curlypaul924

One image that certainly isn't the oldest but might be one of the oldest important images that is still online at its original location is the Blue Ribbin Online Free Speech Campaign animated logo (https://www.eff.org/files/br.gif).

This image dates back to 1996 when the EFF launched a campaign against the Communication Decency Act (CDA). Many of the pages across the internet turned their background images black in protest of the CDA. What remains of the CDA is today known as "Section 230".

The oldest image I could find on w3.org dates back to 19 Nov 1994: https://www.w3.org/Icons/32x32/warning

The W3 consortium itself was only a month old at the time.

Funny, I write terminal codes directly, because where I learned to program (PC DOS), there was no terminfo, only ANSI.SYS. I don't ever plan to port anything to DOS ever again, but old habits do die hard.

Do you think any of these stand a chance at replacing Doug Lea's malloc in glibc, or does dlmalloc provide more desirable behavior for the general case?

Some states don't load for me on my iphone; they just show up as white. The only significant amount of blue I see is in NY and WA; almost the entire rest of the country is red (or white).

I wouldn't be surprised if this shows up in my Facebook feed with someone claiming proof the election was stolen.

I was particularly interested in seeing the break down in my home state (SC), but it shows up as white.

My question still stands. If webkit is a bird and gecko is a reptile, then why are there (relatively) so few reptile browsers? Is it easier to embed engines from the webkit family, or are they popular because chrome and safari are popular?

Am I misunderstanding what webkit is? QtWebEngine uses chromium, but I thought that necessarily implied a webkit derivative (blink).

I do remember that, and while I wouldn't say I'm having flashbacks per se, I do agree that there are some disappointing similarities between that event and what we see in 2021. Do we not learn from our mistakes?

One enhancement I can imagine is charging a processing fee to have your face removed from the site. If it is as easy to build this as was claimed in the article, then it is only a matter of time before someone does this.

It's not clear whether the President was the orchestrator, or whether he was the conductor for music written by someone else.

This is similar to the conclusion I came to. Because there are so many logical possibilities, without a reputable source definitively stating that one of these is right, the door is open for anyone to pick a narrative and run with it.

> And to date the state hasn’t even made their charges public which seems ridiculous. ‘I have an arrest warrant for you, but I can’t tell you the charge’.

As I understand it, the police can tell _her_ the charges, but they cannot make the details of the warrants public until she has been processed. After that it becomes public record with the court.

This is itself an issue, because websites scrape court documents and re-publish the information as a service. They then charge a service fee to have the information removed, even in cases where the charges have been dropped.

The internet is real life, though. More and more, people are experiencing relationships through the lenses of their online personas. The online world is different from the offline world, and it works by different rules, but it is very much real. A conversation in chat is no different than a phone call, and we don't say that phone conversations aren't real life.

You bring up a good point about people behaving differently in in-person conversations and even perhaps being more willing to change their minds. I think there's a lot of truth there, but I think it comes from thinking that our online personas aren't real and from being physically distanced from the effects of what we say online.

It never occurred to me that my sarcasm online would be a factor in a friend's suicide, but now I live with the consequences of not understanding the very real effects of the things I said.

Both newspapers and social networks are multicast, but a newspaper is one-to-many and a social network is many-to-many. There's a material cost to publishing a newspaper that doesn't exist with electronic social networks. I don't know if a utility is a good analogy for a social network platform, but I am confident a newspaper is not either.

> From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber.

How is/was Parler different from Facebook in this regard? Facebook makes money on ads, so the longer you stay on their site, the more money they make. One way to get people to stay longer is by encouraging the sorts of posts that gets people riled up.

I'm not accusing Facebook of being complicit in the events of last week, but from personal observation, I see a lot more low-effort, angry posts on Facebook than I do on Twitter or Reddit.

Do you have a source for that? I would like to see the rest of the email. I tried a Google search, but could not find anything from a source I was confident is reliable.

I cannot get to slack in my phone or in the browser.

I wonder if this is because I haven't used the phone app in a few days, so I was already logged out, but you and others were still logged in?

My productivity increased when my son was that age. This was before COVID-19; I was working from home a lot for other reasons.

With two kids I have to schedule my time a lot more carefully to reach the same level of productivity. Even typing this comment I have to compromise on getting the exact wording I want lest I get interrupted before I finish typing.

Our system used to use grunt and then gulp and later webpack, and I was always annoyed at how slow the builds were. The startup time alone was several seconds, and it never used more than 1 core (our dev machines have 64 cores).

I ended up rewriting the whole thing as rake tasks that call out to rollup and other tools. Now it's fast, and as a bonus I can actually understand what it's doing and why.

I remember when I first learned about multitasking. I think I read an article in Compute! or PC Magazine about Desqview or Concurrent DOS, and I remember wondering "Who would ever want to run two programs at the same time? Nobody has a multitasking brain!"

I feel somewhat the same way, but I also wonder whether the same project with a different name would have been successful.

I especially like the histogram with the per-month bins. It shows clearly both the tendency of developers to leave over time and the fluctuation due to release cycle.

The affiliation graph is also interesting. I think if I were to put a number on how much I liked GNOME in each year, there would be an inverse correlation with the percentage of developers that come from Red Hat (with 1999 being an outlier -- I was a fan of both Red Hat and GNOME back then).

Is the issue JS as an extension language, or is it using JS for core events? Or maybe something else? People write successful games with Pygame, and Python's VM is much less optimized than what's available in the JS world, even in 2010.

To get 1-frame response time, you need to poll and redraw in the same 16.67ms window. That's an eternity inside a computer. I can write a JS curses app using blessed and it feels pretty snappy, so I'm guessing JS isn't the fundamental problem. The GNOME folk have always been a fan of IPC though (remember ORBit?), so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the latency is due to context switching.

Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.

The last time I used Linux on a laptop, I had to edit a config file to get it to suspend or hibernate when I close the lid. Even then, sometimes it kept running, and I would run out of battery. To me that seems like such a basic feature, and it's always worked fine on Windows. After waiting a decade and a half for someone smart to solve this problem, I eventually just started running Windows and Cygwin on all my laptops. Problem solved.

I disagree that Plasma is lightweight.

I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720.

One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough.

So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory.

I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd.

Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this.

The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default.

The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.

I thought oil shell was the hot new thing. I really think it has the potential to displace both bash and zsh.

My impression has always been that zsh is where cool new features go first, and then bash plays catch up. I remember longing for associative arrays in bash while zsh and ksh already had them. What finally got me to move to zsh was colorized syntax; it makes some of my typos very obvious before I press Enter. In general zsh is still more pleasant for interactive use, but I still write scripts in bash since it is everywhere.

If the mRNA is unstable, then what are the chances that at some point it might code for a dangerous protein such as a prion as it degrades?

The CDC and other sources argue the vaccine is safe because it doesn't alter your DNA, but I have a vivid imagination and can think of a thousand other ways something might go wrong. Having my DNA altered was never one of my concerns.

> I looked at various models over the summer knowing that while they may be wrong, they may be useful. But they did not help much at all for understanding trends and relationships. Take for example models that have been modified for mask mandates. During the summer, most of them had trended down to zero with masks “on” but the opposite has since happened.

Most of the models I've seen seem to be focused on generating long-term predictions. The big questions people wanted answered at the beginning were "how long will the pandemic last?" and "when will we hit the peak?". And IF you can calibrate your model correctly, for those questions, SIR and its relatives make sense.

But those aren't the questions we should be asking. For public policy decisions, what we really want to know is "is the epidemic spiraling out of control?". For answering that question, a simple exponential fit does well enough in the short term.

Why aren't more models focused on the short-term, when long-term predictions heavily depend on finicky human behavior?

> There is a genuine amount of circular reasoning where models are used to validate social distancing efforts which in turn are incorporated into revised models.

Do you think this reasoning amplifies or reduces social distancing efforts?

The Q has an historical meaning for Infiniti.