There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.

As a Canadian living in the USA… the efficiency of the US healthcare system in comparison to Canada’s is INCREDIBLY overstated. From my experience it has been no more efficient, but a HELL of a lot more expensive and insanely depressing.

Interacting with maybe a dozen people outside with a mask on for a few minutes at a time is almost certainly much lower risk than being in a courtroom with, likely, many more people and stale air for hours. It’s certainly helpful if everybody is masked up in the courtroom, but people are notoriously bad at wearing masks properly, they’re going to require Gabe Newell to unmask for questions, and there’s a lot more factors you don’t control in that scenario… outside delivering stuff you can always walk away if somebody isn’t giving you the space you’re comfortable with… Regardless, all risk is cumulative and you may want to limit the number of times you do higher risk things as much as possible. Even if you rarely do some riskier things, it doesn’t mean you’re okay with that level of risk all of the time. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to want to manage and minimize your exposure if you’re high risk.

I mean… On Linux you’re going to be running a bunch of open source applications that have been compiled for ARM specifically. A huge problem with Windows on ARM is going to be running legacy x86 / x86_64 applications. You’re probably not contending with this problem at all on Linux, and I suspect if you were you would be similarly unimpressed (you can get Linux to transparently execute executables for different platforms using binfmt_misc and qemu but it’s slooooooow).

Honestly the better question might be why the Mac transition to Apple silicon has been so smooth. Part of this is that Apple cares a lot less about keeping legacy software working and companies will make native versions of their software ASAP. But Apple also has a good translation layer with Rosetta for this, and has custom silicon (which Microsoft does not) and I would not be surprised if part of this custom silicon involves extended instructions which make running x86 applications more feasible, but I don’t know the details and this is just speculation on my part.

Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.

This is such a weird take to be honest… it’s weird to want CS lecturers to work in their free time, it’s weird to expect their applications to be better, and it’s weird because this is something that many lecturers and programmers already do… so I don’t get it, and it feels disrespectful to all of the volunteer foss maintainers?

Why the fuck don’t receipts just show up in my bank / credit card statements?

Fuck that!

Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.

So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.

I feel dumb saying that books aren’t ergonomic… But they aren’t! I hate holding them open so much. This should be a minor complaint, but it’s a huge benefit of ereaders to me.

I think this comic might have been from the era when you did have to pay for new versions of OS X… they stopped doing that around Lion I think in 2011 or so.

That’s not really something that’s on the horizon at all. There’s some experimental quantum computing stuff, but it’s not really practical for anything yet (and certainly not in a personal computer!) It’s also likely not going to be better at the stuff we use normal CPUs for. Eventually they might be useful for certain classes of problems, but probably in more of a coprocessor like capacity (kind of like a side unit like a GPU that’s good at certain tasks). Obviously it’s unknown what the future holds, but I don’t think quantum computing is going to replace silicon any time soon.

Let's Encrypt was a godsend. Getting a TLS certificate before sucked.

He was far from the worst as far as hostility since he was polite and all

It’s good to know there are still decent people in this world 🥰

The somewhat snide answer to this is that… this is what git already is! Git has built in tools for submitting patches via email — a federated service. It’s actually what git was built for.

https://git-send-email.io

Of course, GitHub and stuff can be a pretty nice interface on top of git and provides features on top of git itself… but for small projects like the Linux kernel it’s perfectly acceptable :).

Websites like GitHub are obviously a lot more approachable, though, especially since I feel like a lot of people kind of grew up with the gmail web interface or something similar and aren’t used to dealing with mailing lists for this kind of stuff (myself included, honestly).

But to be honest… what are we really getting out of federation for something like GitHub? Like… it’s basically just single sign on with extra steps? I guess you can build alternate clients with the protocol for PRs and issues and stuff? But git itself is already pretty distributed, so I feel like there’s not much to do there tbh.

To be fair, it’s ideal to not date your coworkers anyway.

Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire.

I really wouldn't say that... PulseAudio has been around since like 2004, and PipeWire's initial release was in 2017 (13 years later). I don't think PulseAudio was incorporated into most distros by default until like 2007 or so, but that's still 10 years before PipeWire was even released. PipeWire is only recently becoming the default in popular distros. We've had to deal with Pulse for a long time.

I was kind of thinking that $22 billion really doesn’t seem like that much money for a project like this.

What a pointless article. Yeah, people “feel” unsafe on unsecured wifi networks. VPN advertisements have been fear mongering for years. But are they actually unsafe? No. If you use https you are fine. Technically there are more attacks you can do while on the same local network, but I really wouldn’t worry about it in most cases.