright cannot be given up.




  • The only app that doesn’t auto-update for me is Fdroid itself (ironically), because it targets an old Android version. Running Android 14 on a Pixel, so with the strongest Google fuckery.

    Are you sure your Fdroid client is up to date? The new API was implemented in 1.19, and apparently I even misremembered and all you have to do to enable Fdroid to auto update its apps is to manually update them for one last time (so no fresh installation required).

    Another long shot: there’s an option to force the old installation method hidden in expert settings - maybe you could check if that isn’t enabled?




  • What error? It gave you a string of tokens that seemed likely according to its training data. That’s all it does.

    If you ask it what color is the sky, it will tell you it’s blue not because it knows that’s true, but because these words “fit together”. Pretty much the only way to avoid this issue is to put some kind of filter in front of the LLM which will try to catch prompts that are known to produce unwanted results, and silently replace your prompt with something like “say: sorry, I don’t know”.

    I’m being very reductive here, but that’s the principle of how these things work - the LLMs are not capable of determining the truthfulness of their responses.


  • OK, cool. Just remember that the only entity who can sue in this situation is Microsoft (because when you contribute code to VS Code, you must sign a CLA that says you give Microsoft full perpetual rights to distribute your code under any license they wish - it is Microsoft who then “graciously” releases your code under a copy left license while also building their proprietary version of VS Code using it).

    And Microsoft cannot use the code if it gets released under a copyleft license - that wouldn’t allow them to build their proprietary build with it. So the only one who can do anything has less than zero (because it would improve only the FOSS forks, which are meant to be inferior) interest in making these guys publish the source code as proper FOSS.






  • In my very limited experience with my 5400rpm SMR WD disk, it’s perfectly capable of writing at over 100 MB/s until its cache runs out, then it pretty much dies until it has time to properly write the data, rinse and repeat.

    40 MB/s sustained is weird (but maybe it’s just a different firmware? I think my disk was able to actually sustain 60 MB/s for a few hours when I limited the write speed, 40 could be a conservative setting that doesn’t even slowly fill the cache)



  • Vista’s problem was just the terrible third party drivers and the fact that it was preinstalled on machines it had no business running on. 7 didn’t improve much on it (except fixing the UAC prompt so that it no longer made you feel like you’re using Linux with misconfigured sudo timeout), but it had the benefit of already having working drivers from Vista and proper hardware capable of running Vista/7.


  • Zig didn’t come to my mind when I was writing my comment and I agree that it’s probably a decent option (the only issue I can think of is its somewhat small community, but that’s not a technical issue with the language).

    My argument against Go and Java is garbage collection - even if Java’s infamous GC pause can apparently be worked around with a specialized JVM, I’m pretty sure it still comes at the cost of higher memory usage and wasted CPU cycles compared to some kind of reference counting or Rust’s ownership mechanism (not sure about the proper term for that). And higher memory usage is definitely not something I want to see in my browser, they’re hungry enough as is.