That's achievable in multiple ways. A standalone window manager for example. KDE with all widgets removed and "do not disturb" mode should work too, but I haven't used KDE in a long time.
8,700 karma · joined March 4, 2017
I thought it goes without saying that I don't mean ads shown directly by YouTube, if you don't already block those in 2025 I don't know what to say.
You can, actually, with a simple rule of thumb: if it's being advertised on YouTube, it's statistically low quality or a scam. The sheer number of brands that sponsor videos just to be exposed later for doing something shady is just too high.
If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality.
> it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back
You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.
> If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment
This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.
Users care about convenience and familiarity, then perhaps (perceived) functionality. People who care more about quality are a niche, not only in the software industry. Prioritizing quality means higher cost in some way, even if it's just effort to research the best choice.
> Most people will use a proprietary project if it's better.
Most people don't even compare available choices. Usually they don't choose based on license, but based on popularity or familiarity, based on what's the standard in the industry or within their community. If a user's been running a tool for years and it's good enough for their purposes they have no reason to look for an alternative, and the license or whether it's "better" is irrelevant. And big tech platforms love to amplify this effect with dark patterns and various forms of lock-in.
Most users put functionality above the license, copyleft or not. Among two comparable projects one will always be more popular and I highly doubt the license is often a deciding factor for that.
> It implies that copyleft projects such as yours will be largely pushed out of the mainstream
Those CAD projects were never in the mainstream to begin with. And FreeCAD might have a niche target audience but for me it has no viable competitor. The situation got better in recent years but I don't see why I should make myself dependent on a subscription based commercial project that's incompatible with everything else including other products from the same company.
> Such permissive projects will always spead and develop faster, all other things being equal
Such as? Wouldn't one expect BSD systems to have overtaken Linux in the last three decades with that assumption?
If it's revolutionary as you say, why are companies laying off people when higher productivity per employee should mean that more employees increase the advantage from AI? Why aren't early adopters running circles around competitors and producing larger, more frequent and/or higher quality updates and products in a measurable way?
That would be possible even on spinning harddrives as long as they're already spinning.
The fastest memory can't prevent the real reason games take so long to the menu: company logos. The Xbox can already resume a closed game within a few seconds, loading a simple main menu is trivial in comparison.
If a game just sends info about a crash I couldn't care less.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.
This animation slows every transition by one second including entering and leaving fullscreen mode, because on Mac OS fullscreen works by moving the window to a new workspace. There is no justification for this.
TIOBE also includes SQL because technically SQL is Turing complete and that's the criterion for inclusion on the index, ignoring that this isn't the real reason people are using SQL.
The more I think about this index the more my head hurts.
How do you measure the downloads on Github? Do you include only releases or also git clones? How do you compare languages with a package manager vs languages without one? What if the language compiler is hosted on a less popular git platform or maybe a personal website? Do you contact those regularly to give you the precise numbers? How do you know those numbers are reliable? How do you e.g. count the number of Rust toolchain installations without putting telemetry into rustup? Do you count nightly + stable + testing toolchains separately?
So it makes sense TIOBE only uses search results as those are comparable - or at least they seem to be, because search engines change their ranking and filtering methods over time and maybe personalize results.
And I just don't get why the compiler has to throw an error about a formatting preference when the builtin formatter already changes it accordingly. Any serious project can just mandate use of the formatter to keep things consistent and be done with it. Instead the github issues have people debate tabs vs spaces because the compiler took a side in order to end the "bikeshed of all bikesheds", ironically contributing to it.
> In order to simplify everything, tabs are not allowed. Spaces are necessary; we can't ban spaces.
They seem to be open to the alternative but not to a solution that isn't forced on people:
> Maybe someday, we'll switch to tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment and make it a compile error if they are incorrectly mixed
Zig already has a builtin code formatter that automatically changes formatting to their preference, but that's not enough.
> That's the entire purpose of the concept of warning
Yes, but as far as I know the Zig compiler cannot emit warnings, only errors. Because warnings are potential footguns too and we can't have that.
The thing is, I don't disagree with the fundamental arguments that led to these decisions, I just think it goes a step too far and they're trying too hard. I understand they aim to reduce footguns in C with that language but that doesn't mean they have to prevent someone from wearing the wrong shoe for the occasion.
Meanwhile Rust treats all possible error types the same way as long as they're wrapped in Result.
Considering their AI achieved about 96% accuracy to the reference, it would be more interesting to see how Blender does on fitting hardware and with a matching quality setting. Or maybe even a modern game engine.
So yes, convenience and progress are strongly correlated but they're not the same.
Critical thinking is inconvenient and does not scale, but it's very important for finding the truth. Technology that disincentivizes critical thought makes it easier to spread lies.
It doesn't matter whether it's better than humans, the one thing that matters are the consequences of its widespread use.
The number of births per woman has been declining for decades worldwide, in cases like South Korea it's collapsing massively. That has many reasons, but it's obviously linked to loneliness and relationships.
> This is a manufactured crisis like seed oils, or ADHD and autism diagnoses
More ADHD and autism diagnoses aren't a crisis, they're an improvement in detection and diagnosis and overall life quality of the affected people.
The famous quote "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" is older than the internet, so this asymmetry was already bad enough back then and whoever coined the quote couldn't have imagined how much farther it would shift.
> QWERTY sucks because it’s not ergonomic and there’s no modern rhyme or reason to where the keys are placed
Fair, and at least this article doesn't perpetuate the ridiculous myth that QWERTY was designed to be slow. But I still disagree that it's worth switching away from it - alternatives are not really faster, the ergonomic difference is negligible, and it comes with severe drawbacks like difficulties with using pretty much every other keyboard in the world. I've seen several people using Dvorak say they wouldn't recommend it in hindsight but keep Dvorak because they don't want to relearn typing yet another time.
But I think it's safe to say that split spacebars are generally superior (except for gaming), aside from the spacebar the thumbs have barely anything to do otherwise and the huge spacebar wastes most of the best real estate on a keyboard. The actual problem with QWERTY (and Dvorak and everything else) is the physical arrangement of the keys.