דלג לתוכן הראשי

2023-05-01

Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

  • Whistleblowers are important to society because they hold the rich and powerful accountable for their actions, yet they often suffer greatly for their efforts.
  • It is essential for legislatures to provide protections for whistleblowers to encourage more people to come forward and speak out against wrongdoing.
  • The author, Ashley Gjøvik, is a lawyer, activist, author, and former whistleblower who specializes in human rights and the common good.

Industry Reactions

  • Power structures are less likely to tolerate whistleblowers who go against them, leading to chastisement and a lack of support from within the organization.
  • The debate on whistleblowing includes ethics, the role of intelligence agencies, and the legality and morality of programs like PRISM.

Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices

  • Microsoft quietly supported the Fair Repair Act in Washington state, breaking from typical tech company opposition to right-to-repair bills that seek to make device repair more accessible.
  • Repair advocates say Microsoft's support for the bill is bringing other major tech manufacturers to the negotiating table for the first time.
  • The Fair Repair Act stalled in the Washington state Senate due to opposition from lawmakers, but Microsoft's engagement on repairing devices marks a change in the industry's stance on right-to-repair.

Industry Reactions

  • Microsoft has pledged to make it easier to repair its hardware, with the Surface Laptop 4 featuring replaceable SSDs, which is part of a broader trend of tech companies, including Apple and Google, making similar commitments in response to the right-to-repair movement.
  • Windows 11 has faced criticism for its heavy presence of advertisements and less user-friendly UI than Windows 10, its hardware requirements, and the amount of pre-installed crapware, but there are some backend improvements such as support for variable refresh rates and Intel Thread Director.

Rate The Landlord: Anonymously share information with tenants like you

  • This website is best experienced by visiting the website directly.
  • Please visit the website to read the article.

Industry Reactions

  • Commenters discuss the exploitative nature of landlord-tenant relationships and propose alternatives like cooperative housing.
  • The importance of understanding legal rights and adhering to regulations is emphasized.

Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs

  • Using the word "simple" in technical documentation can be condescending and off-putting to readers who are struggling.
  • When someone is reading technical documentation, it usually means they are trying to learn a new concept, so making them feel worse by implying it should be easy is unhelpful.
  • It's important to share excitement and enthusiasm for the code in documentation, but it's possible to do so without using language that could be interpreted as condescending.

Industry Reactions

  • Clear and concise documentation is important, but a friendly tone can also be effective
  • The use of hyperbolic terms like "simple" and "easy" can inhibit clarity and be misleading

Engineers develop water filtration that removes "forever chemicals"

  • Engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed an effective water treatment that removes PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals", from drinking water, using a unique adsorbing material that can capture and destroy all PFAS particles present in the water supply.
  • The technology created by Dr. Madjid Mohseni and his team captures up to 99% of PFAS particles and can be regenerated and potentially reused, eliminating the environmental challenge of toxic waste.
  • The new water filtration technology is particularly beneficial for people in smaller communities who lack resources to implement expensive solutions that could eliminate PFAS, and would be especially useful in decentralized and in-home water treatments.

Industry Reactions

  • Forever chemicals are highly resistant to breakdown, can accumulate in the environment, and have been linked to health problems in humans and animals
  • The new system uses plasma technology to treat large flows of water in real-time and can be useful for treating drinking water, wastewater, and agricultural run-off.

Minetest: An open source voxel game engine

  • Minetest is an open-source voxel game engine that allows users to play pre-made games, mod existing ones, create their own games, or join multiplayer servers.
  • The game engine is available on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android.
  • The latest version of Minetest, 5.7.0, was released on April 8th, 2023.

Industry Reactions

  • Discussion around Microsoft's management of Minecraft and user complaints about splitting the community and enforcing chat moderation has arisen.
  • Minetest is similar to Minecraft but allows for more customization options due to its open-source nature; however, it may not be preferred over Minecraft by some players.

Pure Sh Bible

  • "Pure sh Bible" is a collection of POSIX sh alternatives to external processes, aiming to remove unneeded dependencies from scripts and make them faster.
  • The book covers topics on strings, files, file paths, loops, variables, conditional expressions, arithmetic operators, and provides examples of alternatives to common Unix commands.
  • The book promotes the use of raw escape sequences over tput for text formatting and colors.

Industry Reactions

  • Some users recommend using Python or Perl for more complex scripts while others defend shell scripting as a viable option
  • Importance of avoiding potentially dangerous practices such as using eval or relying on shell-specific escape sequences is mentioned.

40 Years of Koyaanisqatsi

  • 'Koyaanisqatsi,' the experimental film from the 1980s, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
  • Directed by Godfrey Reggio, the film comprises only visuals and music, without any dialogue or plot, and explores the relationship between nature, technology, and humanity.
  • The film's title comes from the Hopi language, meaning "life out of balance," and the movie has become a cult classic and a staple of avant-garde cinema.

Industry Reactions

  • The film has inspired and resonated with many people, both at the time of its release in the 1980s and since then.
  • The film has been compared to music videos and has influenced them, as well as other films in the same category.

FAA overruled engineers, let Boeing Max keep flying

  • FAA overruled recommendations from individual engineers to ground the Boeing 737 Max plane after the second deadly crash in 2019.
  • The FAA officials preferred to wait for more detailed data and information before deciding to ground the planes.
  • An investigation by the inspector general's office of the Transportation Department recommends that FAA documents how key and urgent safety decisions are made to prevent similar accidents in the future.

Industry Reactions

  • There is a debate about the qualifications and conflicts of interest of regulatory officials in the aviation industry
  • The conversation highlights the need for accountability and independent oversight in the aviation industry

My favorite C compiler flags during development

  • This article covers important C compiler flags for developers in GCC, Clang, and MSVC, focusing on warnings, static and dynamic run-time checks, and debug information.
  • Enabling flags such as -Wall -Wextra and -Wdouble-promotion can help detect bugs statically.
  • Using sanitizers like Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer can help detect dynamic run-time errors and data races, while properly configuring debug information with -g3 is crucial for effective debugging.

Industry Reactions

  • Some flags aim to improve performance, re-export symbols, and unbreak the C compiler
  • Developers recommend using sanitizers early and often in the development process to find memory bugs in C and C++ programs, with specific flags and settings highlighted