I blame Likud.

Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.

Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

Removed by mod

The first-past-the-post voting system sucks; the resulting two-party system sucks; but right now we have to operate within it. The mathematics of that system entail the simple fact that if you discourage people from keeping Trump out, you are helping get Trump in. That makes you a Trump supporter.

You’re currently a Trump supporter. If you don’t want to be one, you can stop.

Show me what Stalinism looks like
This is what Stalinism looks like

By the way, his sister does cool math art. https://bathsheba.com

There is a word for country X trying to operate a government function inside country Y’s territory, without country Y’s permission. That word is “invasion”.

How come they can’t afford to pay pensions to the families of dead soldiers then?

I’m for ending the war through a unilateral surrender of Russian forces and the trial of Mr Putin for crimes against humanity. However, my opinion doesn’t have a lot of influence over whether that happens.

Similarly, I’m for ending the war in Gaza through the voluntary disarmament of Hamas, the repudiation of terrorism as a way of life, the handover of illegal settlements to displaced Palestinian Arab civilians, and the prosecution of Netanyahu for treason and war crimes. But I don’t expect to get to make that decision either.

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.

Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.

There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

I’m confused. To me, “building a tree” and “parsing” are the same thing. If you end up with a tree representation of the structure of your document, the thing you did to get there is parsing.

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

Grinding a spliff into your bellybutton is not a joint naval drill …

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.

21st century, meet 18th century; apparently the Barbary Wars come around again but on a different corner of Africa?

The best code editor is the one that works well with your other tools, including your compiler and your keyboard.

Corollary: If you use an unusual compiler or an unusual keyboard, this may change what the best editor for you is.