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Can you expand on your vaporware claims? I don't see what in the link would suggest that.

And for some of us, not focusing on AI is a good thing. A physics and simulation focus with gobs of memory is certainly intriguing to me.

For more oddly adorable hummingbirds, I highly recommend this video of a swarm of them having a bit of a party in the water fountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKu6NEf02g

Incredible little feathered narwhal bees. And there are so many different kinds of hummingbirds; several hundred I think.

Another fun bird fact about bluejays and crows: listening for a bunch of screaming crows and/or jays is a good way of finding owls, as they both seem to have an inherent hatred of owls, and harass them whenever given a chance. In my area, the poor owls rarely seem to get any rest from being swooped and yelled at all day.

I really like marginalia; even more so in this day and age where most search engines are filled to the brim with useless AI ad-infested muck. I find myself turning to marginalia search more often to find real people discussing or writing about whatever topic I'm after.

One thing I would really really love, that I didn't know I wanted until he put it in the random/explore page, is for all search results to display a screenshot of the web site that was found. It's a wonderful visual cue that helps me find stuff I've seen before; I often can picture the website I found a piece of information on, but don't have it saved anywhere. I know he's got it under the domain info, but at that point, I may as well just click the link. I think it'd be great to add it to the main search result listing.

I've got a mockingbird that comes and asks for food every morning. The cardinals and titmice will fly up to the tree outside the window and wait as soon as I open the window, but the mockingbird will sit on the tray on the window and stare at me until I open it. When I do, he'll wait in the tree, but as soon as I put the meal worms down, he'll come back and start chowing down. Doesn't seem to mind being within an arms reach of me at the open window. Never makes a sound though. Not while I can see him around the feeder at least.

Working from home with the window/feeder right next to my desk is pretty nice. You get to see the different temperaments and "personalities" of the various birds pretty quick. Sometimes even within the same species; e.g., most of the male cardinals are a bit aggressive, and chase other smaller birds away if they get too close, but a new young male that started coming recently is considerably more timid, and gets pushed around by most of the other sparrows and wrens.

The red-bellied woodpecker that likes to make machine-gun noises on my gutters every day, however, does get a little tiresome.

But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.

Absolutely no judgement for however people want to licence and distribute their software, but I've seen the support burden used as justification for closed source/selling software quite a bit recently, and wonder how often people might be conflating open source with open development. There's no reason an open source project has to accept bug reports or pull requests from anyone. See SQLite or many of the tools from Fabrice Bellard for example.

Again, I've got no problem with people selling software or closed source models, but I've never understood using this justification. Maybe in this instance he's a well known public figure with published contact info that people will abuse?

I'm right there with you on using :term. I also do a lot of work on console only tty's without X or gui environments and splitting between code/text and term is very handy.

And I imagine there will likely be a sudden increase in the number of classified software projects and national security systems in the next 180 days. This may very well be another case of a law trying to make things better, but ultimately having the opposite effect.

The idea that it's wrong to use slavery as a cheap labor force is also modern and outside historical norms. Just because it's historically prevalent doesn't make something right or even good/acceptable. Some things based on historical norms are good. Some clearly aren't. And it seems to me a bit disingenuous to ignore the technological changes and the speed, pervasiveness, and invasiveness with which advertising is now done compared to the historical context being appealed to. Even if one grants that advertising wasn't "as bad" back then, that doesn't make what we have now acceptable.

I've said it before, but I feel like I need to keep saying it: If the people actually using/consuming a product aren't willing to pay the cost required to make/produce said product, then that's probably a good indicator that the product doesn't have enough value to justify its existence. If the Verge can't convince enough people to pay for their output, I'd argue it's not worth keeping around. Advertising ruins the producer/consumer relationship and incentivizes behaviors that disadvantage the consumer and push the producer away from their original purpose. If the Verge wants to diversify income, then they should provide a product that has value to a wider audience.

That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made.

And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating.

People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.

I would argue that in many ways (that vary from project to project) the duplicated efforts are a good thing overall. Now, instead of having one single group or person working on a particular topic, there are many and the knowledge, learning, experience, and expertise that comes from that isn't locked up with only a select few. That can be applied in more areas, used for more things, or carried into other endeavors. It also hedges against all that expertise being lost if the few experts of the original project abandon it for whatever reason.

I don't see all the efforts that go into *BSD, Windows, macOS, etc... as being wasted just because Linux is available, nor would I consider the effort to try something completely new in os/kernel design that starts from a clean slate a waste, even if it doesn't end up becoming wildly popular. Not everyone who has the capacity to work on a duplicate effort would be able to contribute to the original, and the original will never be able to perfectly meet the goals/needs of everyone.

Additionally, having worked with some of their network devices at the driver level, they seem to be kludge piled on top of hack poured over a soup of workarounds for hardware bugs. Maybe they've gotten better recently, but just looking at their drivers, it didn't paint a great picture.

> it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows

I was surprised by this since all I need on Linux is llvm and clang, but looking at the official getting started page, it does indeed say "MSVC compiler and windows SDK" are required. Is that really the only way to run it on windows, or is that just the path most familiar to a typical windows developer?

I personally disagree with saying it requires IDE support. I want to write a ctags parser for it, but that's all I would ever use; as a die-hard vim user, I never liked all the language server stuff people are so reliant on these days. But if that's what people want to use, it's available for Odin as well: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/ols/ -or- https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols

I thought the funding section was a little odd; I was under the impression that Bill was being paid by JangaFX to develop/maintain the language? But I think the corporate sponsorship of language development should be the norm. If existing languages are not sufficient to solve a business need, then they should pay for the development of a new one (or directly support one they rely on). But making a language "popular" and widely used is directly opposed to making it paid. There are plenty of closed languages out there, but they're only used by the corporations that developed them, and are probably kept closed to make sure the language doesn't stray from their business needs, and/or to maintain a competitive advantage.

Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.

Another incredible agent in WWII was Virginia Hall, aka the limping lady, who managed some pretty incredible feats, escapes, and rescues and did so with only one leg.

For a (hopefully entertaining) rundown of her exploits, you can watch this 22m video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdGS5ia2OQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Hall

Have you seen libAgar (https://libagar.org)? Cross platform support is certainly there, covering everything from windows XP (and earlier) to *bsd and SGI IRIX. I'm not sure what all having support for accessibility requires as I've never had to worry about it, but am curious if 1, agar has what's needed, and 2, what exactly is required of a GUI library for accessibility. Screen reader support? (Are there SR standards for desktop applications)? Dynamic scaling? High contrast?

(For embedded and/or touch first UI, LVGL is pretty nice, but probably lacking any semblance of accessibility features apart from keyboard navigation, but you could hook that yourself).

It's got a fairly linux like ABI, though we don't aim or care to be 1-1 compatible, and it has/requires our own custom interfaces. Porting most software that was written for linux is usually pretty easy. But we can't just run binaries compiled for linux on our stuff. So for languages that require a compiler written in its own language where they don't supply cross compilers or boot strapping compilers built with the lowest common denominator (usually c or c++), things can get a little trickier.

This is accurate. I'm an OS/kernel developer and a colleague was given the task of porting rust to our OS. If I remember correctly, it did indeed take months. I don't think mrustc was an option at the time for reasons I don't recall, so he did indeed have to go all the way back to the very early versions and work his way through nearly all the intermediate versions. I had to do a similar thing porting java, although that wasn't quite as annoying as porting rust. I really do wish more language developers would provide a more practical way of bootstrapping their compilers like the article is describing/attempting. I've seen some that do a really good job. Others seem to assume only *nix and Windows exist, which has been pretty frustrating.

The practical concern for my colleagues and me is that we're OS/kernel developers for an operating system that isn't currently supported. I had to fight these kind of problems to get java ported to our OS, and a coworker had to do it for rust, which was much much harder. And he did end up having to start from one of the earliest versions and compile nearly every blasted version between then and now to get the latest. It's a royal pain and a major time sink. If there were a viable rustc that was written in C or even C++ at the time, we could have been done in a few days. Instead it took months.

If there aren't enough people willing to pay for someone else's work product to make it worth the producers time/effort, then I'd argue that maybe that work product is not actually worth producing in the first place. In the realm of youtube, that may require putting out enough quality content as a loss-leader to gain a following large enough that a percentage is willing to support the creator directly. Many have made this work well.

I have many issues with advertising in general, but put simply, it breaks the basic transactional nature of business. When the people benefiting from someone else's work product aren't the ones paying for it, then both the producer and consumer end up being taken advantage of for someone else's profit.

The way I see it, tools like Patreon that allow consumers to directly support people they benefit from are just what are needed.

There are also a handful of 3d terminal/ASCII engines out there like this one: https://github.com/sephirot47/AsciiEngine

Arguably less useful than something like pygamelib, but still pretty fun.

Officially supported? Yes. With no changes? Largely, but you usually configure and compile it with your application for the platform you're targeting, so the vast majority of your code should be the same, but it might require some tweaking to any hardware specific initialization.

You can also run it under X using an SDL backend.

One thing to note though, is that, unless they added it in 9.1, certain mouse control schemes that we've come to expect from desktop applications aren't supported. Since it was made primarily for touch screens, it only supports mouse click (tap) and long press, so it doesn't support things like mouse wheel scrolling in a scroll box, or mouse button right click for example. But tapping, sliding, flinging controls and screens like it's a smartphone work really well. I had made a first pass at implementing support for more desktop mouse functionality a while back, but the maintainer wanted a more generalized solution to what I had done, and I haven't had a chance to go back and play with it again. It's pretty easy and fun to hack on the code base. It might not fit the bill for all UI problems as it's pretty low level, but it's remarkably robust and featureful and I had a great time using it for a number of applications on a custom desktop OS in a similar vein to the linux framebuffer.

I love solvespace. It's a wonderful program. But I don't think I've ever been able to make a complete model of something I needed without running into model breaking NURBs errors. Maybe there's a list of known gotchya's that most users know to avoid in their modeling, but for me it seems to break on very trivial things so I've never been able to use solvespace as a tool. Which is sad, because otherwise, I quite like it.

I'm with you. I didn't have too many issues learning it. But I also didn't know other CAD software, so I'm sure that plays a big part for people; knowing what you want to do, but not being able to find it can be very frustrating, especially when what you want to do now requires an unfamiliar workflow that looks from the outside unnecessarily complicated. So I can understand people's dislike of the software.

I differ on recommending MangoJelly though; video can be good for learning CAD, but I got real tired of having to sit through a 15-40 minute video before getting to the point of what was being demonstrated. I would much prefer written tutorials or pages describing the specific feature I'm trying to use/learn. The FreeCAD wiki was more useful to me than MangoJelly's stuff and I hope people don't forget that it's there. But many folks like his approach, so do what works for you.

> The origins of the earlier monoliths were never revealed, sparking conspiracy theories involving aliens or that the appearance of the structures is an elaborate, highly coordinated prank.

The source of the originals has been known for years, and would be trivial to find out with a basic search, but I guess that's too hard for people these days...

Answer: A couple of youtubers made them for a laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-pKKM6CXr0

> Opinionated when it makes life easier. > Tab character in source code is a compile error.

I don't think I will ever understand this. I get that different people have different preferences and reasons for those preferences, but why deliberately alienate such a large set of potential users? Especially after a statement asserting it's to make life easier? Who's life? The developers who will be using the language? I'm not convinced forcing all users to either type more white space or figure out how to configure their editor to auto convert (some of which may not be able to) is really making life easier. Or is it for the language developers themselves? In which case I'd argue that's probably the wrong thing to be optimizing for, and that it isn't that difficult to support both anyway.

And to be clear, I'm not interested in litigating the tabs vs spaces debate here, or even white space as part of code/syntax. It's this attitude that I'm seeing a lot more in recent years of 'I know better than you how you should do/use _X_ so I'm not going to give you the option'. Obviously not every project out there can be tailorable to every user's every preference, but I wish that when deciding what to accommodate and what not to, it would be done not on one's own myopic perception of the problem space, but on actual limitations and priorities and user needs. And when making a choice that may not be widely popular, be up front about why and how that decision was made. I'm much happier accepting 'not enough dev resources to support the added complexity in the parser' than I am 'tabs are stupid and you're dumb for wanting to use them'.

Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.

For the mechanics, there are a ton of good books, articles, and sites that can walk you through the syntax and I'm sure others here will have plenty of good suggestions on that.

While those are necessary, I'm of the opinion that you don't really learn unless you do. For systems programming, there are many good projects out there for you to poke at. I'd suggest getting a hold of the source code for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Learn how to build each of them, and install/run what you built to a VM. Then making a simple device driver for a serial or USB device would be a good introductory project. Even better, get an Arduino or something similar, and make/program both ends. Maybe a little button/light box that blinks if the CPU thermal throttles and can instruct the computer to launch an application when buttons are pressed for example.

At the end of the day, you're just going to have to find something you're interested in actually doing/finishing so you can stay motivated enough to push your self up the learning curve, just like learning anything else really. The fact that you'll be reading/writing/learning C is nearly irrelevant.

Similar for me, except that I always saw engine as specific type of motor. Hence "motorsports" was perfectly normal for gas burning vehicular racing.