I mean that an individual folder will always look the same (consistent), and also look distinctly different from any other folder (unique) if that’s how you arranged it. So you could identify a folder instantly.

Everything in list view looks the same at a glance, and most file managers don’t retain a folder window’s size and placement. Modern macOS kiiiind of does but you have to fight it if you don’t want a single-window browsing UI.

The last time I found icon view useful was in Mac OS 9. There were three main characteristics that made it useful that no current systems have AFAIK:

1. The icon grid was tight (32 pixels) and you could either snap items to that grid or place them freely.

2. Window sizes and places were directly associated with folders. (There was no “browser-style” single-window mode.)

3. File names used dynamic spacing. Longer names would occupy multiple grid spaces as needed.

These factors meant that every folder had a consistent and potentially unique size, placment, and layout.

OS X took the Finder and either ruined or neglected everything good about it. Windows explorer has always been garbage. Never found a Linux file manager with a compelling icon view either (though to be fair, I’ve never looked all that hard). The lack of system-level metadata for layout kind of mandates an abstraction between a directory and its display.

Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.

Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.

SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.

Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.

do they just want everything to be crawled

Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.

The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.

Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.

They actually want to increase what can be done in user mode, to reduce reliance on kernel mode code.

That’s basically what Apple did with macOS 11. They deprecated kernel extensions and replaced them with “system extensions”, and created new APIs so security tools, VPNs and such could function without kernel-level privileges.

mpv still works.

Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.

There are two potential show-stoppers.

1. Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.

2. Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.

It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.

If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.

Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.

If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).

Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.

Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.

This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.

FOSS projects are often labors of love.

Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

I’m not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.