Personal:
As many of you know, I lost my beloved son March 9th. This has hit me really hard, but I am staying strong and holding on to all the wonderful memories I have. He grew up to be an amazing man, devoted christian and wonderful father. He was loved by everyone who knew him and will be truly missed by us all. I have had folks ask me how they can help. He left behind his 7 year old son Mason. Mason was Billy s world and I would like to make sure Mason is taken care of. I have set up a gofundme for Mason and all proceeds will go to the future care of him.
https://gofund.me/25dbff0c
Work report
Kubuntu:
Bug bashing! I am triaging allthebugs for Plasma which can be seen here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/plasma-5.27/+bug/2053125
I am happy to report many of the remaining bugs have been fixed in the latest bug fix release 5.27.11.
I prepared https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.11/ and Rik uploaded to archive, thank you. Unfortunately, this and several other key fixes are stuck in transition do to the time_t64 transition, which you can read about here: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time . It is the biggest transition in Debian/Ubuntu history and it couldn t come at a worst time. We are aware our ISO installer is currently broken, calamares is one of those things stuck in this transition. There is a workaround in the comments of the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calamares/+bug/2054795
Fixed an issue with plasma-welcome.
Found the fix for emojis and Aaron has kindly moved this forward with the fontconfig maintainer. Thanks!
I have received an https://kfocus.org/spec/spec-ir14.html laptop and it is truly a great machine and is now my daily driver. A big thank you to the Kfocus team! I can t wait to show it off at https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/.
KDE Snaps:
You will see the activity in this ramp back up as the KDEneon Core project is finally a go! I will participate in the project with part time status and get everyone in the Enokia team up to speed with my snap knowledge, help prepare the qt6/kf6 transition, package plasma, and most importantly I will focus on documentation for future contributors.
I have created the ( now split ) qt6 with KDE patchset support and KDE frameworks 6 SDK and runtime snaps. I have made the kde-neon-6 extension and the PR is in: https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/pull/4698 . Future work on the extension will include multiple versions track support and core24 support.
I have successfully created our first qt6/kf6 snap ark. They will show showing up in the store once all the required bits have been merged and published.
Thank you for stopping by.
~Scarlett
Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.
Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024
Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds.
However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.
Three new reproducibility-related academic papers
A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month:
Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:
Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)
[The] principle of reusability [ ] makes it harder to reproduce projects build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.
This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)
Distribution work
In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.
diffoscopediffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [][]
Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). []
Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. []
Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. []
Make test_zip black clean. []
In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [][] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.
reprotestreprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:
Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [][]
Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [][]
Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [][][][]
Website updates
There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:
Chris Lamb:
Improve the relative sizing of headers. []
Re-order and punch up the introduction and documentation on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. []
Update SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation re. datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp. Thanks, James Addison. []
Reproducibility testing framework
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. []
Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. []
Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. []
Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . []
Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. []
Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. []
Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [][]
Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:
Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [][][]
Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [][] [][]
In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [].
Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [][][][][][] and Vagrant Cascadian [][][][].
Upstream patches
The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:
Witch Wells AZ Sunset
It has been a very busy 3 weeks here in Kubuntu!
Kubuntu 22.04.4 LTS has been released and can be downloaded from here: https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/
Work done for the upcoming 24.04 LTS release:
Frameworks 5.115 is in proposed waiting for the Qt transition to complete.
Debian merges for Plasma 5.27.10 are done, and I have confirmed there will be another bugfix release on March 6th.
Applications 23.08.5 is being worked on right now.
Added support for riscv64 hardware.
Bug triaging and several fixes!
I am working on Kubuntu branded Plasma-Welcome, Orca support and much more!
Aaron and the Kfocus team has been doing some amazing work getting Calamares perfected for release! Thank you!
Rick has been working hard on revamping kubuntu.org, stay tuned! Thank you!
KDE Snaps:
KDE applications 23.08.5 have been uploaded to Candidate channel, testing help welcome. https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE I have also working on bug fixes, time allowing.
My continued employment depends on you, please consider a donation! https://kubuntu.org/donate/
Thank you for stopping by!
~Scarlett
Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. Titled Reproducible Builds: The First Ten Years
In this talk Holger h01ger Levsen will give an overview about Reproducible Builds: How it started with a small BoF at DebConf13 (and before), then grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an Executive Order of the President of the United States. And of course, the talk will not end there, but rather outline where we are today and where we still need to be going, until Debian stable (and other distros!) will be 100% reproducible, verified by many.
h01ger has been involved in reproducible builds since 2014 and so far has set up automated reproducibility testing for Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and coreboot.
More information can be found on FOSDEM s own page for the talk, including a video recording and slides.
Separate from Holger s talk, however, there were a number of other talks about reproducible builds at FOSDEM this year:
It s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!!
My first week ( I started midweek ):
It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely amazed with the work they have done, and if you are in the market for a new laptop, you must check these out!!! https://kfocus.org Or if you want to try before you buy you can download the OS! All they ask is for an e-mail, which is completely reasonable. Hosting isn t free! Besides, you can opt out anytime and they don t share it with anyone. I look forward to working closely with this project.
We now have a Kubuntu Team in KDE invent https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu if you would like to join us, please don t hesitate to ask! I have started a new Wiki and our first page is the ever important Bug triaging! It is still a WIP but you can check it out here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu/docs/-/wikis/Bug-Triage-Story-WIP , with that said I have started the launchpad work to make tracking our bugs easier buy subscribing kubuntu-bugs to all our packages and creating proper projects for our packages missing them.
We have compiled a list of our various documentation links that need updated and Rick Timmis is updating kubuntu.org! Aaron Honeycutt has been busy with the Kubuntu Manual https://github.com/kubuntu-team/kubuntu-manual which is in good shape. We just need to improve our developer story
I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844 with testing the fixes from the ppa and writing profiles for the various KDE packages affected ( pretty much anything that uses webengine ) and making progress there.
My next order of business staging Frameworks 5.114 with guidance from our super awesome Rik Mills that has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Kubuntu for many years now. So thank you for that Rik
I will also start on our big transition to the Calamaras Installer! I do have experience here, so I expect it will be a smooth one.
I am so excited for the future of Kubuntu and the exciting things to come! With that said, the Kubuntu funding is community donation driven. There is enough to pay me part time for a couple contracts, but it will run out and a full-time contract would be super awesome. I am reaching out to anyone enjoying Kubuntu and want to help with the future of Kubuntu to please consider a donation! We are working on more donation options, but for now you can donate through paypal at https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you!!!!!
The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled to announce a new release
1.0.12 of the Rcpp package. It
arrived on CRAN early today,
and has since been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS
builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in
different Linux distribution and of course at r2u should catch up
tomorrow. The release was uploaded yesterday, and run its reverse
dependencies overnight. Rcpp always
gets flagged nomatter what because the grandfathered
.Call(symbol) but we had not single change to worse
among over 2700 reverse dependencies!
This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started
with release
1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim
snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly
encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions
which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all
reverse-dependencies.
Rcpp has long established itself
as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now,
2791 packages on CRAN depend on
Rcpp for making analytical code go
faster and further, along with 254 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.8% of
all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages
do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN
downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded
78.1 million times. The two published papers (also included in the
package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1766 (JSS, 2011) and 292 (TAS, 2018)
citations, while the the book (Springer useR!,
2013) has another 617.
This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing
capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending
slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from
CRAN or R standards.
The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if
applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all
contributors!
Changes in
Rcpp release version 1.0.12 (2024-01-08)
Changes in Rcpp API:
Missing header includes as spotted by some recent tools were
added in two places (Michael Chirico in #1272 closing #1271).
Casts to avoid integer overflow in matrix row/col selections have
neem added (Aaron Lun #1281).
Three print format correction uncovered by R-devel were applied
with thanks to Tomas Kalibera (Dirk in #1285).
Correct a print format correction in the RcppExports glue code
(Dirk in #1288
fixing #1287).
The upcoming OBJSXP addition to R 4.4.0 is supported
in the type2name mapper (Dirk and I aki in #1293).
Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
Generated interface code from base R that fails under LTO is now
corrected (I aki in #1274 fixing a
StackOverflow issue).
Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
The caption for third figure in the introductory vignette has
been corrected (Dirk in #1277 fixing #1276).
A small formatting issue was correct in an Rd file as noticed by
R-devel (Dirk in #1282).
The Rcpp FAQ vignette has been updated (Dirk in #1284).
The Rcpp.bib file has been refreshed to current
package versions.
Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
The RcppExports file for an included test package has been updated
(Dirk in #1289).
I haven't done one of these in quite a while, long enough that I've
already read and reviewed many of these books.
John Joseph Adams (ed.) The Far Reaches (sff anthology)
Poul Anderson The Shield of Time (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Veiled Web (sff)
Travis Baldree Bookshops & Bonedust (sff)
Sue Burke Semiosis (sff)
Jacqueline Carey Cassiel's Servant (sff)
Rob Copeland The Fund (nonfiction)
Mar Delaney Wolf Country (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Last Watch (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Exiled Fleet (sff)
Mike Duncan Hero of Two Worlds (nonfiction)
Mike Duncan The Storm Before the Storm (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott King's Dragon (sff)
Zeke Faux Number Go Up (nonfiction)
Nicola Griffith Menewood (sff)
S.L. Huang The Water Outlaws (sff)
Alaya Dawn Johnson The Library of Broken Worlds (sff)
T. Kingfisher Thornhedge (sff)
Naomi Kritzer Liberty's Daughter (sff)
Ann Leckie Translation State (sff)
Michael Lewis Going Infinite (nonfiction)
Jenna Moran Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political
Theory (sff collection)
Ari North Love and Gravity (graphic novel)
Ciel Pierlot Bluebird (sff)
Terry Pratchett A Hat Full of Sky (sff)
Terry Pratchett Going Postal (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thud! (sff)
Terry Pratchett Wintersmith (sff)
Terry Pratchett Making Money (sff)
Terry Pratchett Unseen Academicals (sff)
Terry Pratchett I Shall Wear Midnight (sff)
Terry Pratchett Snuff (sff)
Terry Pratchett Raising Steam (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Shepherd's Crown (sff)
Aaron A. Reed 50 Years of Text Games (nonfiction)
Dashka Slater Accountable (nonfiction)
Rory Stewart The Marches (nonfiction)
Emily Tesh Silver in the Wood (sff)
Emily Tesh Drowned Country (sff)
Valerie Vales Chilling Effect (sff)
Martha Wells System Collapse (sff)
Martha Wells Witch King (sff)
A new release of our linl package for
writing LaTeX letters with (R)markdown is now on CRAN. linl makes it easy to
write letters in markdown, with some extra bells and whistles thanks to
some cleverness chiefly by Aaron.
This version add extended header and footer placement support thanks
to an included copy of wallpaper.sty as added in a nice PR
by I aki. As the previous
release was well over three years ago, we also enhanced continuous
integration in the process. The repository README.md
shows some screenshots of input and output files.
The NEWS entry follows:
Changes in linl
version 0.0.5 (2023-01-11)
Several updates to continuous integration and testing
Enhanced placment functionality for images in header and footer
via wallpaper.sty and new x and y offset variable (I aki
Ucar in #30)
Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating?
This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks while still making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also, an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors who already have accounts and are typically the source of most valuable contributions. Creating accounts might even help community members build deeper relationships and commitments to the group in ways that lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.
In a new paper published in Communication Research, I worked with Aaron Shaw provide an answer. We analyze data from natural experiments that occurred when 136 wikis on Fandom.com started requiring user accounts. Although we find strong evidence that the account requirements deterred low quality contributions, this came at a substantial (and usually hidden) cost: a much larger decrease in high quality contributions. Surprisingly, the cost includes lost contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.
A version of this post was first posted on the Community Data Science blog.
The full citation for the paper is: Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. 2020. The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Peer Production. Communication Research, 48 (6): 771 95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220910345.
If you do not have access to the paywalled journal, please check out this pre-print or get in touch with us. We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analysis and compile the paper itself.
The fourteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now fifteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet the build system could be extended see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.
A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette.
This release brings two new example scripts and command wrappers (compiledDeps.r, silenceTwitterAccount.r), along with extensions, corrections, or polish for a number a of other examples as detailed in the NEWS file entry below.
Changes in littler version 0.3.13 (2021-07-24)
Changes in examples
New script compiledDeps.r to show which dependencies are compiled
New script silenceTwitterAccount.r wrapping rtweet
The -c or --code option for installRSPM.r was corrected
The kitten.r script now passes options bunny and puppy on to the pkgKitten::kitten() call; new options to call the Arma and Eigen variants were added
The getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r scripts were updated for a change in rvest
Two typos in the tt.r help message were correct (Aaron Wolen in #86)
The message in cranIncoming.r was corrected.
Changes in package
Added Continuous Integration runner via run.sh from r-ci.
Two vignettes got two extra vignette attributes.
The mkdocs-material documentation input was moved.
The basic unit tests were slightly refactored and updated.
My CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and now also on the new package docs website. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter.
Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."
The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land.
What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all.
Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.
The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.
I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise.
John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.
The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:
The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.
But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:
For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)
However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema.
Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched.
Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993).
Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works.
Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?
"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."
The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land.
What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all.
Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.
The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.
I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise.
John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.
The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:
The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.
But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:
For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)
However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema.
Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched.
Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993).
Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works.
Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin. Fuck you Christel, lilo's life work did not deserve this.
What you knew as freenode after 12:00 UTC of May 19 will be managed by different people.
As I have no desire to volunteer under the new regime, this marks the end of my involvement with freenode. It had started in 1999 when I encouraged the good parts of #linux-it to leave ircnet, and soon after I became senior staff. Even if I have not been very active recently, at this point I was the longest-serving freenode staff member and now I expect that I will hold this record forever.
The people that I have met on IRC, on freenode and other networks, have been and still are a very important part of my life, second only to the ones that I have known thanks to Usenet. I am not fine, but I know that the communities which I have been a part of are not defined by a domain name and will regroup somewhere else.
The current freenode staff members have resigned with me, these are some of their farewell messages:
In exciting professional news, it was recently announced that I got an National Science Foundation CAREER award! The CAREER is the US NSF s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. In addition to the recognition, the award involves a bunch of money for me to put toward my research over the next 5 years. The Department of Communication at the University of Washington has put up a very nice web page announcing the thing. It s all very exciting and a huge honor. I m very humbled.
The grant will support a bunch of new research to develop and test a theory about the relationship between governance and online community lifecycles. If you ve been reading this blog for a while, you ll know that I ve been involved in a bunch of research to describe how peer production communities tend to follow common patterns of growth and decline as well as a studies that show that many open communities become increasingly closed in ways that deter lots of the kinds contributions that made the communities successful in the first place.
Over the last few years, I ve worked with Aaron Shaw to develop the outlines of an explanation for why many communities because increasingly closed over time in ways that hurt their ability to integrate contributions from newcomers. Over the course of the work on the CAREER, I ll be continuing that project with Aaron and I ll also be working to test that explanation empirically and to develop new strategies about what online communities can do as a result.
In addition to supporting research, the grant will support a bunch of new outreach and community building within the Community Data Science Collective. In particular, I m planning to use the grant to do a better job of building relationships with community participants, community managers, and others in the platforms we study. I m also hoping to use the resources to help the CDSC do a better job of sharing our stuff out in ways that are useful as well doing a better job of listening and learning from the communities that our research seeks to inform.
There are many to thank. The proposed work was the direct research of the work I did as the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford where I got to spend the 2018-2019 academic year in Claude Shannon s old office and talking through these ideas with an incredible range of other scholars over lunch every day. It s also the product of years of conversations with Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler. The proposal itself reflects the excellent work of the whole CDSC who did the work that made the award possible and provided me with detailed feedback on the proposal itself.
A new maintenance release, now at version 0.0.18, of RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the famous Spotify music discovery algorithm.
This release is follow-up to release 0.0.17 which was made four weeks ago, and which brought the new upstream release 1.17 of Annoy. We now have an updated upstream with a PR by Aaron aiming for improved control of RNG seeding to ensure better reproducibility, along with extended tests and new helpers for RcppAnnoy and Annoy version numbers. The release was once again coordinated with Annoy and James whose BiocNeighbors and uwot packages both consume the Annoy header library shipped here.
Detailed changes follow below.
Changes in version 0.0.18 (2020-12-15)
Small tweaks to threading policy header defines (Dirk closing #65)
Vignette code is again compiled during testing (Aaron Lum and Dirk in #66 addressing #64)
Upstream code (with Aaron's PR) was synchronized once more (Dirk in #67)
A new helper function was added to report the Annoy version (Aaron in #68)
A new release 0.0.17 of RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the famous Spotify music discovery algorithm.
This release brings a new upstream version 1.17, released a few weeks ago, which adds multithreaded index building. This changes the API by adding a new threading policy parameter requiring code using the main Annoy header to update. For this reason we waited a little for the dust to settle on the BioConductor 3.12 release before bringing the changes to BiocNeighbors via this commit and to uwot via this simple PR. Aaron and James updated their packages accordingly so by the time I uploaded RcppAnnoy it made for very smooth sailing as we all had done our homework with proper conditional builds, and the package had no other issue preventing automated processing at CRAN. Yay. I also added a (somewhat overdue one may argue) header file RcppAnnoy.h regrouping defines and includes which should help going forward.
Detailed changes follow below.
Changes in version 0.0.17 (2020-11-15)
Upgrade to Annoy 1.17, but default to serial use.
Add new header file to regroup includes and defines.
Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, edited by Maya Schenwar, et al.
Editor:
Maya Schenwar
Editor:
Joe Macar
Editor:
Alana Yu-lan Price
Publisher:
Haymarket Books
Copyright:
June 2016
ISBN:
1-60846-684-1
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
250
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an anthology of essays
about policing in the United States. It's divided into two sections: one
that enumerates ways that police are failing to serve or protect
communities, and one that describes how communities are building
resistance and alternatives. Haymarket Books (a progressive press in
Chicago) has made it
available for free in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and
resulting protests in the United States.
I'm going to be a bit unfair to this book, so let me start by admitting
that the mismatch between it and the book I was looking for is not
entirely its fault.
My primary goal was to orient myself in the discussion on the left about
alternatives to policing. I also wanted to sample something from
Haymarket Books; a free book was a good way to do that. I was hoping for
a collection of short introductions to current lines of thinking that I
could selectively follow in longer writing, and an essay collection seemed
ideal for that.
What I had not realized (which was my fault for not doing simple research)
is that this is a compilation of articles previously published by
Truthout, a non-profit progressive
journalism site, in 2014 and 2015. The essays are a mix of reporting and
opinion but lean towards reporting. The earliest pieces in this book date
from shortly after the police killing of Michael Brown, when racist police
violence was (again) reaching national white attention.
The first half of the book is therefore devoted to providing evidence of
police abuse and violence. This is important to do, but it's sadly no
longer as revelatory in 2020, when most of us have seen similar things on
video, as it was to white America in 2014. If you live in the United
States today, while you may not be aware of the specific events described
here, you're unlikely to be surprised that Detroit police paid off
jailhouse informants to provide false testimony ("Ring of Snitches" by
Aaron Miguel Cant ), or that Chicago police routinely use excessive deadly
force with no consequences ("Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department
Upholds Culture of Impunity" by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers), or
that there is a long history of police abuse and degradation of pregnant
women ("Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement
Violence" by Victoria Law). There are about eight essays along those
lines.
Unfortunately, the people who excuse or disbelieve these stories are
rarely willing to seek out new evidence, let alone read a book like this.
That raises the question of intended audience for the catalog of horrors
part of this book. The answer to that question may also be the
publication date; in 2014, the base of evidence and example for discussion
had not been fully constructed. This sort of reporting is also obviously
relevant in the original publication context of web-based journalism,
where people may encounter these accounts individually through social
media or other news coverage. In 2020, they offer reinforcement and
rhetorical evidence, but I'm dubious that the people who would benefit
from this knowledge will ever see it in this form. Those of us who will
are already sickened, angry, and depressed.
My primary interest was therefore in the second half of the book: the
section on how communities are building resistance and alternatives. This
is where I'm going to be somewhat unfair because the state of that
conversation may have been different in 2015 than it is now in 2020. But
these essays were lacking the depth of analysis that I was looking for.
There is a human tendency, when one becomes aware of an obvious wrong, to
simply publicize the horrible thing that is happening and expect someone
to do something about it. It's obviously and egregiously wrong, so if
more people knew about it, certainly it would be stopped! That has
happened repeatedly with racial violence in the United States. It's also
part of the common (and school-taught) understanding of the Civil Rights
movement in the 1960s: activists succeeded in getting the violence on the
cover of newspapers and on television, people were shocked and appalled,
and the backlash against the violence created political change.
Putting aside the fact that this is too simplistic of a picture of the
Civil Rights era, it's abundantly clear at this point in 2020 that
publicizing racist and violent policing isn't going to stop it. We're
going to have to do something more than draw attention to the problem.
Deciding what to do requires political and social analysis, not just of
the better world that we want to see but of how our current world can
become that world.
There is very little in that direction in this book. Who Do You
Serve, Who Do You Protect? does not answer the question of its title
beyond "not us" and "white supremacy." While those answers are not
exactly wrong, they're also not pushing the analysis in the direction that
I wanted to read.
For example (and this is a long-standing pet peeve of mine in US political
writing), it would be hard to tell from most of the essays in this book
that any country besides the United States exists. One essay ("Killing
Africa" by William C. Anderson) talks about colonialism and draws
comparisons between police violence in the United States and international
treatment of African and other majority-Black countries. One essay talks
about US military behavior oversees ("Beyond Homan Square" by Adam
Hudson). That's about it for international perspective. Notably, there
is no analysis here of what other countries might be doing better.
Police violence against out-groups is not unique to the United States. No
one has entirely solved this problem, but versions of this problem have
been handled with far more success than here. The US has a comparatively
appalling record; many countries in the world, particularly among
comparable liberal democracies in Europe, are doing far better on metrics
of racial oppression by agents of the government and of law enforcement
violence. And yet it's common to approach these problems as if we have to
develop a solution de novo, rather than ask what other countries
are doing differently and if we could do some of those things.
The US has some unique challenges, both historical and with the nature of
endemic violence in the country, so perhaps such an analysis would turn up
too many US-specific factors to copy other people's solutions. But we
need to do the analysis, not give up before we start. Novel solutions can
lead to novel new problems; other countries have tested, working
improvements that could provide a starting framework and some map of
potential pitfalls.
More fundamentally, only the last two essays of this book propose
solutions more complex than "stop." The authors are very clear about
what the police are doing, seem less interested in why, and
are nearly silent on how to change it. I suspect I am largely in
political agreement with most of the authors, but obviously a substantial
portion of the country (let alone its power structures) is not, and
therefore nothing is changing. Part of the project of ending police
violence is understanding why the violence exists, picking apart the
motives and potential fracture lines in the political forces supporting
the status quo, and building a strategy to change the politics. That
isn't even attempted here.
For example, the "who do you serve?" question of the book's title is more
interesting than the essays give it credit. Police are not a monolith.
Why do Black people become police officers? What are their experiences?
Are there police forces in the United States that are doing better than
others? What makes them different? Why do police act with violence in
the moment? What set of cultural expectations, training experiences,
anxieties, and fears lead to that outcome? How do we change those
factors?
Or, to take another tack, why are police not held accountable even when
there is substantial public outrage? What political coalition supports
that immunity from consequences, what are its fault lines and internal
frictions, and what portions of that coalition could be broken off, pealed
away, or removed from power? To whom, institutionally, are police forces
accountable? What public offices can aspiring candidates run for that
would give them oversight capability? This varies wildly throughout the
United States; political approaches that work in large cities may not work
in small towns, or with county sheriffs, or with the FBI, or with prison
guards.
To treat these organizations as a monolith and their motives as uniform is
bad political tactics. It gives up points of leverage.
I thought the best essays of this collection were the last two.
"Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate
from Police," by Candice Bernd, is a profile of several local emergency
response systems that divert emergency calls from the police to
paramedics, mental health experts, or social workers. This is an idea
that's now relatively mainstream, and it seems to be finding modest
success where it has been tried. It's more of a harm mitigation strategy
than an attempt to deal with the root problem, but we're going to need
both.
The last essay, "Building Community Safety" by Ejeris Dixon, is the only
essay in this book that is pushing in the direction that I was hoping to
read. Dixon describes building an alternative system that can intervene
in violent situations without using the police. This is fascinating and
I'm glad that I read it.
It's also frustrating in context because Dixon's essay should be part of a
discussion. Dixon describes spending years learning de-escalation
techniques, doing hard work of community discussion and collective
decision-making, and making deep investment in the skills required to
handle violence without calling in a dangerous outside force. I greatly
admire this approach (also common in parts of the anarchist community) and
the people who are willing to commit to it. But it's an immense amount of
work, and as Dixon points out, that work often falls on the people who are
least able to afford it. Marginalized communities, for whom the police
are often dangerous, are also likely to lack both time and energy to
invest in this type of skill training. And many people simply will not do
this work even if they do have the resources to do it.
More fundamentally, this approach conflicts somewhat with division of
labor. De-escalation and social work are both professional skills that
require significant time and practice to hone, and as much as I too would
love to live in a world where everyone knows how to do some amount of this
work, I find it hard to imagine scaling this approach without trained
professionals. The point of paying someone to do this work as their job
is that the money frees up their time to focus on learning those skills at
a level that is difficult to do in one's free time. But once you have an
organized group of professionals who do this work, you have to find a way
to keep them from falling prey to the problems that plague the police,
which requires understanding the origins of those problems. And that's
putting aside the question of how large the residual of dangerous crime
that cannot be addressed through any form of de-escalation might be, and
what organization we should use to address it.
Dixon's essay is great; I wouldn't change anything about it. But I wanted
to see the next essay engaging with Dixon's perspective and looking for
weaknesses and scaling concerns, and then the next essay that attempts to
shore up those weaknesses, and yet another essay that grapples with the
challenging philosophical question of a government monopoly on force and
how that can and should come into play in violent crime. And then essays
on grass-roots organizing in the context of police reform or abolition,
and on restorative justice, and on the experience of attempting police
reform from the inside, and on how to support public defenders, and on the
merits and weaknesses of focusing on electing reform-minded district
attorneys. Unfortunately, none of those are here.
Overall, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? was a
disappointment. It was free, so I suppose I got what I paid for, and I
may have had a different reaction if I read it in 2015. But if you're
looking for a deep discussion on the trade-offs and challenges of stopping
police violence in 2020, I don't think this is the place to start.
Rating: 3 out of 10
Following up on the initial 0.0.1 release of linl, Aaron and I are happy to announce release 0.0.2 which reached the CRAN network on Sunday in a smooth 'CRAN-pretest-publish' auto-admittance. linl provides a simple-yet-powerful Markdown---and RMarkdown---wrapper around the venerable LaTeX letter class; see below for an expanded example also included as the package vignette.
This versions sets a few sensible default values for font, font size, margins, signature (non-)indentation and more; it also expands the documentation.
The NEWS entry follows:
Changes in tint version 0.0.2 (2017-10-29)
Set a few defaults for a decent-looking skeleton and template: font, fontsize, margins, left-justify closing (#3)
Ordering the "unused substitution" warnings to prevent superfluous differences between logs of package builds on the Reproducible Builds test framework. (#870221)
A new Build-Kernel-Version field in .buildinfo files that can be generated with a new dpkg-genbuildinfo --always-include-kernel option. (#873937)
On Saturday 28th October, Chris Lamb will present at freenode.live in Bristol, UK.
From October 31st November 2nd we will be holding the
3rd Reproducible Builds summit
in Berlin, Germany. If you are working in the field of reproducible builds, you should definitely
attend. Please see our public invitation mail and contact us if you have any questions.
New York University sessions
A three week session will be held at New York University to work on
reproducibilty issues in conjunction with the reproducible builds community.
Students from the Application Security course will be working for two weeks to work on the reproducible builds effort.
On Tuesday 24th Oct Ed Maste from FreeBSD will be presenting some reproducible
builds work for students.
On From Tuesday 24th of October to Monday 7th of November students will work
on fixing reproducibility issues brought up by the community. A milestone
presentation will be held by Santiago Torres-Arias and Preston Moore.
On Tuesday 7th November Holger Levsen will join the NYU team to wrap up the work.
Reviews of unreproducible packages
41 package reviews have been added, 119 have been updated and 54 have been removed in this week,
adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types were removed as they were fixed:
strip-nondeterminism development
Version 0.039-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb.
It included contributions
already covered by posts of the previous weeks, including:
Chris Lamb:
Clojure considers the .class file to be stale if it shares the same
timestamp of the .clj. We thus adjust the timestamps of the .clj to always
be younger. (#877418)
dh_strip_nondeterminism: Log which handler processed a file.
(#876140)
bin/strip-nondeterminism: Print a warning in --verbose mode if no
canonical time specified.
Misc.
This week's edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Santiago Torres & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.
Aaron Wolen and I are pleased to announce the availability of the initial 0.0.1 release of our new linl package on the CRAN network. It provides a simple-yet-powerful Markdown---and RMarkdown---wrapper the venerable LaTeX letter class. Aaron had done the legwork in the underlying pandoc-letter repository upon which we build via proper rmarkdown integration.
The package also includes a LaTeX trick or two: optional header and signature files, nicer font, better size, saner default geometry and more. See the following screenshot which shows the package vignette---itself a simple letter---along with (most of) its source:
The initial (short) NEWS entry follows:
Changes in tint version 0.0.1 (2017-10-17)
Initial CRAN release
The date is a little off; it took a little longer than usual for the good folks at CRAN to process the initial submission. We expect future releases to be more timely.
For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.
Witch Wells AZ Sunset
I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug 
The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled to announce a new release
1.0.12 of the 
Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating?
This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks while still making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also, an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors who already have accounts and are typically the source of most valuable contributions. Creating accounts might even help community members build deeper relationships and commitments to the group in ways that lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.
The fourteenth release of 
"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."
The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin. Fuck you Christel, lilo's life work did not deserve this.
What you knew as freenode after 12:00 UTC of May 19 will be managed by different people.
As I have no desire to volunteer under the new regime, this marks the end of my involvement with freenode. It had started in 1999 when I encouraged the good parts of 
A new maintenance release, now at version 0.0.18, of 