Every device I have just has a couple of blue ones and a couple of black ones, perhaps some orange ones and some USB-C ports, and good luck figuring out what they all can do. No symbols anywhere.

I have set up OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a couple of my machines with Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine. Windows runs at a perfectly good speed in this setup, and I use it when I want quick access to proprietary software that only runs in Windows. It’s simpler and more reliable than messing around with Wine. It can be a little more complicated if you want to share folders between guest and host, but there are several ways you can achieve that.

Yes, in addition to MS Office, MacOS is particularly used by a lot of people who work in art or music, and none of the programs they use professionally for that will run on Linux. You can’t just go it alone with free software when all your colleagues expect you to use proprietary tools. And what people like about MacOS is that it is reliable for running these programs with a minimum of fuss, has a solid low-latency sound system (for musicians), and has easy access to Apple features like cloud backup. Imitating its desktop brings none of that.

I find it surprising to see the NYT publish something that paints the IDF in a pretty bad light. Usually it’s one of the worst publications for uncritically relaying Israeli government propaganda.

Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.

Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

I’m not familiar with how the US electoral college works. I am talking about FPTP electoral systems like those in the UK and Canada. One MP is elected per constituency, and if a party wins a majority of the seats (that is, if they have a majority of the MPs), they can form a government. In such a system it’s common for a party to win the majority of seats without having a majority of votes, and possible for a party with the majority of votes not to win a majority of seats.

I’ve seen reports that just say someone “dies” instead of that the IDF killed them.

So we know these things work on one person’s computer (theirs) but not on another’s (yours). Such anecdotal experiences are not a reasonable basis on which to judge any OS, positively or negatively.

I suspect it’s not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you’ll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won’t scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.

Whether it’s possible for a party to win a majority of votes but lose an election, in a first-past-the-post system, will depend on the how the electoral districts are drawn, the voter turnout in each district, and the geographical distribution of the majority. The system itself does allow this to happen.

But it sounds so legit…

After being released last year, McFarland began planning a second incarnation of Fyre festival, which he said he devised during a stint in solitary confinement. He told his followers on social media: “This is everything I’ve been working towards. Let’s fucking go.”

A feature that has been shown to actively put people off your product. But in the end these companies would rather have investors than users, and it’s the investors they’re marketing to.

I’m in the same position. I prefer free software but there is none that does what Affinity does. If it goes subscription-only and they shut down the bought versions, it will have to be piracy time.

Are they? When they bought it they explicitly promised that they would not change the licensing. And no one believed them. Affinity was the only true competitor to Adobe products with equivalent functionality for a reasonable one-off payment instead of an extortionate subscription. I was so happy to find it - software that actually feels good to buy and use, Of course they’re going to ruin it.

seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation

Maybe they could start with X/Twitter and Facebook.

If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway

From a capitalist’s point of view, yes, but we need a society that enables people to act from other incentives than making money. And there are plenty of other reasons to make things.

To be fair, most of them aren’t as nasty as C++. But Rust certainly gives you a sense of security you don’t get with most other languages.

Ooh, I spy more snark!

I’m no Rust expert, but in my experience the borrow checker is a pain for a bit, then you start to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t, and after a while it has taught you to write cleaner code.

As one of the other quotes suggested: fork the kernel project and rewrite it entirely in Rust

That’s not practically possible given the scale of the kernel. And doing a total rewrite is almost always a recipe for getting stuck and, if you ever create anything, creating something worse.

Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it’s running or being used every day.

Almost all real-world software development is like this. That’s what we do.