Unfortunately Putin and his close advisors believe that they are essentially Lincoln fighting the Confederacy in an epic battle of good and evil for which no permanent peace can be accepted. Convincing them to see sense is the only non-military resolution to the war.
Dictators have always been paranoid about everyone else, this is why they are always extremely careful about personal protection.
What you dont appreciate is that Russia is a multi tiered society. Im not denying a small number of thousand European Russians have died, but the only cities or peoples that Putin fears are Moscow and St P. So far only a few thousnad have died from there and basically everyone in those cities knows they are effectively spared from being forced into the army.
Most of the dead and fighting are from places you and me have never heard of, that is cities and towns and regions filled with the many other non European peoples that are under Russia. Russia is a land of over a 100 peoples, there are dozens if not more different cultures and languages. Those are the people being killed.
The European type Russians in Moscow and St P know this, and they wont dare protest because they are not the wons dying.
The only language fascists understand is an overwhelming display of force.
There will be no non-military resolution. Either Russia wins by subverting Western governments - which has been a partial success so far, but not the knock-out Putin was expecting - or Russia implodes.
No, The type of Nazi's which invade their neighbors. Like Russia did when it co-started the second world war by invading Poland and shortly there after Finland. And then occupying eastern Europe til about 1990. And then occupying the Crimea and invading Ukraine. And of course Moldavia, Georgia, etc. Basically Russia has always been occupying countries in Europe (or pieces thereof) in the last century.
France, true to form, is popularly supporting their neo-Nazis, elevating their pro-Putin sell-outs to power. Like Israel, they seem to have missed the global wave of anti-corruption elections.
Nah, both sides have no choice but to fight because Ukraine can't make territorial concessions, and Russia can't leave a militarized Ukraine intact. If either government compromises the nationalist factions of their own countries will lynch them. The only resolution to this war is to fight it out until one or both sides collapse.
There is a difference between "can't" and "won't".
For Ukraine, losing means the end of their existence as an independent state, so they truly have no choice but to fight. For Russia, losing means one dude being embarrassed. They can stop whenever they want.
Russia losing means Putin will lose power. If he loses power suddenly he will likely die. Putin doesn't want to die. He can't stop, so he will never let Russia stop without a justification that can appease the Russian people. The Russian people don't want to stop either, because of the sunk cost fallacy and the perception that Europe wants to attack them and break Russia into little pieces and the internal propaganda that the only way to prevent that is to win and destroy Ukraine's military power.
Sure, everybody could sit down and agree to stop, but both sides have already many times vehemently denied any possibility of a compromise on their core issues, so what do you expect to happen? Both Ukraine and Russia view this war as existential. Both have red lines they refuse to bend on and which they demand the other side to bend to. Where do you see a non-military path to peace?
This is all about what the Russian people want, or think they want, rather than what they can. If they must live in fear of the scary Europe, that's good with me, we've been living in fear of them so far.
I don't think what happens to Putin personally matters that much in the grand scheme of things. His country was a murderous regime before him, and will remain one once he's gone.
> Where do you see a non-military path to peace?
I never claimed there is one, just that Russia has no say over whether Ukraine stays militarised or not. We should not normalise the demands of mad men as if they are legitimate.
"They" stopping the war really means Putin and he can’t afford to walk away empty-handed without admitting the invasion was a blunder. It’s more than just him being embarrassed, that would be the end for him.
My point is that he has to go, or Zelenskyy, or some external diplomacy that makes everyone look good.
That said, even if replacing Zelenskyy gave Putin a face-saving excuse to negotiate, Russian ultra-nationalist pressure means Putin still won't settle without keeping the occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
With Zelenskyy refusing any land concessions, peace is virtually impossible while both remain in power.
I agree for the most part, but like I said in another comment, we should not sanewash the demands of a genocidal dictator. What Putin wants is of little relevance, we don't ask the victims of violence to make concessions towards their aggressors and promise they won't fight back next time.
Wanting some assurance that your country won't be invaded again in a couple years like this time isn't "optics" or "saving face". Zelenskyy openly said Ukraine is open to freezing the frontline where it is as long as we have any sort of assurance Russia won't attack us shortly after.
Russia demanding to limit our army size is not assurance
Russia demanding us not to join any defensive alliance is not assurance
Putin demanding we give up well equipped defensive positions even before any real negotiations start is not assurance either.
Except Ukraine never threathened to invade Russia.
Why would they?
Russia literally invades Ukraine so any territorial concession is just giving up your position for nothing. They will just continue from their new position.
This is their house and they are attacked by robbers. Luckily they are armed.
You dont understand the mind of the dictator especially a Russian dictator. They have always been paranoid about their neighbours, this is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years because of geographic luck they have no defensive boundaries.
The UK famously has the sea, which has helped it for a thousand years. Its no conincidence that the boundary of Spain and France are the Pyrenees or France and Italy are the Alps or China and India have the Himalayas.
Powerful countries like natural boundaries like this because they are always worried about the other side. Russia for all its size has mountains or water stopping others. Putin wants Ukraine because he wants to push RUssia back to the USSR boundaries which were mountains in Europe. WHen Russia controlled and had roops in East Germany the open plains were narrow, today they are thousands of kms. Yes Im not defending Putin his violence and aggression and changes to Finland are all his fault, but thats not whwat im discussing.
He wants the boundary to the sea and mountains. Unfortunately he doesnt care how many millions die, all he cares about is his imperial amb itions.
> You dont understand the mind of the dictator especially a Russian dictator. They have always been paranoid about their neighbours, this is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years because of geographic luck they have no defensive boundaries.
So, so wrong. Putin himself made it clear it's about territories. His admiration of imperial Russia isn't a secret. He wants more territories. It's not that deep.
Russia can absolutely leave a militarized Ukraine intact. Give back the pieces of the country they tried to steal, pay war reparations, send some people to The Hague to get fitted for new ties. Move on.
No one wants a war with Russia, even now. The whole "the West will invade" trope is just a way to keep Russians from focusing on their own situation. If the populace paid even knew a little of what Western media said about a potential conflict between the West and Russia, they'd realize this... "The Day After", etc.
Why would Putin care what ordinary Russians think ?
Every single Russian citizen is scared of Putin, because they know he owns everything including their lives.
They also know that most of the dead and fighting are not even European white Russian, most of the unfortunates are from the many other cultures and peoples that have been conquered.
I think russian government cares a lot about population support, and despite the efforts of the few Russian anti-war heroes, war still has broad support from a population, so it buys time for russian super rich to enjoy their position in society. Moreover, historically russian government used wars as a means to raise support, 1999 Ichkeriya war was used as a vehicle to prop up Putin popularity, 2008 Georgia invasion was able to gain widespread support for Medvedev, and of course 2014 invasion, and to lesser extent Syria invasion, repelled all the mass protests that were happening in early 2010s. Large chunk of population enjoys warmongering, hails strongmen and genocide. This does not extend to all Russians citizen, but likely majority of them.
Russia believes they have to attack their neighbours, because they believe they need to push all the way to geographic boundaries like the sea or mountains.
Unfortunately this is how dictators think. Nobodies die for their ambitions and tahts what we see.
Putin believes he needs the boundaries to be what Stalin took after WW2 from the old and sick Roosevelt who gave him too much of Eastern Europe.
Have you watched too much of Peter Zeihan? Dude is mostly talking nonsense confidently while hiking.
As someone living in Ukraine I can tell you he understands literally nothing about our politics, defense capabilities etc but talks very confidently about it.
I am not a Putin supporter and i hope he rots in hell, the sooner the better, but that doesnt change the fact that he does wish to recreate the USSR and its satellite state system.
Im sorry your home country cant be left in peace but those are the facts.
Putin has said the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest political tragedy of the 21C.
USSR bit might be true, but the Russian invasion so far is the top contender for the greatest tragedy political or not of the first half of the XXI century.
I don’t think Putin can. He certainly doesn’t believe that would be a better outcome than continuing to fight (although he’s definitely not being realistic about that). That would be complete defeat, and he can’t admit that.
We still maintain GNU Coreutils upstream, FWIW. I had to beg Canonical to address bug reports on the version that they distribute, which was ignored after the switch to uutils.
For that reason I suggest switching to any other distribution. Of the ones I have interacted with, I have had good experiences with all of them.
> The GNU versions work fine in macOS. Apple doesn’t want to distribute them, but that’s mean you can’t use them.
We also test GNU coreutils on macOS. It is a bit tricky since the other maintainers and I don't own any macOS machines for testing. But we seem to do well enough with a shared system that Adélie Linux kindly allows the compile farm [1] to use, along with some additional CI machines.
Hi, one of the co-maintainers of GNU coreutils here. It is nice to hear things worked on HP-UX. I don't have access to it, and I don't think the other maintainers do either. See this commit [1].
[1] https://github.com/coreutils/gnulib/commit/c599eba7bed3baa30...
Yes we're using quite an old version 8.13 and yet it does the job for our build which maintains an EXTREMELY important bit of software in public service relating to healthcare.
It's on Itanium so obviously we have to move away from that to Linux but the existence of open source tools like coreutils gives us time.
No such luck with python. We have to postpone some changes as a result.
As I say, there's some kind of effect where changes that are only negative on the margins are cheered until one finds oneself on one of those margins.
Glad you could get an older version works well for you. We probably would have tried to continue supporting it if we had access to it. I'm a bit sad I never got the chance to use it once.
However, the other maintainers, who have been doing it for many more years than I have, and various other authors are certainly more deserving than I am. I am similarly thankful to them.
I dislike LLMs, but if a bug is a bug, then I will fix it, typically without complaint. That is enough to get added to this list. The "curators" demand you accost reporters for any mention of LLM usage.
They don't demand that you do it. They just flag it as such. Just like how the ESRB doesn't demand you remove crude humor from your game - you might just get a T rating for it.
While I'd agree that the only harm being done here is branding a project as being "tainted" in some way, much like a parental warning sticker on an album marks it as "offensive" in some way, but that still leaves the question of what a project is supposed to do to avoid the label.
If someone reports a bug to you and says that they used AI to find it, then what are the options? If you fix the bug you get the tainted status because you "accepted the use of AI for finding bugs or security issues" so what's the alternative? Leaving the bug in your code? Patch it, but also send an angry reply to the person who submitted it telling them to never do that again? How does that help your project?
Functionally, this just makes the "Condones LLM Ingestion" category entirely useless. That still leaves tags like "Vibecoded" or "Gen AI 'Art'" tags useful, but it pretty much guarantees that people will be put off and dismissive of the entire effort. Extremism to the point of absurdity only hurts their cause.
In theory, I agree that it shouldn't be tricky. However, in practice, it is a bit tricky since all the different implementations have different ways to perform reflinks.
Linux has FICLONE [1], which I prefer because it operates on two file descriptors, allowing you to safely modify file metadata after the fact. macOS has clonefile, clonefileat, and fclonefileat [2]. Sadly, there is no way to operate on two file descriptors. The best you get is fclonefileat, which operates on a source file descriptor. Solaris has reflink and reflinkat, which operate on two paths, the latter relative to file descriptors [3]. In that case, one needs to be careful opening the destination to make changes to the metadata.
GNU coreutils has support for reflinks on Linux and macOS. But I've been thinking about adding support for Solaris as of late [4]. Sadly, I don't use it enough to test it as much as I would like.
Hopefully, a few years down the line the interfaces converge, and it is as simple as hard linking.
Hey, I perfectly understand if not. But do you have the sources that were used to build those binaries?
The oldest version on the GNU ftp server is fileutils-3.13 [1]. I vaguely remember having some links to older versions, probably somewhere in my archived mail. But I don't remember if it was fileutils-3.9 or earlier.
I co-maintain GNU coreutils, so I am interested in reading them. If you have them, you can email me privately or on the public mailing list. Both are listed on the homepage [2].
When you get to packages that are old enough, DiscMaster[0] is helpful for this since these packages were often on magazine cover CD-ROMs! There are several files matching "fileutils-3.9.tar.gz"[1]; the two variants seem to be the original GNU release (182.9KiB, the one you're looking for), and what looks like the result of a "make install" (57.4KiB).
The original GNU release of fileutils-3.6 is there too (but be careful; one of the two files appears to include Makefiles from a ./configure run, while the other doesn't), though 3.7 and 3.8 don't appear to be. You'll need to sift through to find what you need in some cases, but it's an incredibly valuable research tool.
Note: To download a file, you'll need to click on the filename, and then click the small arrow at the top that looks like a red arrow pointing down to a white box with red/green lights. (Which I assume is their representation of a desktop computer.)
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