cecilkorik

Agreed, I don’t think people who haven’t experienced this can really understand it. I was accelerating into an intersection about to get hit by cross-traffic and when I saw what was inevitably going to happen my body just went rigid, and one of my feet was firmly on the accelerator. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) my car was a manual, and the other foot was firmly on the clutch, because I think I had just started or intended to change gears, so my car just drifted slowly into the intersection while roaring loudly at the rev limiter, and I only got clipped. But if my left foot had not been on the clutch, it probably would’ve been a much worse accident. There was no time for anything resembling a conscious thought. My entire body was instantly reacting, I suppose to brace itself for impact, it was very primal and instinctive. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.

They said it but they didn’t mean it. They probably didn’t even really understand it. One lesson I’ve learned from this is that I’m never again going to be able to listen to what anyone says with any degree of credibility. From now on, I will always be watching like a hawk to see if people’s actions are actually backing up what they say, because recent years have revealed to me how many dishonest and ignorant people there are and how banal that kind of evil really is. Actions do speak louder than words.

Although even actions can be dishonest, in a lot of cases, that’s simply too much work for people. They have no interest in any deliberate effort to hide their true nature. Lazy, low-effort evil is the most harmful kind because it’s the most widespread. It’s not the just the sneaky, devious Machiavellian snakes, they’re part of it too, but they are few and far between. They only have the power they have because of the ignorant masses who can’t be bothered to care and aren’t bothered by being part of something evil because they’re “just following orders” or “just having a little fun” or “just making ends meet” or “not being political” or whatever other excuses they make to justify it.

This is exactly how an AI would respond, complete with fancy-quotes, em-dashes, a three-bullet-point list, and empty justifications throughout. Any AI would probably be able to provide more technical detail if we wanted to get into that, but I think a real human would be able to respond with a recipe for peach cobbler, and you’re a real human, right? What is your favorite recipe like?

It’s a safety feature. You’re actually safer once the wheels fall off, because it can no longer go anywhere.

That’s fair, it’s certainly not for everyone (nor for every situation).

Depends on your system specs, but… yes, generally speaking. There is a reason most people and most distros use binaries. Even Gentoo can use binaries for some stuff.

Are you going to suffer significant damage if your updates take forever though? What’s the hurry? The number of times I have literally needed the absolute latest version of something installed right now are pretty damn minimal. The major exception is widespread, exploited zero-day remote-access vulnerabilities, but those are rare, and especially rare are ones that affect the exact versions and configurations of software that I am currently using and cannot reasonably just opt to “stop” using. Even so, there are usually other ways to block the network traffic, disable the offending part of the configuration, or otherwise mitigate the risk. Besides, there’s nothing stopping you from literally just downloading a patched binary if that’s what you need at that moment.

Patience is a virtue, and it’s generally good for you. You don’t have to be addicted to constant updates, but you do need to be thoughtful and understand how to build defense-in-depth.

I know this is probably sarcastic but honestly Gentoo’s great if you don’t trust binaries by default. Nothing is an absolute guarantee against compromise, but it’s an awful lot harder to compromise a source code repository or a compiler without anyone noticing (especially if you stick to stable versions) than it is to compromise a particular binary of some random software package. I trust most package maintainers, but they’re typically overworked volunteers and not all of them are going to have flawless security or be universally trustworthy.

I like building my own binaries from source code whenever possible.