You just don’t appreciate how prestigious it is to get a degree from Example U.

It is, but it probably shouldn’t be any more. WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined. (Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG). But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.

E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it). Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.

Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we’ve still got WebP. It’s not super great, but it’s at least better than JPEG and PNG. A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.

Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they’ll ever do, and it’ll only get moreso. If it weren’t for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn’t open a single modern web page and was limited to the “retro” web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I’m guessing it won’t be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.

(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)

I used to run a TFTP server on my router that held the decryption keys. As soon as a machine got far enough in the boot sequence to get network access, it would pull the decryption keys from the router. That way a thief would have to steal the router along with the computer, and have the router running when booting up the computer. It works wirelessly, too!

Whenever I’m started anything new, I just go AGPL without even thinking about it. If I later change my mind and think GPL or LGPL or BSD or something would be more appropriate later, I can always change it (though I’ve never found a need to), but you can’t really go the other way. If you start permissive, that’s just out there, forever.

I mean…yeah. Just because something is provably the best possible thing, doesn’t mean it’s good. Sorting should be avoided if at all possible. (And in many cases, such as with numbers, you can do better than comparison-based sorts)

To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.

Thank you!!

Subscribed! My daughter is super into beavers. Though I don’t want to get into a conversation about what “fucking” means yet, so maybe I’ll be selective which posts I show her.

The scary thing? Define “new”. This judgment is from a lawsuit in 2014. So any car made in at least the last 9 years is doing this. Maybe newer cars are doing even worse things.

They didn’t “try”: they did change the licence. From BSD+Patents to MIT. Hardly scandalous.

Facebook is a top 10 contributor to Linux. They are major developers for BtrFS and BPF and have contributed to a number of other kernel subsystems, too. Just Jens Axboe alone is a huge force in Linux.

Outside of Linux, they’ve created some pretty big open source projects, like React and Go Ent.

Honestly, they’ve open sourced almost everything they’ve ever done except for Facebook itself, and are one of the largest open source companies in the world.

I think it’s the “temporary” part of the licence where the trouble comes. Yes, you’re allowed to do whatever you want privately…until you’re not. I mean Louis Rossman is (in my view) a very trustworthy individual, so “trust me bro” legitimately does carry a lot of weight when he’s involved on the project, but “we can take away your licence at any time for no reason at all” is not something seen in the open source world.

(No hate on the FUTO team. It’s their hard work and livelihood and if that’s the licence they want, that’s fine. This is just my personal opinion.)

If they’re just trying to avoid a NewPipe situation, the licence is more heavy-handed than it has to be. NewPipe is GPLv3, which has provisions in it for preventing forks from using certain names or logos or identifying marks. The NewPipe team chose not to (or neglected to) use those specific provisions in the GPL. But it’s perfectly within their right to add to the licence information "You are not allowed to use the words ‘new’ or ‘pipe’ or use the letter P stylized as a triangle in a logo. The GPL makes a provision for these sorts of restrictions to automatically void the licence even for the case where none of those things are legally trademarked. (I’m not a lawyer and it’s probably an open question as to how a court would enforce that clause, but my suspicion is it’s probably enough to get Google to suspend violators from the Play Store at the very least. Probably you’d want to go to the trouble of trademarking them to be safe)

That “airline pilot speaking over an intercom” is spitting mad fire

You’re not wrong, but there’s a kind of irony in it when you talk about ending humanity because of it. There’s a lot to hate about humanity if you have humanity and have human values. There’s nothing objectively wrong about being cruel or destructive or dishonest or greedy or abusive or murderous and I imagine most hypothetical alien species would look at those things and say “what’s wrong with any of that?”

But because humans evolved as social creatures and our survival depended upon trusting one another, we’re constantly trying to judge ourselves against values that can’t actually be met. So we look at ourselves and say we’re a really horrible species, but that statement only makes sense because ironically we’re a really glorious species that’s fabricated these completely irrational things like love and compassion and empathy and honesty and sacrifice that no other species has (though many other social species do have bits and pieces of them).

And we’ll forever hate ourselves for not being able to live up to our own values.

It’s the standard for industry research, as well. And for education (e.g., textbooks) and a lot of technical documentation.

Basically any job where you may have to type math (and make it look okay), (La)TeX will be the standard. Anything other than TeX, LaTeX or Typst for typesetting math would be pure masochism.

But if your job is to actually do things applied, and your math can be limited to scribbling on a whiteboard or a notebook and never showing anyone other than maybe a coworker or two, you will probably never have a need for LaTeX.

I unironically cannot use Photoshop. I grew up with GIMP and the Photoshop UI is completely alien and confusing for me, so I have no choice but to retreat into the safe warm UI of GIMP.