This fantasy of “I’m one of the good ones and all the people worse than me need to be killed” seems common to religious fanatics and authoritarians. Maybe it’s why nationalism and religious fanaticism often go together. Their followers share an inability to accept how complex and messy the world is, and how they’re not special.

How is that relevant to this article?

That sounds good, but when you start thinking about how to implement this practically, it seems like it would either be unfeasible or would fail to really address the problem.

Maybe the rule would be: Unicode is allowed only in resource files. It would make code comments awkward for many non-English-speaking programmers. But suppose you did it, then since URLs can include Unicode, it would become normal to put URLs in resource files. If the VCS flagged up Unicode commits in source code, it would have to give resource files a pass. So in any case where you’re not hardcoding a URL it wouldn’t flag up Unicode URL abuses like the one illustrated here. You wouldn’t really have fixed the problem, just hidden it in a different way. You’d still need to flag up ambiguous Unicode characters in resource files.

When was the last time Eric Schmidt was worth listening to?

That’s odd. I’ve been running OpensSUSE Tumbleweed with a Ryzen 9 5950X and RTX 3080 with no issues. I don’t know what would be making yours, with similar hardware, function differently unless it’s the laptop stuff for dynamically switching between onboard graphics and the GPU.

I just have the regular subscription. I wouldn’t pay for the lifetime one. I want to support them but I am not confident enough that they’ll be around for the long term since video hosting is a hard business to make money from.

What kind of graphics hardware does your laptop have?

I have stopped buying lifetime subscriptions to cloud services unless they pay off within a year or two since you can’t guarantee that they’ll be honoured. Any longer and you stand to lose too much money.

Debian and Mandrake in the late 1990s. And I was already almost three times as old as you were when you started. These days I’m happy with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for daily use. I tried NixOS but it threatened to break my old brain.

The LLM isn’t trained to be reliable, it’s trained to be confident.

And it’s promoted by business people with the exact same skill set who have been rewarded for it. I would argue though that there’s nothing wrong with what LLMs are doing: they’re doing what they were trained to do. The con is in how the confidently unreliable techbros sell it to us as a source of knowledge and understanding akin to a search engine, when it’s nothing of the sort.

The focus on Microsoft is odd. I remember most people using WordPerfect for DOS and other non-WYSIWYG word processors up until around 1993. These were much better for focusing on writing. MS Word came from behind and started to take over as Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 became standard. Word wasn’t the best word processor back then and was very buggy, but Microsoft succeeded in marketing it as a natural companion for Windows and bundling it with Excel and PowerPoint, and WordPerfect was slower to move to WYSIWYG.

The rise of the web was also happening at that time, and this article doesn’t give it enough attention as a major influence on document format and a motivation behind markdown.

Unpersons.

the rich having a vested interest in keeping this dead horse of an economy alive

Are the rich actually benefiting from Trump’s chaos? Perhaps a few of the super-rich are, but most depend on a functioning economy to stay rich, and Trump keeps throwing spanners in the works.

He’s on his way back, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Let’s hope his colleagues at least take the party leadership away from him.

Yes. Canada should celebrate but know that it is not out of the woods yet. We need a real progressive alternative and we need to stop the momentum of the far-right cult. Right now we have neither; we have just seen off the most immediate threat.

Right now if their lives were to become completely unaffordable they would blame “libs”, trans people and non-whites. Fascism tends to become more popular when times are tough, not less. So it’s hard to see the way through this except through some kind of violent conflict, or a depression so long and harsh that it becomes impossible to pretend the current government isn’t responsible. But that would also give this regime time to consolidate its power.

I’d imagine the $20K price is for a model so basic many people won’t want it. it will be interesting to see what the price is for a model most people would consider an acceptable basic car or truck.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn’t require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.