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In recent years we've also had browser-exploitable vulnerabilities that allowed reading arbitrary memory as a regular user, but slowly or without full control over the locations. I think wiping credentials as soon as possible after use is a very sensible precaution, even if it's only a moat.
Manufacturing dispute on non-disputed things is also a common tactic to influence people and create confusion and disorder. For that you don't need to turn the facts on their head, just make the result seem indecisive.
There were decent and reasonably thin layers over that to solve the immediate practical issues (e.g. Delphi, MFC), but they're no longer fashionable and nothing seems to have replaced them in the same space. Maybe we need a "NoFramework" phase to get back to RAD again?
I think there's similarity to the dynamic too. Not many instances have the means at this time to produce LLMs from scratch and operate them at scale.
IBM owned literally the whole market on computers at a time when computing equipment was prohibitively expensive and centralised.
At their best they had an exceptional amount of demoscene / game development content overall, as well as several full (usually "previous") versions of various creative software like 3D modeling or photo editing apps.
Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.
Brutalism doesn't signify "brutality" though, it's about leaving the building materials bare and favouring clean lines. Those glass and steel buildings could also be considered brutalist architecture of a different flavour.
library quality and algorithm choice
And especially having performant and actively maintained default choices built in. With C, as described in the post you responded to, you'll typically end up building a personal collection of dusty old libraries that work well enough for most of the time.
It's made a lot of sense in general if you think about the business models around open source products. An extensive test suite gives you the ability to engineer changes effectively and efficiently, meaning that you can also add additional value on top of released versions better than everyone else.
I've occasionally spent time doing and even fighting for latency optimisations that supposedly don't matter in the great scheme of things, but that resulted in customers leaving positive feedback about how the product is noticeably more responsive and/or feels more polished than the competition in those specific areas. It can definitely make a difference.
It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
As an aside, I know tons of experienced "Senior" developers who just suck at their jobs. The problem is they have tons of experience in delivering terrible products based on terrible code and architectural decisions.
It's a classic tragedy of engineering; you can actually ship with almost anything, and just successfully delivering a product reinforces a feeling that your choices were good, no matter how arbitrary they were in practice.
People can get really confident that what they're doing is tried and true, while it's simply the only approach they've had for all of their career.
Apple have always preferred preserving letter forms over hinting, so Macs are therefore also "blurry" on lower DPI displays. The reason they aren't these days is because the DPI is higher.
Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.
There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions had already enabled those features anyway.
I guess in the same sense that every functional aircraft is. Taking everything apart and putting it back together, replacing worn out parts, is considered normal maintenance.
Altered Carbon also.
There was definitely a key combination that would skip the whole thing (out of old memory, alt-x?).
I switched to a new Android phone just weeks ago. Choosing the search engine was part of the onboarding wizard.
It would be pretty strange for experts to recommend doing something that they consider ineffective or harmful.
The expert opinions that I've seen so far have indicated that geoengineering at any scale that we're realistically able to produce on a short notice is unlikely to have a sufficient effect on climate change. Essentially it's a pipe dream at best, and a way to create additional (localised) disasters at worst.
If the only proper argument for doing it is that "the left" is against it and "the right" is for it, that seems comparatively weak.
I gather that OpenXR is lower level, but what exactly does that mean for an app developer?
Mostly that they won't be using OpenXR directly. It's a standardised layer that lets many kinds of tools and libraries make use of the same hardware.
Morally, it's pretty significant that we make conscious decisions (as a process that we often see as distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom) to kill and eat thousands of other animals mostly for the sake of taste, rather than for the sake of necessity, which is why most other animals hunt.
Used to be that way for me too, but I believe with the latest LTS the slowdowns just went away. I'm using Firefox through the default Snap packaging every day, and it's just fine.
This is also with the distro installed with all default choices. If memory serves me right, using btrfs for one can result in any number of weird performance issues.
As far as I know, Servo wasn't ever really intended to be a production browser. But significant parts of Firefox have been rewritten in Rust since, and those parts have included bits from Servo.
Banners are in no way mandated, though. As the quoted text states, you need to have a policy easily available - the same as you'd have any other legal information on your website. Typically it isn't served on banners or popups, but e.g. in the page footer.
You also need to have the right to refuse, which is a non-issue if tracking is opt-in, or only happens in a necessary context like user login, where you can inform the user that it's about to happen.
It's a more or less deliberate misunderstanding to claim that you need popup banners because of EU regulation, and it seems to be said mainly in order to mask the fact that applications are designed to be hostile to privacy in the first place.
Year of the Linux on the desktop might never come
I'm not even sure what that would mean practically. By brute market share, possibly not. But I've had Ubuntu as my personal daily driver for many years, and at the moment it's honestly just a much better experience than either Windows or macOS.
Microsoft and Apple seem to have turned their operating systems into advertising platforms for their other products, largely disregarding the basics of what makes a desktop actually work well.
Most of Hancock's claims aren't really provable by evidence, or there hasn't been much research done to produce it. He's essentially saying "Isn't this curious? Scientists should look into it."
Why should they, though? He seems to be staking much of his credibility on vague accusations that someone is not doing the work. Mostly the case seems to be that his propositions are not being ignored, they simply lack substance.
The thing is, the less evidence you have, the easier it is to come up with any number of stories that "fit" the data points. Historians therefore need to be extremely conscious about only drawing conclusions that have an undisputed record supporting them. That is the whole basis of the scientific methodology; if you can't get the evidence, you have no argument.
The period Hancock has chosen to focus on is commonly called "prehistory" for a good reason, as without any written records, there's not much of a basis to build any kind of narrative that stands up to scrutiny. Especially if you only cherry-pick data points that fit your assumptions, and wilfully ignore a gigantic void in the rest of the known record.
Surely that is a problem with the credibility of the claims themselves, and not the rest of the world.
that science either can't disprove, or hasn't been actively researching, for whatever reason
Most often the reason is lack of evidence in proportion to the claims.
As I remember, the initial versions of Git would have been a chore to use; the intention was for it to be only the "plumbing", with a more friendly front-end layered on top. So it took a good few years to change that, and for it to catch on.
I believe USB HID drivers have been in userspace for quite some time, in part precisely to provide a stable interface. I'm not sure why the Wacom drivers are an exception though: https://linuxwacom.github.io/
You say "much more", but the models of healthy eating don't really differ that much in practice. Both prescribe a balanced plate with carbs, proteins, and "other" vegetables. The omnivore model calls for half the plate being vegetables, while the vegan plate is divided into equal thirds.
That of course being the rule of thumb, and obviously people don't necessarily build every meal to exactly that pattern. A pizza night every now and then is okay too.
rarely have any significant nutrient deficiencies
People in the Nordics are usually already supplementing at least vitamin D due to lack of sunlight, and often iodine due to a lack of it in the soil. So in this context, switching to a combined vegan supplement that includes those as well as B12 is a relatively small change.