A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 3 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • Oh man, I’m a bit late to the party here.

    He really believes the far-right Trump propaganda, and doesn’t understand what diversity programs do. It’s not a war between white men an all the other groups of people… It’s just that is has proven to be difficult to for example write a menstrual tracker with a 99.9% male developer base. It’s just super difficult to them to judge how that’s going to be used in real-world scenarios and what some specific challenges and nice features are. That’s why you listen to minority opinions, to deliver a product that caters to all people. And these minority opinions are notoriously difficult to attract. That’s why we do programs for that. They are task-forces to address things aside from what’s mainstream and popular. It’ll also benefit straight white men. Liteally everyone because it makes Linux into a product that does more than just whatever is popular as of today. Same thing applies to putting effort into screen readers and disabled people and whatever other minorities need.

    If he just wants what is majority, I’d recommend installing Windows to him. Because that’s where we’re headed with this. That’s the popular choice, at least on the desktop. That’s what you’re supposed to use if you dislike niche.

    Also his hubris… Says Debian should be free from politics. And the very next sentence he talks his politics and wants to shove his Trump anti-DEI politics into Debian… Yeah, sure dude.






  • I meant both sex and gender. They regularly fail to tell me a lot for my own real life. I like some people and dislike others and it’s easier for me to talk to / work with / collaborate or empathize depending on various circumstances. Personality traits, shared goals… Maybe sharing something or it’s the opposite of that. I believe gender or sex or identity is a bit overrated and so is stereotyped thinking for a lot of applications. Or the need to conform to a stereotype. Dress and identify however you like, make sure to give your children an electronics kit, a plastic excavator and a princess dress… And unless that’s really important for some niche application, don’t feel the urge to look into people’s pants and check what’s in there.


  • You’re welcome. I mean it’s kind of a factual question. Is gender an indicator on its own? If yes, then the rest is just how statistics and probability work… And that’s not really a controversy. Maths in itself works 🥹

    I’d also welcome if we were to cut down on unrelated stuff, stereotypes and biases. Just pick what you like to optimize for and then do that. At least if you believe in the free market in that way. Of course it also has an impact on society, people etc and all of that is just complex. And then women and men aren’t really different, but at the same time they are. And statistics is more or less a tool. Highly depends on what you do with it and how you apply it. It’s like that with most tools. (And LLMs in the current form are kind of a shit tool for this if you ask me.)




  • LLMs reproducing stereotypes is a well researched topic. They do that due to what they are. Stereotypes and bias in (in the training data), bias and stereotypes out. That’s what they’re meant to do. And all AI companies have entire departments to tune that, measure the biases and then fine-tune it to whatever they deem fit.

    I mean the issue aren’t women or anything, it’s using AI for hiring in the first place. You do that if you want whatever stereotypes Anthropic and OpenAI gave to you.


  • I think after initial installation, you open a browser with the post-installation step and configure a username and password there. I’m not entirely sure, it’s been some time since I did it. But depending on installation method, I don’t think it has a provided password.

    General password advice: Check caps lock, and if you use like a German keyboard if ‘z’ and ‘y’ are swapped.



  • Concerning the IQ: App development and regular programming aren’t that hard. It needs some time and dedication, and willingness to learn how all these things work and tie together, but I think everyone with an average IQ could do it. It’s specific domains where you need a high IQ, like writing advanced signal processing algorithms. Or write very efficient algorithms or do detailed security audits. But App development is just moderately complex, you can get away with basic math… So I’d say it’s doable. Still needs quite some time and effort though. At least several weeks to months. And the Kotlin book I have has like 800 pages filled with information, and that just takes some time to work through. None of it is magic, though. You do one chapter at a time.

    Vibe coding is overrated IMO. There are applications and clients out there for whom it’s fine if you just do a piss-poor job and throw something together, and it somehow works enough. For a lot of things it’s not advanced enough, yet.






  • Is SELinux really that important for the average desktop user? I mean we have a lot of concepts like different system user accounts which run services, namespaces…

    And I feel we’d need more sandboxing and a permission system for desktop apps so they have to ask before reading your Documents directory and access the webcam. That’d do way more than SELinux as is… And we kind of have none of that to begin with. (…except software installed as Flatpaks, to some degree.)