I just wonder how widespread fraud is without any form of ID.
A fake utility bill is just a few clicks away on my PC.
Govt surveillance? I'm much more worried by the ever increasing number of cameras in the streets rather than something similar to having a passport to prove who you really are.
I have used my company LLM thingy. Able to summarize and document code leveraging remarks and general code behavior just because LLM just ingested the full python docs.
About generating things well... it just copypastes the same snippets you could find on stackoverflow, including bugs - if the task you throw at it has already been answered.
For complete and complex code... well it spews out the same useless advice you could get from a drunk non expert person while sitting at the bar.
Issue is... LLMs are too big to fail, everyone just poured billions in this huge statistics bean counter, and... someone has to justify those expenses at board meetings.
Nice, if only you could count on having it installed on your fleet, and your fleet is 100pct Linux, no AIX, no HPUX, no SOLARIS, no SUSE on IBM Power....
Been there, tried to, got a huge slap in the face.
Been there, done that. I am so glad I don’t have to deal with all that insanity anymore. In the build farm I was responsible for, I was always happy to work on the Linux and BSD boxes. AIX and HPUX made me want to throw things. At least the Itanium junk acted like a normal server, just a painfully slow one.
I will never voluntarily run a bunch of non-Linux/BSD servers again.
At the time (10 years ago) I worked for a company with enormous customers who had all kinds of different deployment targets. I bet that list is a lot shorter today.
Especially to package writers that assume bash is available everywhere, hope that bin/sh is the same as bin/ksh...sed -i... not on unices, grep missing a ton of options....
A proud cygwin user myself, with cygwin in the PATH since the 2000s, I recently sideloaded Ubuntu under wsl.
Right now, wsl is my primary terminal app, I've mounted C:\ as /c, added a symlink to bypass the ugly Onedrive default name, and... I'm happy.
Slowly, I removed 90% of the mixed BAT scripts, converted to bash the rest, and I now enjoy it.
As the old timer that I am, I limp around powershell, so no luck with that.
Cygwin on the other hand seems to be slowly dying, as more and more packages are now unsupported/unmaintained, with Redhat apparently willing to smother it at the first viable moment.
There's a long history of Unix-like environments on Windows dating to the 1980s: MKS Toolkit (Mortice Kern Systems, later incorporated into Windows Services for Unix, precursor of WSL), UWIN from David Korn, Cygwin, and others.
I'd experimented with several of these before I realised that what I wanted wasn't Windows running Unix-like utilities, but a real honest-to-goddess Unix system, which was spelled "Linux".
I'm using the nixos wsl image and a majority of my linux workstation setup was just installed with almost zero effort. happy and impressed. Using the Ameliorated.io debloater plus nixos wsl makes Windows almost tolerable.
GfW is remarkably hostile to installing any additional components (e.g. I’ve needed to get ahold of rsync), especially compared to normal MSYS2, which is as flexible as any Linux distro.
Right, and manually extracting MSYS2 packages into an MSYS2 environment is also possible if very unsupported (used that to get a copy of rsync once). My point, rather, is that GfW isn’t and shouldn’t be your starting point if you want to get a Unix-like environment; use actual MSYS2 instead.
as a former long time cygwin user, my advice is dump cygwin ASAP. its not really good for anything anymore. the only reason I ever used it was for a C compiler, but Zig does that way better than Cygwin ever did. also honestly I don't even use C anymore unless I need to, I write most stuff in Go, but both Go and Zig can cross compile. finally I am using windows terminal and PowerShell
If this is just for sql queries ... it'd be overkill especially where you need to compare the usual PREPARE statements with the hassle of keeping everyone on 3.14 and above.
If this is in reference to the French scientist that was denied entry, that was fake news:
"The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal.
Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false."
That said you better make sure your "papers" are good. Instead of just putting you on the plane and sending you back home, there have been many recent cases of tourists handcuffed and sent to ICE facilities for a couple of days up to a couple of weeks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-to...
There's an huge amount of entitlement from people coming to the US, as if their presence is a gift and they're owed entry uncontested. For decades at this rate everyone just walked all over US customs and immigration. Now that the US is enforcing immigration laws to similar levels as South Korea, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, Vietnam, etc. people are clutching their pearls. Sorry, refils are no longer free. You're not owed free refils because that's how it use to be.
- held for an indefinite time without due process and information what you did wrong
- stripped naked and spilled with cold water
- potentially worse, but that depends entirely on the way things are developing on a day-by-day basis
And if someone thinks that won't happen to them because they come from a western country and have a low eumelanin pigmentation level, recent examples show that this does not matter¹. Remember ICE also appears to want to police "illegal ideas" at the border now².
These arbitrary arrests, a disregard for the Rule of Law and the valuation of loyalty to the cause over predictable consequences fit the despotic style that is encouraged in the US from the top down lately. The world would be wise not continue betting all their cards on a crazy horse.
Yeah, but there is a dark number of cases that don't make it to the media, e.g. I just read by a guy who had a 15k$ cruise ship trip booked from the US and was rejected at the border because they found his flight stop "unusual" he came from Australia and had a stopover in Asia because that was the cheapest flight. He wasn't imprisoned without any legal process, but the number of people rejected without cause ought to be much higher than the number of people who will be detained.
I grew up in a tourism country and the number one rule of tourism is that if you want people to come hospitality goes a long way. A mad-king-leader calling them freeloaders and quoting Napoleon with "He who saves his country, violates no law" and a cult like followership doesn't exactly instill confidence that your rights will be respected when you go there.
The current administration seems to be downright hostile to everybody who isn't a US citizen even if we'd just come to spend our money in the US. Pair that with a lack of basic oversight over your cops/TSA-agents/whatever and suddenly the US just isn't as attractive any more.
Don't get me wrong, I find the US fascinating, but given I am in the middle of Europe, I have many destinations with a friendlier atmosphere and a more reliable political leadership to chose from.
Take China for example. People do criticize the government online all the time. It's just that criticism magically disappears before it reaches critical mass. Generally China does not throw people (Han Chinese, minorities are different) into gulag for posting against the government. They are just constantly censoring and shaping the discussion. Only after they can't contain something they step up. Even then, there is often a phone call first. They try to be efficient.
People have rebel fantasy that US tuns into fascist dictatorship. What really happens is that US turns into illiberal democracy like Hungary. There is constant headwind going against the government or voicing your opinion, you don't get fair treatment and opportunities. Most people just stop resisting when it's somewhat inconvenient. You can still post anything but it is drowned by algorithms.
I refer to what political scientists write about the subject.
Illiberal democracy (aka electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, or soft authoritarianism) is a system with democratic institutions that don't work properly. Opposition can still win but it's not a fair game.
>And if there is a significant difference, what stops one becoming the other?
People. For example, Ukraine was illiberal democracy and Orange Revolution 2004 changed that. Poland was slipping badly but 2023 Polish protests changed things.
Putin started with illiberal democracy and slipped into pure authoritarian eventually, because Russians can't get their shit together.
Situation in Poland wasn't magically fixed by one election. Institutions take years to gain authority. Constitutional court is still a joke, judiciary is split into two warring worlds. Additionally supposedly centrist coalition is running to the right for short-term electoral purposes. (completely ignoring that this run itself shifts public opinion to the right).
I mean critics of the Trump administration are still thrown in a max security prison and subjected to forced labor. I get that there isn't a sign on the front calling it a gulag but that distinction isn't particularly important to the people being brutally punished for using their first amendment rights.
Can you provide a single example of someone getting thrown into a maximum-security prison and subjected to forced labor solely for criticizing the Trump administration?
> "If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes," said Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil's attorneys.
He's currently in Louisiana prison it says which means yes, he's subject to forced prison labor.
He’s not been charged with a crime. He’s not being removed from the country for criticizing Donald Trump. He’s in detention pending removal, which is a civil proceeding, not a criminal one. And he’s certainly not doing any labor there. Not every detention facility in Louisiana is a federal prison for criminals.
What about that visiting french scientist that got detained at the border for having criticized Trump on twitter? Is that enough for you to admit your country has a problem or shall we wait until there are literal American gulags? If so, see what's going on in El Salvador.
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