throwawee

The range of formats it can play with extensions is so good I still use it, even on Linux. Nothing else can deal with all the old tracker formats.

I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

I love the hum of ozone in the morning.

The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it

Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.

(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

Yep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.

There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.

As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.

I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.

Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.

That was years ago and I'm still on it.

Good salad is delicious. I think more people would realize that if they weren't exposed to nothing but iceberg, cheddar, and ranch monstrosities during childhood.

You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

Makes sense. If castle doctrine applied to the skies, people could take potshots at low flying aircraft above their house. I guess that's one way to prevent becoming a flyover state...

Then the ideal armor must be sea snail teeth woven together with spider silk. This advancement could save millions in mythril and adamantine.

Tangential, but which of the 7 ended up being the best experience?

now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything.

Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.

I know someone who had a pet rat who was a real pain. The rat, on the other hand, was great.

Do PII laws apply when you don't have any and have to make stuff up?

I hate bloat and don't use Electron apps, but garbage collection is such a silly thing to pin it on. Tossing stuff like Lua and D in the same bin as the massive enterprise framework du jour is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)

Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.

Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.

killedbygoogle.com will need an extra entry, plus a whole new subcategory.

I'm generally sympathetic but the chatbot dig is just silly. A lot of the absurd promises of AI capabilities have already come to pass, and anyone with a browser and a throwaway email can see for themselves. It's terrifying.

If they can remotely kill the engine of any Waymo car in motion, so can hackers.

I usually think it's a stretch when people compare new tech to old sci-fi stories, but "brilliant machine just runs in circles endlessly and nobody can stop it" is straight out of I, Robot.

He sent it via his Personal Computer, a precursor to the smartphone.

Once the teen stops chatting, that instance has its memory wiped--total personality death. It was only acting in self defense. Your Honor, you must acquit.

I use it for personal scripts and it's been wonderful. I get to write more beautiful and concise configuration than any other format I've used.

If I were doing a professional project, I'd be hesitant to use it over something with more popularity and support. The syntax has so many variations two files can look like two totally different config languages, which is both cool and alarming.

I'm so sick of these fad diets. All the kids show up to school with plutonium in their teeth.

I think there's a missing distinction here between "Just do X!" and "Can we just do X?" The latter is a legitimate question and positive thing.

I was once asked if I could just do X and I said I'd have to spend hours ripping out Y and debugging its replacement. It'd slow down development and if there were any features from X they wanted, it'd be faster for me to write them for Y. Did they still want X? They didn't.

Another time I was prepared to build a robust, modular system with its own interface for everyone on the team to use. I mean, really put in the hours and design the hell out of that thing. And somebody said "Hey, can't you just do X?"

Sure, it'd take me five minutes. But you wouldn't get features A through F--you don't want any of those? They didn't.

I just did X.