xorcist

"Just" a social construct are underselling it by quite a lot. There are, let's call them "commonly held beliefs", what happens when a country decides selling oil in anything other than the USD.

That may not be the complete story, and will likely not hold up forever, but the complexity should not be understated.

Just recently Alex Courbot with an @nvidia address have become co-maintainer of Nova. Apparently he has pushed open source inside nVidia before, so there's hope for the future.

There is no call. Anyone can volunteer at any time.

Software take up no space and there is no scarcity. Theoretically there could be any number of maintainers and what gets uptake is the de facto upstream. That's what people refer to when they talk about free software development in terms of meritocracy.

Or exile is probably the key word. There are more historical examples of exoduses than genocides.

The problem with understanding this situation is that it probably has more to do with Israel's internal politics than what the situation looks like on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. Just a quick read from the wikipedia page should give an idea just how corrupt the situation really is.

There's also the fact that Palestinians aren't a homogenous group in any sense of the word. That makes it hard for them to unite under any political flag. It also doesn't help that the borders are all closed, from both sides, and no neighboring country are willing to accept them.

From the outside the situation certainly looks very bleak.

Because "the govahment" is not a singular entity. In functioning democracies, by popular definition in large parts of the field, legislative and executive powers are kept separated from the judicial powers. So the executive power can not interfere with being held accountable. That's not fullt implemented everywhere, but that is the general idea how it is supposed to work.

Agreed. Also, Docker.

> What do copyright laws [...] have to do with [...] DRM

Ask the people who signed off on DMCA/EUCD.

That's a good reason to have timestamps in the history, which you should.

Something like

  export HISTFILESIZE=
  export HISTSIZE=
  export HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%F %T] "
  shopt -s histappend

really ought to be default in bash.

It's not as clear why you need it in the interactive prompt.

> People are not buying small phones

How can one buy what is not being manufactured?

The few small-ish phones that have existed have mostly been cheap and underpowered.

I will not buy another phone without a headphone jack.

Either I will have to buy Xperias or stock up on old Pixel 4 phones.

It is impossible to analyze the EU without the context of the US. The EU exists because the US allows it to, which wasn't at all obvious in the beginning.

It has been popular lately to complain about European states military spending, which is more than just naive given that NATO decides what can exist and an alternative to NATO would be unrealistic, especially in the shorter term.

If the EU really threatened the US in any manner, that situation would be rectified in a heartbeat. That may sound violent, but it mostly isn't. A lot of it is just the free market at play, but it is a market in harmony with US interests.

It's also objectively the definition of fascism; a society where industry and party is working together as one body with the strong leader as the head.

It does certainly make it easier. Sure, we can survive without it, but cryptographic signing of dns records is useful for a number of things.

The 4GL was mostly reporting languages, as I remember. Useful ones, too. I still feel we haven't been even close to utilizing specialized programming languages and toolkits.

Put another way, I am certain that Unity has done more to get non-programmers to develop software than ChatGPT ever will.

Maybe not the best example. Whatsapp started out as a paid service (even if it was comparably cheap, somewhere around a dollar per year comes to mind), but that didn't help them. They have followed the same trajectory as everyone else.

No one exists in isolation, if the market values your user base at ten billion then that is what it is. That also indirectly means someone with deep pockets could spend that order of magnitude of resources to compete with you. No one really wants to know how customer acquisition or sausages are made.

The best counter example is perhaps wikipedia. But they exist in a very special niche. Lots of people have tried foundations in other places only to be outspent by a loss leader.

Not sure about this specific example, but are we sure they had the choice?

I've been in many similar situations where all the vendors in the marketplace have the same limit on their offering. You might want on-prem for example, but offerings are getting scarce because vendors are valued on recurring revenue so they are no longer interested.

If the choice is between a locked down oven or starting an oven factory yourself, it's not easy. We have built this economy for us and it is what it is, even when it clearly is a local maxima.

Is there a reason Denmark was chosen for comparison, rather than neighboring Norway (15 persons/km^2) or Sweden (25 persons/km^2)?

Wouldn't the natural thing to do be to bury it? That's what we do with other important wires. Hanging it off old telephone poles seems like a recipe for recurring disaster.

Does it need to be a metal wire? Or is, say, a plastic pipe enough? In the spirit of the other comments here, there are plenty of those already in place. Certainly with the involvement of the land owner, which in these cases probably are the city or the state.

It would be interesting to hear from someone who are involved in these traditions to hear their view.

> Activating an electric switch causes a spark, which is kind of like a fire.

So is walking on a carpet and removing your sweater and almost anything involving fabrics and motion.

Is it really a useful definition of "fire" and "spark"? Most people think of those as different things. Fire implies oxygen, you put out fires with heavy blankets or with nitrogen gas since time immemorial. Sparks, as in tiny plasma discharges, does not require oxygen and can not be put out the same way.

Relentlessly trying to lock up as much of the world's information as possible behind your login wall, I'd be struggling with procrastination as well.

Maybe the answer isn't so much finding new tricks to play on your mind, but finding something to do that doesn't involve codifying more power in the strong leader, to increase his masculinity in the worklace or whatever the political issue du jour is.

Something being evolutionary is not an argument for anything. Just like something being natural isn't necessarily good for you.

Sometimes I really really want to punch a certain coworker in the face, but I still don't, and that's despite the temptation by "evolutionary design".

There absolutely is. You just think the word immunity means something else.

After vaccination or a passed infection the immune response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from a large enough portion if the population is enough to lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call that type of immunity herd immunity.

It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and one that some people devote their professional lives to. It can be observed every flu season.

Right, but covid disinformation != vaccine skepticism.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by established researchers in respected institutions or countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just different from what many US state institutions implemented.

Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having clear and direct communication, and the perception of information being filtered for policitcal or personal career reasons can never yield rust.

Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against everyone else.

  $ sudo apt-get install unbound

(Seriously though, this service is the middle ground no one asked for. The technically literate runs their own resolver, like the example above, or has chosen one they trust. The technically illiterate doesn't know they want this and will never find this service.)

You already know log4j. Now it's time for the sequel: log6j!

On select cinemas in 2026.

(It's a horror movie, don't bring the kids.)

From the outside, it seems like what you really wanted to write was a diff tool, not a new patch format.

You already are user facing. Why interpret a user facing format behind the scenes? It makes no sense. The document speaks about specifying yet another diff format, but luckily, it does nothing of the sort but specifies a new patch set format. But those are by necessity VCS- and file format specific.

I don't think that was intended as an argument that Starlink or Tesla doesn't exist but that there has been many not entirely truthful promises made when building the brands. Tesla exists, but some investors really believed it was to be taken private, or perhaps even that Full Self Driving would be capable of earning money while you sleep, or any other of a thousand more or less realistic promises that has been publicly made.

I do wish that the Paypal statement would be a bit more nuanced though. Yes, Musk made a lot of money on the dot-com hype by way of Paypal. And he seems to have built strong friendships from that, weirdly with the same people that fired him. But his involvement in Paypal was that he let it buy the startup he was in and demanded to be CEO. He then only showed interest in throwing out the FreeBSD it was built on and replace it with NT (which was the hottest fad at the time) and to rename the company to "X". Neither happened, and he was quickly let go before the company risked bankruptcy. It's rather far fetched to go from that to "changing the Internet". Paypal won and X didn't.

In my experience, it's never "a junior". There are people who build their entire careers on doing things like this. The rest of the story is completely believable, despite put in an unnecessarily sarcastic tone.

What I don't understand is how film crews can work together when they are larger than two pizza teams? And when they want to change something, it's almost like they just do it? Surely they have to file a ticket with the Product Owner first? And why don't they wait until the current sprint is done before doing things that clearly belongs to the next one? Why do the producer run around speaking in precise terms when he is clearly in the position of Business Owner and should stick to user stories? It's a wonder that the result is even watchable!

Sarcasm aside, there is something to be said about industries that let professionals do their work, and everyone is doing their bit towards a clearly defined shared goal. Considering the IT industry has taken so much ideas from industrial production, it wouldn't hurt to take some from artistic production too. After all, both are work concerned with refining blueprints where the final draft ends up being the product.

I see a pattern with AI companies. They always try to solve a really hard and not very useful problem. It's the same as with self driving car companies ten years ago: If you believe self driving tech is ripe for commercialization, the reasonable thing to do is something capital intensive and a special case where the technology most likely to succeed. For instance, heavy trucks automatically following others in formations for long drives. Saves gas, money, and potentially personnel.

There is a clear business case and buying large trucks is already a capex play. Then slowly work your way through more complex logistic problems from there. But no! The idea to sell was clearly the general problem including small cars that drive children to school through a suburban ice storm with lots of cyclists. Because that's clearly where the money is?

It's the same with AI. The consumer case is clearly there, people are easily impressed by it, and it is a given that consumers would pay to use it in products such as Illustrator, Logic Pro, modelling software etc. Maybe yet another try in radiology image processing, the death trap of startups for many decades now, but where there is obvious potential. But no! We want to design general purpose software -- in general purpose high level languages intended for human consumption! -- not even generating IR directly or running the model itself interactively.

If the technology really was good enough to do this type of work, why not find a specialized area with a few players limited by capex? Perhaps design a new competitive CPU? That's something we already have both specifications and tests for, and should be something a computer could do better than human. If an LLM could do a decent job there, it would easily be a billion dollar business. But no, let's write Python code and web apps!