I’m gonna shed a tear, though, when other people get maimed while these dipshits find out they were wrong.

The discoverers themselves refer to it as a backdoor, so frankly I don’t know what you’re on about accusing this article of misrepresenting their findings.

Tbf, Cunningham’s law doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry unto itself, just a subsection in the biography of the sort-of kind-of coiner of the aphorism. And it’s not trying to be scientific or academic; the law is just a light-hearted joke that people are less likely to answer questions on the Internet than they are to correct statements.

Entirely fair; sorry for blowing up.

This story hasn’t ever been verified.

It seems to be working well after about 6 years.

Dude, seriously? Don’t tell a user to do a factory reset unless you actually know what you’re talking about jfc.

I am the soft stars that shine at night

Um, ackschually…

the average person has very little way to reduce the number of plastic nets in the water

Besides the obvious and 100% viable option of just not eating fish.

Edit: they edited their comment to add the 6 billion link, and it’s super weird that VLC’s website then lists 400 million. Nonetheless, that’s not the actual point. They also edited their comment to spitball estimate the number of Linux servers. What they’re plainly failing to account for is that 1) Android and an unfathomable amount of embedded devices are Linux, and much more importantly 2) those servers aren’t just sitting there doing nothing. They’re doing their job of serving to billions of people. Literally everyone directly uses Linux in some capacity unless you’re part of some remote tribe. This isn’t a debate; it’s just a fact that Linux is 1) much more used (see below examples that are critical to modern society that don’t even all represent servers), 2) used by more people, 3) more useful, and 4) much more irreplaceable. You have to genuinely have no idea how any modern technological infrastructure works on even the most basic level to think that VLC wins out in usage because of 6 billion downloads. Google alone received 3.5 billion search queries per day in 2024. Linux absolutely trounces VLC’s usage by several orders of magnitude, and its usage is absolutely critical to modern society. If you’re thinking exclusively of the Linux desktop and excluding things like embedded systems, servers, Android, etc., you don’t know what Linux is.

• Their own website’s count shows 400 million downloads if this were even a meaningful metric for anything (it isn’t).
• Even accounting for duplicates (e.g. I have VLC on my Windows partition which hasn’t ever been used even a single time; it exists solely “just in case”), downloads as a metric doesn’t even remotely correspond to how much use has been gotten out of it. That is, treating “user” as a binary thing for the importance of a piece of software is ridiculous unto itself. One clearly sees much, much more usage than the other by orders of magnitude. Maybe every week I’ll use VLC (and that’s clearly above average), but almost every computerized aspect of my life and yours is attached to Linux in some way.
• If VLC disappeared out of existence today, that would really suck, but functionally it isn’t crucial, and the gaps would quickly be filled with other products (some worse like Windows’ built-in; some like mpv which actually has higher compatibility).
• If Linux disappeared out of existence today, the global economy would collapse, billions would lose access to their computers (Android, Linux desktop, and ChromeOS), the Internet and telecomms in general would practically vanish (and even if it didn’t, your router wouldn’t work to access the Internet anyway), almost any “smart device” in your home like TVs and appliances would stop working, modern cars, planes, traffic control, and much of public transit would stop working, the energy grid would probably go offline, tons of kiosks and signs would stop working, I guess game consoles would be fine since PS and Switch run BSD while Xbox’s is MinWin-based, a lot of people with pacemakers would drop dead, critical military systems would stop working, and generally the world would be plunged into absolute chaos.

I’m sorry, your argument is just patently nonsense. Linux is clearly vastly more important and vastly more used than VLC. In terms of the “greatest piece of FOSS software” as the prior comment discussed, Linux wins on amount of usage, importance of usage, number of users, irreplaceability, and technical complexity – hands-down in every category.

The fact that Linux runs on so, so many servers (let alone Android and embedded systems) means that Linux has orders of magnitude more users than VLC. That’s not “getting weird with what you quantify as Linux”; both of those things are definitely Linux.

Sounds more like a win-lin result to me.

Who do I vote for if I want paragraph breaks?

I’m really sorry, but “Stacey Champagne” sounds like the stage name of a porn star. 💀

Why read an actual article written by humans when you can turn it into more generative AI garbage instead? 🙄

Useless red circle.

The OP’s problem: “Should I read the name of the community I’m posting this in?”

Whoops! I didn’t even notice the Modlog because (at least for me) it’s tucked away at the very bottom of the sidebar and nestled between the list of mods and some statistics I don’t really care too much about. :P Genuinely my bad, though; I should’ve looked harder. Appreciate it now that I can finally see it!

I can’t emphasize enough how bad Lemmy’s moderation tools are. It’s not just that they’re abysmally anemic (including that you can’t perform moderator actions on someone in your community without a comment of theirs to click the context menu on? what??). It’s not just that reports don’t synchronize correctly across instances (i.e. if you want to moderate a community on another instance, you’re at a severe disadvantage). It’s that they’re wildly fragmented, presented just all over the place like some kind of scavenger hunt.

• As I said previously, the context menu of a comment is the only way you can ban and unban users (except that you actually can ban them if you use the API directly).
• Moderation has zero hierarchy, so 1) any moderator if they want to can perform a Night of the Long Knives and become the sole moderator (fine for now when admins can quickly intervene, but impossibly stupid if Lemmy ever became bigger), and 2) every moderator has access to all of the tools (including appointing other mods).
• You can’t view a list of banned users and unban them from there; this gets back into point 1 where you need to dig up the last comment on your community (not easily if you removed it) to unban them.
• On Voyager (third-party mobile app), I have more tools than I do on desktop, which indicates to me that the tools are there in the API but just aren’t exposed on desktop for some god-forsaken reason.
• I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop. I have to go out and find the Lemmy.World modlog (usually from a search engine) and then filter by action and pray that it was recent enough that I can find it in the rest of the heap.
• Oh, but don’t worry. There’s a third-party tool for viewing the modlog, which is just ??? What the fuck?? How is this in some random tool you have to go searching for instead of in Lemmy proper? And even then, this tool has its flaws.

Edit: obviously no automod either, although I know that’s a much larger undertaking than any of the things I’ve listed thus far.

in order to promote the growth of the fediverse, we want to merge these two communities from two different instances into a third one.

Feels weird.