If you’re thinking it may be malicious, I think it’s innocuous.

Try cat’ing /etc/skel/.bashrc and see if the code in question in in there. My guess is it will be. When a new user’s home directory is created, it copies all the files from /etc/skel into the newly-created home directory. So, that directory is basically a “new user home directory template.”

The code you posted (is missing an fi at the end, but anyway) just looks like a utility for making it easier to organize your .bashrc into separate files rather than one big file. That’s a common technique for various configuration files that a lot of distros commonly do. And I personally find that technique nice.

If you want to delete that code, it’s not going to hurt anything to remove it (unless someday you add a ~/.bashrc.d/ directory and some file in there “doesn’t work” and it confuses you why.)

Also, what distro are you on?

I kindof hate the slogan “they go low, we go high” (from Hillary’s campaign.)

But this is an example of the “good” side of that slogan. The political left(-of-what-passes-for-center-in-the-U.S.-now-a-days) isn’t given to publicly calling for assassinations of the opposition party. It’s not even given (and, yes, there are exceptions) to calling privately for assassinations of the opposition. And that’s a good thing.

It means the left(-of-U.S.-center) hasn’t turned into the fascist-dictatorship-trying-to-happen that the right has. It’s not the left(-of-U.S.-center) calling for civil war and pandering to creeps who chant “blood and soil” while carrying tiki torches around the capital.

The day left(-of-U.S.-center) news sources delight in assassinations even of opposition as dangerously unhinged and power hungry as Trump because that sentiment started with snide remarks like yours is the day we have to worry that maybe the Democrats are sliding into their own brand of fascism.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m for radical support of LGBT rights, womens’ autonomy in matters of personal health, universal free healthcare, and most other “liberal” causes. (I also identify as well left and libertarian-ward of the Democratic party and would love to see “to each according to need” be our modus operandi. I’m also for direct action.) I don’t fault the Democrats for being “too radical” by a long shot. (More likely, the Democrats will continue to be far too willing to let the Republicans control the narrative and cheat their way to political power. And that’s the bad side of “they go low, we go high”) And I don’t believe it’s very likely that the Democrats will slide into widespread advocacy for political violence like the Republicans have much more so already.

But taking delight in assassination attempts and wishing they’d been successful – even those directed at Cheeto-flavored Hitler himself – isn’t helpful.

All that said, I get it. I’m pissed at the U.S.'s descent toward fascism, too. But wishing him assassinated isn’t going to change anything for the better.

if you want to take OpenAI’s own research into account

No thank you.

OlympicArena validation set (text-only)

“Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy (28.67% for mathematics and 29.71% for physics)”

• The OlympicArena analysis that you cited.

Source?

Unlike this year when LLMs are more of a huge scam.

You can’t really and make a profit. You pay more in electricity than you get in crypto.

…unless someone else is (unknowingly) paying for the electricity.

(Of course, when the price of crypto takes an upturn, sometimes it might get profitable again. And I’d imagine there are people mining it even when the price is low banking on the idea that it’ll spike again and they can sell it.)

No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.

And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.

The sooner the crypto bubble bursts, the fewer victims there will be of fraud like this.

In this thread: Cryptobros downvoting every realistic take on cryptocurrency for being “bearish” and “FUD”.

Do they play a part in commercial DDOS protection?

Absolutely! As well as mitigating other types of threats. “Web Application Firewalls” (don’t be fooled, they’re not like regular firewalls really) are a type of transparent web proxy that watch requests for anything that “looks like” a SQL injection or XSS payload and block those requests if necessary. Transparent web proxies may also do things like caching or even “honeypot” functionality that may shunt likely bot traffic to a fake version of the website to prevent scraping of real site content.

Ooo. This is a good one.

A computer can have more than one network interface, right? (Like, you can be plugged into ethernet at home but also connected to the WIFI of the coffee shop across the street.)

A VPN gives you a whole new network device (“virtual ethernet card” if you will) that works as if that card was connected to some LAN somewhere else. Typically, you’d forward “all” of your computer’s/smartphone’s/etc traffic through the VPN so that your computer “thinks it’s on that remote LAN” rather than on your home WIFI or whatever.

Proxies… well the term can mean a few different things in different contexts, really. But generally you’re not forwarding “all” traffic through them, just HTTP traffic (and usually only a subset of all HTTP traffic) or just traffic that is specifically told to be forwarded through them.

An opaque web proxy is one that you can point your browser (or other HTTP interface) to. It won’t handle protocols other than HTTP. And when you want to use an opaque web proxy, your HTTP client has to know how to do that. (Whereas with VPN’s, it’s your operating system, not your individual applications, that need to know how to forward through it.)

A transparent web proxy can be something you (and your apps and OS) don’t know you’re even using. When you point your browser or app to a Lemmy instance, it’s almost certain that the domain is pointed not at an application server that actually runs the Lemmy code, but rather at a transparent web proxy that does stuff on the instance-owner’s end like preventing spamming or whatever. This type of proxy is sometimes called a “reverse web proxy” and can also only work with HTTP.

A SOCKS proxy, like an opaque web proxy, requires applications to know how to use it. (Ok, technically that’s not 100% true. It’s possible in some cases to have a transparent proxy of some sort forward through a SOCKS proxy in a way that the application doesn’t know SOCKS is involved. There are also some cool OS-level hacks that can force an app to go through a SOCKS proxy without the app knowing anything about SOCKS. But if you’re doing those things, you’re a hacker.) And with a SOCKS proxy, your computer doesn’t “think” it’s connected to a whole different LAN. Individual applications know that they’re forwarding through SOCKS. SOCKS supports more protocols than just HTTP. Probably all TCP-based protocols, but I don’t think it has any support for UDP. So you won’t be torrenting through SOCKS.

That’s all I can think to say at the moment. There are special-purpose proxies for things like security auditing (like Burp Suite, for instance.) But I’m guessing that’s not the sort of thing you’re asking about.

Damn. I really wanted that article to show me photos/videos of transparent-skinned mice.

I write Java for a paycheck, but I really hate it.

It feels like everything is layers and layers of overengineered cruft, each added to the precarious tower for something extremely minor. But every subsequent card in the house of cards makes it more precarious. “But look, I don’t have to write accessors.” “But look, I eliminated the need for the web.xml file.” “But look, I don’t have to understand SQL now.” But look, the codebase depends on a shit-ton of completely opaque Automagic™ that you have no hope of understanding the moment something goes wrong – which it will if you even think of changing your Java version. And since it’s practically impossible to understand what’s going on under-the-hood of whichever dependency is fubar’d this week, you have to resort to a mixture of trial-and-error and copy-pasting shit (that you also don’t understand) from StackOverflow and praying to Cthulhu something works – which is also trial-and-error because Java questions in particular have tons of just straight up wrong answers.

To be fair, I’m the guy on my team who people come to when they run into those sorts of “I bumped up one subminor version of Mockito to fix a bug that was preventing my unit test from working but now literally half of our unit tests won’t build” or “I added the war plugin to the build.gradle and now SwaggerUI is broken.” So maybe I see more than my fair share of “well shit, I guess I’ll just spend the next three hours hunting down which magical combination of Jar version numbers will fix things” kind of problems. But damn. This shit didn’t ever happen back when I was doing Python for a paycheck.

I don’t use Java if I don’t have to. If I have to use Java, I prefer to just use Servlets (mostly I do web development) and absolutely as few dependencies as I can possibly get away with. Fewer moving parts mean less that can break.

This isn’t actually a serious question, right?

The other three quarters are just scared that Elom will sue them if they cut advertising.

(Not really. I suspect many of the other 75% just aren’t willing to admit they’re planning to loosen ties with Twitter (I will not call it “X”) just yet.)

Delete System32.

Sweet! Now let’s all go commence scowling at Redis until they do the same.

I’m just speaking from their history. Like when they embraced Java, built their own JVM, shipped it with Windows, and then forked the Java language by adding Windows-specific APIs to Microsoft Java and not adding the Java 1.2 features to Microsoft Java. You can’t convince me their aim all along wasn’t specifically to kill Java, and cross-platform technologies like it. The whole “Windows tax” thing is another good example. And “Open Core.”

And, who knows. Maybe they’re either nicer now or less competent at that kind of evil. But if so, that’s a relatively new thing. Their history as a company is full of (not-so-)“secretly planning to control the world”. And they have never really faced any consequences for their anti-trust violations. And if they didn’t want people to hold grudges, maybe they should have thought of that before fucking everyone over as thoroughly as they possibly could.

I guess you could say Microsoft was perfecting the art of enshittification before it became such a pervasive thing. Plus, I largely blame Gates personally for the rise of the institution of proprietary software, which is also complete BS.

Mind you, I don’t blame you for working for Microsoft or anything. No ethical consumption (or employment) under capitalism and all that. And it’s not like I’m not doing evil things on a regular basis as an employee where I work.

Microsoft gives the Wine team infectious mononucleosis. Got it.

But seriously, Microsoft is nobody’s friend and shouldn’t be trusted.

A broken clock is right twice a day.