It shouldn’t be hard to implement the APIs, the problem would be sourcing the models to sit behind them. You can’t just steal them off Windows or you will have Copyright Problems presumably. I guess you could try and train clones on Windows against the Windows model results?

So Copilot Runtime is… Windows bundling a bunch of models like an OCR model and an image generation model, and then giving your program an API to call them.

It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.

That should just be the title bar now

I think we can trust that most phone camera apps do in fact obey the toggle they provide for whether or not to embed the GPS location data in the image.

There oughta be a law

I don’t think that’s true. For one thing, it’s easy to buy a car from a random person, without granting any permission to any car company to download stuff from your car and sell it. If a car company were to access your car without permission, you could sue for damages (see OP).

The Uplift series isn’t really that third picture but I can kind of see why this person did the cover art.

The last one actually reminds me of Saturn’s Children where the cover is like a worse CGI version of that, but the book actually thinks it through in a way that makes this person a compelling point of view character.

I read them all. I think I liked the first book fine, it’s more of a self-contained mystery, which might be better. The aliens are probably most prominent in the second trillogy; there’s loads of them and I quite like the Commons of Jijo.

I feel like the series is sort of missing pieces? Like, across the five books it is in, WTF was going on with Streaker’s discovery is never really explained, the whole the-galactics-aren’t-being-honest-with-us thread is never satisfyingly resolved in the whole series, and at several points in the chronology it feels like there could have been a whole book about the stuff that happened since the last book.

The whole series is An Aesop on how science is good. Which is fine, doing science is good and you can spend a series reminding people of that if you would like. But it’s strange to find that as the point of a series that otherwise seems to have all these frankly conservative ideas about colonizing space planets and about some people being just inherently more or less “uplifted” than others. Uplift seems to stand in for a person’s moral value without what I would consider sufficient critique. Like, paternalism is bad when the galactics do it, but when humans just have full power over a dolphin person’s entire life that’s fine somehow, you need it to do Uplift, the thing the books are about. The whole Uplift concept has unavoidable parallels to European notions of “civilizing” people by using military force to make them act more like Europeans, which I don’t think are fully examined.

I also remember them as having weird 1980s gender ideas in them, like the men are normal and the women are viewed through some weird filter and the other gender humans are entirely absent.

I think there are more interesting books to read about the structure of minds and the diversity of subjective experience. For example, Diaspora only comes out a year after Heaven’s Reach, and also has all sorts of weird aliens, but it additionally has defensible gender politics and a much more cogent thesis on autonomy and what the powers of science may or must be used to do. Or, A Half-Built Garden is all about what happens when galactic society arrives to save the humans, and the humans maybe finally don’t need saving.

High-level polyamory.

I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.

Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?

I wouldn’t really recommend IPFS for this. It’s tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn’t really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you’d have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you’d have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won’t do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).

I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn’t themselves Turing-complete.

Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user’s ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.

Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don’t actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.

But if “You can fork it and do whatever, even remove the “please donate” thing, but if you distribute any spy/malware versions they have legal avenues to force it to get taken down”, that sounds like open source to me? You can indeed modify and redistribute it in almost any way you would like!

Sounds more like open source but not free software?

We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.

The death of the device and the return of the system.

A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.

A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.

A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.

Google was Phone all along

Alice is a pretty good 3D programming environment aimed at kids, with little programming blocks to snap together.

You might want to try going back into the archives and pulling out something like MS-DOS and QBasic, or Logo. You can find a good tutorial in book form, and you can get a system that was designed to be programmed offline, with things like local help in the editor instead of behind a Google search, so it should be 100% safe to leave the kid alone with the machine.

Files by Google

From Google, the inventor of Files^tm

Instead of an MS account, join a domain and use the domain account to log in. You can set up a domain with Samba.