Related: Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks saw this coming: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-go-within-10-feet-of-todays-walking-robots/

I think this is a well-written and important article.

One more aspect: The article lines out that todays control algirithms for robots are not inherently stable and can’t guarantee safety.

I have seen some code that runs in some if such humanoid robots and would like to add the following warning: the control code for robots is typically written by researchers, not safety experts. While there might be some brilliant programmers among them, such code will be, in most of the cases, a hot mess which cannot guarantee any safety. It will certainly not meet requirements which are commonly mandated for things like complex medical devices, automobiles, or other dangerous work equipment - but due to the much larger complexity and dangerous mechanical forces in such robots, the requirements should be higher than in automobiles.

Well, what the world really needs are laptops with built-in HVAC support!

Would you go near an uncontrollable maniac swinging a ten-pound sledgehammer, or stand two meters below a larger-than life bronce sculpture of Neptun with a harpoon, weighting 150 kilograms, which is not fixed, unstable and could at any moment fall upon you?

No? Then you should not go near such a robot.

I use Zim Wiki + git. Or gollum wiki, which also uses git. Works both very well and can not only be synced but automatically merged.

I do not really see that.

The article is short, and myself I like to write longer, more detailed texts. But few people nowadays have the patience to read ten, five, or three pages of text.

Also, I am becoming wary about the trolling / disinformation tactic to qualify something as AI that you do not like. If a piece of text is wrong, it will have logic failures that you can address and point to.

And said that, burn-out is a real problem, I can confirm that. Not only in FOSS software but in other fields of software development, too - but the article also cites real factors which make it worse for open source development. And it is not only a threath for the mental health of individuals, but also for the community.

And the aspect of entitlement of some users is true, too.

I swear by mulinux with Emacs as textual WM.

I know gimp, git, borg, and mutt, but not the others :)

That’s good point.

Another thing that is dangerous are CLAs or “contributor license agreements”, like Google uses. Technically, it is GPL, but Google might demand to hold all the copyright, so as the copyright holder it can change the license at a whim.

It works well for me.

Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME’s PaperWM extension just to give it a try.

You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME’s fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.

But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.

But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.

Oh, it’s not that bad. I use UK international with AltGr to type English, program code, and German. I don’t use the Compose key so often. Just for some extra symbols like Greek alpha or ° C.

I use “PrintScreen” for that …

Yeah, but is it useful to rob the Mona Lisa?

I use it as the prefix key for my tiling window manager (stumpwm), and have mapped it to the “Super” X11 modifier for Emacs.

(Also, I have mapped CapsLock to the Hyper modifier, which I mostly use for user-defined commands. Not as powerful as the original space cadet keyboard, but not bad!).

BTW, one thing that is great about StumpWM is that you can define commands to script actions on GUI applications. For Example, if you are in a Firefox window, you can script Ctrl-t-B (or perhaps Hyper-B) to go to the adress bar, copy the URL, then call xsel to append the content of the buffer to a file which is called ~/bookmarks.txt, and finally open your preferred editor to add a comment.

Just an example: Of course you can use a private email service. You don’t need to give a copy of all your communications to Google Mail or outlook. Or medical data.

But what helps that, if 97% of the people you communicate with (including your doctor) use outlook or gmail, and all messages you write them are kindly stored there “for them”?

For the moment, that would not be enforceable in respect to people with technical knowledge. Enforcing it would require authoritarian control and even China’s Great Firewall has way to circumvent it.

On the other hand, this is already far more difficult than you might think. You could not install such an app from a server authenticated with TLS because the TLS keys might be subverted - the certification chain has national institutions as the top certificate authorities. You would also not be able to install such an app on an Android phone because Google has decided it needs developer attestation to install apps in a way accesible to end users. You can run Linux now but if all that is taken seriously, your options to run Linux might become limited. E.g. you already can’t run many banking apps on phones with user-controlled OS software. Railway apps like the German one already don’t work. In future, you might not even be able to use a municipial library’s or bookstore’s website this way.

But more to the point, the real application case for this kind of civil rights is not some nerd kids which want to play DnD or minecraft on their own server or test their self-written IRC service. The real application case is what we see in the US, people being dragged out of their house and disappearing just because of their ancestry, how they look, being poor or the area they live in. They don’t have time to compile software or configure port-knocking protocols.

Somebody has called these systems of “democratic” mass surveillance uncovered by Snowden “Turnkey Dictatorship” . I for sure wish they would have been wrong.

Why is this specifically relevant to Linux users?

Well,

• controlling end-to-end encrypted messages is only possible if either the keys/certificates are not secret (which is possible with TLS), or the software on the end-users device is not controlled any more by the user (but perhaps by law enforcement, or companies). This overturns the basis of any FLOSS software system where trust is based on transparency and user control.
• age verification will typically done by a form of attestation, a highly problematic concept. Again, this would require to run software on the users device which can’t be controlled by him or her, which is deceptively called “trusted computing”. (Technically, age verification could be done by other means, but this is not what these proposals aim for).
• in the world of public-key cryptography, which is what TLS , GnuPG, and most other modern systems are based in, encryption and digital signatures are nothing but two sides of the same coin: Who breaks encryption keys necessarily also breaks signature keys. This means it is not possible any more to sign software such as the Linux kernel, or Email clients, or browser packages. Or even banking apps or bootloaders for smart phones. Which means to give control away to the entities, groups or induviduals controlling these keys. Ironically, this will make computing lot less safe, and also undermine trust in communication networks, because communication where we can’t be sure that the communicated symbols are genuine is for humans as worthless as the numbers on fake money. (As a corollary, it is also bad for business: All business is based on some amount of trust. Would you do important business with somebody if the only communication channel you have happens to be a messanger which is a compulsory liar?)

To sum up, this is a massive transfer of control.

And that’s why things like PaperWM or niri might be a good compromise on the spectrum between “powerful but complex” and “simple but limited”.

And how much complexity is good for one depends also on the area of application. I use Rust for programming which is complex for sure, but when I have to scan a document, I use “simple-scan” which does exactly one thing, and very well.

They key is repetition, and this means it can be easier to go “all in” and learn, say, only six or eight keyboard chords from stumpwm than to use Xfce with mouse and i3 and more stuff, because the latter is ultimately more complex and requires more things that need to be memorized.

There is a learning program called Anki which is great for repeating learned stuff, it was made for language learning but I’ve used it also for a job where I had to learn like one hundred three-letter acronyms. It can be very helpful but it won’t help if one does not use the learned stuff.

I also think that Arch works much better than its reputation. It is true that sometimes, manual changes to packages or configuration are needed. But this is sometimes also the case if you upgrade a Debian installation, or pull a new version of GNOME (I had GNOME break completely when upgrading from buster to bookworm).

What is probably more important is whether the user can live with many small but more frequent changes, or bigger changes and reinstallations every two or three years. I think that a pure and plain desktop installation might need almost no maintenance.

Also, running a system for years without re-installing requires a good amount of hygiene and discipline when configuring and adding packages from source and such. But this does not matter that much for a standard user.

Isn’t constantly asking for “the best” distro, and constantly asking or stirring contentious topics a kind of spamming or trolling? Especially since anything relevant to that has probably been said and written about at least fifty times? And especially since most of these posts do not make any effort to describe what is so special about their request that the answer can’t be looked up by using the f******** search function?