robmusial

The only reason we had a computer was my dad was a machinist/metal fabricator and was convinced by business partners that he had to stop using his graph paper and scientific calculator and NEEDED AutoCAD. We had the tablet, puck, everything. He sat down to use it once and went straight back to graph paper.

But this was a great boon to me because it gave me a highly spec'd 486DX in the early 90s.

Oh they definitely did give me FTP sites, I just didn't want to ramble too much. I think at that time I had a USRobotics 33.6 sportster and a shared line with the rest of the house. Downloading large-ish files even overnight was a no go. My mom was a school teacher and the thought of her missing a call from the district about a snow day or other calamity would have been a disaster!

Hilarious that we were both commandeering computers of those we lived with via a $2.99 copy of Red Hat. Good times!

Like a lot of 90s kids my first language was BASIC via QBasic. After feeling like I had outgrown that I went looking for a "real" language to learn and landed on C++. The cost of Borland Turbo C++ 4.5 for a young kid, and my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me, led me to ask for alternatives on IRC. I was told about [GNU/]Linux coming with a C/C++ compiler for free! I ordered a Red Hat CDROM from cheap*bytes and never looked back.

Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.

In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.

I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.

No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"

I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.

> The US is not trying

https://usclimatealliance.org/

I don't expect people outside of the U.S. to keep up on state level politics but it is worth noting that many in the U.S. are trying and given our form of government state level action isn't anything to sneeze at.

It's probably being downvoted and flagged because it's off topic to the post and adds no substance which is against site rules.

Very similar use case but even for smaller amounts. I try to be as free software as possible so USDC is my go to alternative to Venmo/Apple Pay. I would use GNU Taler if it worked with U.S. banks.

And yet I'm constantly getting asked when we'll support Windows containers at my office.

The entire library of scans on this site is great. It gives me a similar feeling as being a kid and playing around in 'The Way Things Work'[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Nz1y7Sj74

I hate to see this. I bought a Sangean AM/FM/Weather radio with NOAA All Hazards alerting a little while back (I've been extremely happy with it) and as I was programming it wondered how long until either a group like DOGE, or private interest who wanted to repurpose these radio bands would cause such a wonderful service to go away. Maybe I'm naive but I'm surprised it happened in Canada before it happened here in the U.S.

> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.

Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.

If you live in America, are banking with an American bank, and hold your investments denominated in dollars I'm not sure that just shifting your investments to other global equities would really get you the outcome you want if your goal is to hedge against this specific risk. Besides if this really is the trade war to end all trade wars, the world losing one of the largest markets (the U.S.) is going to depress the entire global economy. I assume if you're even considering VXUS you're not close to retirement so wouldn't the better strategy be to just keep adding to VOO?

Maybe not the Internet for me, but certainly the web. But I totally agree with the sentiment.

F-Droid app store. https://f-droid.org

In the Air France flight 11 [0] situation the pilots thought they were having instrument and control issues, they had to go around, and there was much panic in the cockpit. It turned out the entire thing was pilot induced and the aircraft was fine. Because of Boeing's massive failures on the minds of everyone it'll be interesting to see if this was truly an instrumentation failure or something else.

[0] https://simpleflying.com/air-france-boeing-777-serious-incid...

How could it be any easier to fork Linux?

The 914 in the picture looks like a 1970 or 1971 so since it's over 50 years old it looks like it wouldn't be inspected anymore. [0]

A lot of states in the US also require safety inspections (including North Carolina where the author teaches) but often make exceptions for antique cars.

[0] https://www.vegvesen.no/en/vehicles/own-and-maintain/eu-mand...

> The tone of this article is always a bit off to me and I can never figure it out. This seems like some sort of bragging, boasting and I don't understand why that is appropriate...

...

> With that said, I'm trying to understand why this article isn't met with a response like "it is extremely unethical to operate a vehicle in this condition..."

Because it's not bragging or boasting. I don't even think it's meant to be taken literally. Especially seeing that the author is an engineer and professor. It's like a car guy pastiche of folk tale/tall tale. Just like I wouldn't respond to a story of Paul Bunyan to criticize him for eating 50 pancakes a minute I don't feel the need to point out that this car sounds unsafe.

If PulseAudio, Wayland, etc are all some of the worst software then how does it keep ending up in distros like Debian? If there are better alternatives why would they willingly adopt it?

> Whether this is in line with the spirit of the GPL or not is another story. But at least as I understand it, it does not violate the GPL.

I'm fairly zealous about Free Software and I don't think this is even against the spirit of the GPL.

Many of the writings and talks from RMS on gnu.org talk about how it is perfectly fine for a company to modify GPL'd software for internal use only and not be required to redistribute those changes because you're not redistributing the binaries. If it is fine for companies to do that and not be considered a bad actor violating the spirit of the GPL this seems to me to be in the same moral sentiment. At the end of the day if you have the binary you have source and all 4 freedoms associated with it and you truly control your computing.

Red Hat isn't imposing further restrictions. You are free to do with the source code whatever you wish, but the GPL nor any court can force Red Hat to give or sell you binaries in the future and thus source code in the future.

An example of an illegal restriction would be if Red Hat gave their binaries to everyone publicly but only their source to people who agreed to not redistribute it, and then if you did redistribute the source they cut you off or brought some type of legal action.

I agree. Encouraging more pork consumption when pigs are one of the more resource intensive AND emotionally aware/sentient/social animals seems like a poor decision in the light of climate change and animal cruelty.

Is there a good reason to encourage pork consumption?

No this is a red and blue thing to give themselves more power.

As a personal user of .xyz I couldn't agree more. People often get a chuckle at my web/email address when I give it out. Sometimes I have to repeat it because (especially non technical) people aren't expecting it to end in .xyz but often it works to my advantage. The repetition and uniqueness makes it memorable. Also .xyz is generic enough to be used for business and for personal sites. It's also not a ccTLD so I don't have to worry about registration restrictions.

But... Even with using a correctly configured major provider to deliver my mail, it gets sent to spam all the time. Which for personal email, fine. Most of my recipients know to check spam, and mark me as safe. But I know of at least one destination that flat out rejects my mail and if I were a business that'd be nightmare. Also on the web front a lot of proxy and filter providers just block .xyz all together.

When I purchased it I hoped Alphabet having abc.xyz would've helped with .xyz's reputation, but it hasn't. Oh well. Mine is for personal use so I'm willing to tolerate it. Businesses be warned though.

I'm not expert on YouTube's algorithms, how did getting rid of visible dislikes help improve recommendations?

I could see it having an impact on the comment section because rather than just dislike and move on people feel compelled to say what is wrong with the video, but I could also see the opposite effect where instead of just disliking and moving on now people spam the comment section with unhelpful attacks on the video/creator.

DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having.

I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.