Notices by Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online)

Crochet? Cooking? Fountain pens? Learning FORTRAN? Writing short stories? Developing your own film pictures? Spotted a rare bird in your area? Beat that SNES game you never got to play as a kid?

I just want to hear something about humanity that isn't work or doomsday era news. Hit me.

Tell me about your current fun/hobby/side project or interest.

This LLM arms race is really burning through a lot of the built up good will with open source communities for the big tech companies. The constant relentless overly aggressive scraping, ignoring robots directives, lack of attribution, disrespecting licenses, drawing support requests away from community outlets, and just producing bad/wrong/misleading advice are all exhausting.

You want to bring back American ingenuity again? Make education and healthcare accessible to everyone. Make "right to repair" codified in the Constitution. Make Net Neutrality the law of the land. A person's chance of surviving and having a roof over their head shouldn't depend on "generational wealth". Once those things happen, American ingenuity will return in full force again. It's not Canada, Mexico, or Europe's fault we're here. It's our own fault. But we can still do better.

Since the 1960s, American manufacturing turned from making things that were expensive but could last a lifetime or longer to prioritizing cheaper and mass production. The "Made in America" marketing was a way to slowly burn some of the good will from the earlier days that valued quality and craftsmanship, but there's fewer and fewer younger people that see American-made as the apex beacon of quality standards, because things really aren't made as well as they used to be.

This isn't news to anyone who has owned old cast iron. Before the 1960's, American cast iron was amazing quality but it wasn't stamped with "Made in USA" until the 1960s when the quality of American goods went down and as the quality of import goods improved. Before then, you didn't have to market it as American to convince people to buy it because the quality and cost/value was compelling on its own merits.

OK, I'm gonna say the quiet part out loud. The biggest reason why American guitars cost more than Mexico, Korean, or Indonesian made guitars is that American companies intentionally sometimes use cheaper parts. I've played some amazing Chinese made guitars and some underwhelming American made ones. The premium on "American made" often comes down to marketing based on racism/nationalism, exploitation, and corporate greed. Tariffs aren't going to fix that.

@tobhe @Conan_Kudo Sounds like Lenovo has done a good job, then. Similarly, Lenovo has had good lvfs support where a number of x86 vendors still lack as well. I love my P14S's I use in my dayjob. Having that kind of out of box experience with ARM would be killer.

@tammeow @cas @jorge @sfalken @Conan_Kudo Neal is a longtime Fedora and OpenSUSE leader. As far as ARM, being on the Asahi governing board should say something:

https://asahilinux.org/governance/

@Conan_Kudo @tammeow @cas @jorge @sfalken My biggest accomplishment was managing to get the latest Pop_OS to run on the Pi500 in January. I'm not remotely near either of your levels when it comes to DT stuff. Spot showed me some uboot setup stuff for ARM over a decade ago and I was amazed how quickly stuff got into the weeds even for Beagle boards at the time.

Hot take: The Snapdragon X PC's would have sold far better if they were pitched as the PC Apple Silicon counterpart instead of the all in on AI marketing. Better battery life with top performance and touting compatibility should have been a clear slam dunk. For strictly AI, there's not much of a compelling reason to buy it over a Ryzen. Microsoft entirely and completely failed to read the room. Qualcomm OEM vendors should tout #Bazzite gaming compatibility instead.

#Microsoft #ARM #Copilot

Tyrants, totalitarianists, and dictators have been around for the entire history of humanity. What's more remarkable are the periods and places where that wasn't the case. Totalitarianism, violence, and war aren't and haven't always been inevitable, despite the pervasive myth to the contrary based on hopelessness, sometimes even mixed with good intentions. Every totalitarian dictatorship and empire based on violence eventually falls. That is a consistent historical truth.

@grammasaurus @inthehands @wdlindsy And now another one in Arizona!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/aircraft-collision-arizona-airport-leaves-least-1-person-dead-rcna192843

Today, I've added a public data dump of the US Social Security Administration (SSA) website. This data dump includes things like #disability #research, policies, forms, and guidance for same sex couples, etc.

https://git.lsit.ucsb.edu/publicdata/ssa-gov

#data #datarescue #ssa #socialsecurity

@grammasaurus @inthehands @wdlindsy There was also a plane crash in Santa Barbara on January 31st.

https://kmph.com/news/local/officer-and-civilians-rescue-pilot-from-fiery-plane-crash-in-santa-barbara

@sarahjamielewis There are a number of them. #Keycloak is probably going to be the easiest to get going. Apereo CAS and Shibboleth IdP are also possibilities, but those are generally going to be more complex and geared for larger deployments.

If a customer has a bad experience but you quickly make it right, you may or may not lose a customer, but if you don't and string someone along on top of it, you've just motivated them to tell everyone they know to avoid doing business with you.

@jbz Where is Gondor in our hour of need?

Now would be a great time to move to #Nextcloud if you care about the privacy of your own data.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

-Maya Angelou