Yeah, maybe just a good steward quality-testing the Bus Factors?
rowanthorpe
Thanks, that's good to know, but for raw-writing a bootable image to a device do you (or anyone reading) know if there are also straightforward powershell commands for mapping devices at the block level? (as opposed to mounting at filesystem level)
The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.
Side-note: Last time I was on a friend's Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.
If you haven't already seen the talk recently given at the Chaos Computer Club's "Hacker Hotel" named "How Thermonuclear fusion works, free energy without waste", I highly recommend it. https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-ff152736-e38872dd7aed088e
Thanks. Had heard the name but didn't really know "what they do" in that sense. Will check them out.
I'm glad that wording got clarified, otherwise people's mental images could have taken a disturbing turn. :-D
At least on that day he was.
I think a good tool against this could be to have an international nonprofit organization of investigative journalists, OSINT experts, and detectives (and experts in seeing through AI abuse and other fraudulent media behaviour, and as soon as they build reputation they would need damn good lawyers too). They would act as a fast-response crack-team to look under the covers every time any powers-that-be launch a news cycle chaos-offensive (which sadly these days is "all the time"). Not just as a side-hustle or section of a general publication, but as its own non-profit-beholden organisation dedicated to that task.
They would follow the timings and run contextual pattern recognition on all the big/fishy "look over here" announcements (or character hit-pieces attacking the credibility of people sharing uncomfortable or explosive information). Their explicit goal though would be surfacing the most promising other stories that are being buried, combine and tug on those threads to discover what kind of meta-stories and deeper narratives are being lost in the "manufactured mainstream" noise, and provide announcements/advice/guidance to other journalists and reporters on what to do next with those. They would need to all be highly experienced and disciplined expert investigators of impeccable integrity to provide adequate mental-vaccination against risks of sliding into conspiracy-hypothesising tin-hat territory due to the nature of the work.
In addition to the obligatory website for people to discover and learn about them, they could provide a non-paywalled RSS stream of their findings, tongue-in-cheek naming it "While you were out", maybe with a sister podcast discussing their findings called "Excuse me, I think you dropped this".
This little exchange felt so wholesome in a deliberately counterintuitive way. :-D
It would probably be configured using YAML and require health checks and quorum monitoring. I'm not sure I would want that job, especially on-call shifts. The consequences of downtime would be on a whole other level.
That makes sense too. I guess it's a very difficult balance to hit, for all concerned. I think a lot of the famous outbursts that happen on LKML are probably an inevitable side-effect of that balancing-act, and of maintainers being stretched in multiple directions.