You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.
And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.
Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".
And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.
And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.
The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.
I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.
(That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
I still refer to 1:37 pm (13:37) as "l33t o'clock" and 7:11 pm (19:11) as "Razor o'clock". They seem to come up remarkably often when I glance at the time, like 11:11 for normies, but I think all of these are some sort of pareidolic/selection-bias effect wherein your brain is just more likely to remember/notice times that it considers significant.
Don’t you remember the giant phishing campaigns like back when lots of celebrities got their nudes in iCloud stolen and published? These things happen all the time, and are incredibly painful. Much, much more so than being unable to share your account with a coworker.
I don't get the sense that regular people get data "stolen".
Ransom is the only thing I see happening to end user data.
Credential thefts facilitate theft of money. It might might help the attacker to rifle thru somebody's data to find information that helps answer "secret" questions, to trick friend and family into getting phished, and maybe blackmail, but I don't see a market for end user data that would drive data theft. Nobody is buying end user photos, videos, email, etc. (Anybody who would possibly buy it just tricks/entices users into giving it to them for free to train their AI models anyway.)
LLMs ironically are changing this[0], but at least until now, rifling through random people's data did not scale, so aside for a subset of cases where it was possible to automate access to some services or otherwise leverage them into a scam on the cheap, it wasn't of interest because there was literally nothing useful to do with it.
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[0] - LLMs, whether multimodal or combined with modern AI-driven STT / TTS pipeline, enable running highly personalized scams cheaply and in an automated fashion, which does scale up and suddenly makes this data important. But that's a very new consideration, one which passkeys were not designed for, because it literally was not possible or conceivable even few years ago.
At the scale you'd expect that to happen, looking at credential dumps, you'd also expect to hear a lot about it.
And yet, you don't. Which leads me to the conclusion that the data dump are overblown.
I think companies around the world come to the same obvious conclusion, which is why these data breaches keep happening, and the companies whose systems were breached are never any worse for the wear.
But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
And if I don't want a building block like logind or journald, can I not use them? Can I take those blocks elsewhere, like over to FreeBSD and use them there?
SystemD is not "building blocks" — which implies modularity — it is a monolith: components cannot be added or taken away or replaced. The best you can do is maybe run disable --now. (I'm at least thankful I can usually do an apt purge resolved.)
Secondly, Canonical required copyright assignment for any contribution to Upstart, and Lennart/Kay decided that if they basically have to substantially rewrite it to fix the broken architecture, they better do it in a new project with no copyright assignment barriers.
See the comments in this thread by Upstart author and former Canonical employee Scott James Remnant:
Had the CLA not been in place, the result of the LF Collab discussions would have almost certainly been contributions of patches from +Kay Sievers and Lennart (after all, we'd all worked together on things like udev, and got along) that would have fixed all those design issues, etc.
But the CLA prevented them from doing that (I won't sign the CLA myself, which is one reason I don't contribute since leaving Canonical - so I hold no grudges here), so history happened differently. After our April 2010 meeting, Lennart went away and wrote systemd, which was released in July 2010 if memory serves.
The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions.
An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.
This. I can see the utility of systemd and probably would have liked to have it when my team was riding herd on a DC full of Sun E15Ks and HP Superdomes. But for basically everything else that I use Linux for, every time someone says "systemd does this", at least 50% of the time I don't need that, and most of the rest I could do with with other tools with vastly less complexity.
Not "this". By that logic most people do not need backups too. Rebuilding working service state after config change is non-trivial, requires using admin-only kernel interfaces, and said kernel does not care about these types of problems. Meaning average user ends up simply rebooting rather than trying to figure why enabling wifi makes printer stop working (and such). We cannot have network stuff controlled by multiple programs, because linux kernel is broken like that. This thing is the userspace part of the monolith.
Those jenga towers were terrible, many didn't work very well. Very few had good monitoring, ops, reliability, least-privleges.
It's unbelievable to me to hear people advocating for not having good broadly usable systems, to advocate that sysadmins really should spent their time and energy building bespoke custom cut weird poorly invested in little things to suit their own fancies. It's not helping the company to do this. And to me it's such a weird antisocial vibe, that is radically vocal, that shows up all the time to proclaim everyone everyone else is doing the wrong thing by working together and making tools that fit together, have cohesion. Theres never any suggestions for how or what that looks like either, just the image of not working with others is the only thing presented to sell itself. This is din. This is havoc. This is hell. Don't do it people. And alas, we have to endure this attitude every single time. The forces against cooperation are doggedly persistent and vocal. The forces for just build your own thing, this unreasonableness, is radically overrepresented.
This is why I was so hopeful this submission was going to be a nice new post kind of re-selling where we are today with systemd. Because the pro-social forces are weirdly not bothering to get the social / cultural victory. And those driving us apart telling us to each do our own thing, figure it all out yourself: they are endemic, dime a dozen on social media.
Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.
> The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management
What use cases of "proper server management" does fucking with my resolv.conf(5) solve?
If I have a laptop I can perhaps see updating values per DHCP or IPv6 RAs, but once I set up a server up why the hell is it a link to /run? (I once had to use chattr +i because of brain dead "cleverness".)
In over thirty years of running Unix-y systems I never needed my resolv.conf "managed", so I have no idea why Ubuntu (for one) defaults to fiddling with it.
> What use cases of "proper server management" does fucking with my resolv.conf(5) solve?
For one, it avoids telling all processes and their mothers the IP of the DNS resolvers they should query, but hands them 127.53 instead. If you then update your resolvers using systemd-resolved, for example because the network changes to a failover line, or because puppet pushes an updated catalog, or you want split DNS for a VPN (like, send *.corp.local to the internal DNS server or something), that is all pretty easy. There are more use cases on servers, but of course you most obviously benefit from this on laptops that roam between WIFIs with different upstream DNS server config.
> For one, it avoids telling all processes and their mothers the IP of the DNS resolvers they should query, but hands them 127.53 instead.
What "all process" are you referring to? What kind of software on Unix-y systems is not using gethostbyname(3) (or similiar)?
(And the context of this sub-thread is "server management", which I'm not sure how often has VPN running on it and doing things like split (horizon) DNS.)
Just one thing: why that resolver work *need to be" in systemd package ? Why we can't have few implementations, as it always have been, that do different jobs, with overlapping funcionalities ? Why we ever need some gigantic codebase guarded by corporations that we can't easily replace ? Codebase that is uncooperative with other implemantations. And developers.
And moust importantly: why they make everything more stupid and windows-like trash ?
And I assure you: what you described as "easy" is not true. I is just few basic usecases they baked in. And when you neeed something a bit more specific in some direction you are not allowed to have that.
Actually I didn't say anything about overcomplexity and I wasn't thinking about systemd as an init system at all. That wild misinterpretation, which you knew to (partially) hedge with that "usually", is more or less the proof in the pudding frankly.
You are mixing a lot of things here. For one, taking a picture of a crime happening as capturing evidence overrules the right to one’s own image, as does the freedom of the press when capturing images of events of public interest.
However what is not okay, and I find that pretty reasonable, is taking a picture of someone else unaware of having their picture taken. I don’t want somebody taking a picture of me going about my life, no matter if I look goofy or wear an extremely cool outfit. You don’t get to take a picture of me, and I won’t take one of you either.
That does absolutely not imply that you couldn’t capture scenes of importance for whatever reason, and that happens literally all the time.
Germany sits on the 14th position of the press freedom index - the narrative you’re trying to construct about some kind of repression on documenting events in the public sphere is just not true.
>However what is not okay, and I find that pretty reasonable, is taking a picture of someone else unaware of having their picture taken.
That is covered by the law. Background subject? Okay. Foreground subject, picture taken covertly? Not okay. This is well understood.
>.. the narrative you’re trying to construct about some kind of repression on documenting events in the public sphere is just not true.
It’s only a matter of a generation or two, feeling entitled to privacy in a public space, until it is widespread ‘common knowledge’ that nobody can take pictures of anybody. That’s how these things work.
During a regular trip I observed some thugs harassing a woman and her dog in a public park in Berlin. I took their picture, they came to threaten me with violence and insist I delete it - I stalled long enough for the lady to make the call and I waited until the cops arrived.
The cops were grateful that there was a very definite picture of one of the thugs kicking her dog. They made the decision on the spot that I was not to be fined, and the lady thanked me. I sent her and the cops the picture, and I deleted it from my roll.
It’s a breath of fresh air IMHO to be at places far away from any desire for posterity. Just remember yourself what you’ve seen instead of outsourcing that job to your phone for a while.
And while I have the utmost of empathy for your condition, that is unfortunately not a compelling reason to generally allow to violate the privacy of everyone else.
Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.
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