Cities are centuries older than cars though. Cars are the new thing. And yet it’s true that cars are an obvious QoL improvement for anyone in a rural area, and no reasonable person is suggesting that people in rural areas shouldn’t drive cars.

The real issue is that Americans (among others) have decided they want all the convenience and amenities of living in a city (sewer, water, energy, convenient access to most goods and services, etc.), but they want to pretend they live in a rural area, with no density whatsoever. This has resulted in the suburban sprawl that is financially ruinous and requires cars to be able to go anywhere and do anything, which creates traffic, which we solve by building bigger roads and pushing things farther apart, creating more traffic.

Thus, the answer really is that if you want city amenities, you need to live in a city. It doesn’t have to be as dense as New York. Not Just Bikes just posted a great video about the smallish town of Bergen in Norway that is not a super dense urban hellscape, it is medium density with human-centric development.

Congratulations, you’ve illustrated the difference between syntax and semantics. But any competent compiler also handles semantics (just in a separate phase of compilation), because that’s necessary for any useful conversion to machine code, not to mention optimizations.

repairable and upgradable*

I know it’s an absolutely banal nitpick, but I think it’s unfortunately a revelation in the current laptop market that ~90% of a laptop stays good for a really really long time, and the other 10% can be upgraded piecemeal as the need arises. Obviously this was never news to the Desktop world, but laptop manufacturers got away with claiming this was impossible for laptops in the name of efficiency and portability.

If you’re in any of these states:

• Alaska
• Arizona
• California
• Connecticut
• Florida
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Kansas
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Washington state
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

You can use the IRS’ new Direct File service. It’s what we should’ve had ages ago, letting citizens file their taxes directly without a for-profit middle man. There are still a couple of scenarios they don’t support, since it’s still in development and is only in it’s second year of use, but in my experience it’s already competent and helpful.

And, as a bonus, you don’t have to give any money to Intuit/TurboTax to keep lobbying the government to make our tax code as arcane as possible so that people need their services to file taxes.

1. There was a serious lack of current kernel developers (which I don’t think there is)

Maybe not at the moment, but my understanding is that the pool of qualified C programmers is shrinking rapidly, because the old guard is all ageing out and there simply are not enough intermediate developers coding in C at the level that Kernel development requires.

Having a larger (and growing) pool of upcoming developers interested in systems programming and software excellence is one of the explicit stated reasons that Linus et al. considered Rust in the first place.

I’m a bit confused, it sounds like Yale will no longer offer CS50, but unless I’m misunderstanding, won’t Harvard still be producing the course?

I broadly agree.

However, “Existing maintainers have every right to push back where they see fit” is tenuous when the Linux project as a whole has already (exhaustively) discussed and debated this exact question alongside all the other questions about adding Rust, and the explicit declared direction is that Rust should become an increasingly large part of the Linux kernel.

This is valid if your city doesn’t have dedicated bike infrastructure that gets plowed. Snow can be hardly an inconvenience at all if bike infrastructure is treated with equal importance as car infrastructure.

Oh the Urbanity! on Youtube has a really realistic take on this in Montreal: https://youtu.be/sokHu9bhpn8?si=C_2WD0WKDMKLVXIO

In what sense are they “siding” with the corporations? If anything, this seems like a step in the right direction, to add some modicum of open governance to the Chromium project in a fashion that is clearly not corpo-dominated.

Also, it’s not like this is the Linux Foundation saying “we only support Chromium”, after all they also run the Servo project.

Source? Like obviously none of us on this platform appreciate manifest v3, but it’s obvious that’s a corporate push, and exactly the thing this new organization might help mitigate.

On the other hand, the Chromium team has been pumping out all kinds of day-to-day platform improvements for the last 5 years at least. I’m thinking of CSS ergonomics and more robust HTML that make web devs less JS-dependent. The kinds of down-in-the-weeds work that gave us CSS grid, all the useful new CSS pseudoselectors, the command attribute for buttons, etc. etc.

I’m not a web maximalist, and I would love to see a simpler web/browser prosper, but I just don’t think it’s realistic.

I think anyone is welcome to try this, but the core ethos of the web is backwards compatibility. To my unending irritation, even non-standard behaviors/APIs like WebUSB have become critical for sites to function.

The last time we actually dropped a feature, it was Flash, and that took a decade and there is still tons of effectively dead/permanently lost content because of it.

Creating a browser that only implements a subset of the standards is fine for very niche usecases but I don’t expect it to ever overtake the major browsers. We’ll see how Ladybird fares as it’s compatibility increases.

Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it as someone who has left Chromium behind personally, Chromium is kind of the only choice. I think people outside the browser implementation world underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the modern browser stack and what goes into maintaining compatibility with web standards, much less advancing them.

We’ve reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions’ share of feature testing and development, because Chromium receives the lions’ share of funding.

Igalia, an OSS consultancy that does a lot of fairly-funded independent browser development, has lots of material about this. For example, the recent chat between Igalia members and someone from Open Web Advocacy about what to do if the anitrust ruling against Google jeopardize’s Chromium’s funding, and the options are pretty dire.

Edit: After reading the article, I think this is a really good sign. Bringing together the immediate stakeholders in Chromium’s development and funding bodes well for the possibility of stewarding Chromium in a less Google-dependent, profit-motivated, ad-centric direction. There’s unfortunately a lot of uncertainty about how this will all shake out, but it’s possible that Chromium could become a truly independent project and move back in the direction of user value instead of user-hostile shareholder value.

Microsoft produces a plethora of good learning materials if you’re struggling with the basics or specific concepts. I recommend their C# for Beginners course to get a good overview of real C#.

Once you have a good handle on the basics, I would echo others’ advice that having some kind of project or goal to work towards is the surest path to learning, because you have external motivation to use what you’re learning and look up things as you need them. Is there some reason you chose C# specifically as your next language, maybe for game dev, web dev, or Windows apps?

YAML is truly an untenable format. I’m personally excited for KDL to stabilize and hopefully see wider adoption, but in the meantime I’m fine sticking with JSON most of the time.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

It’s a third-party GitHub Action that is passing the branch name directly to Bash. So to be clear, not GitHub’s fault.

Except an LLM has no way to roll anything random, it will just predict the most likely text for a random roll, which isn’t remotely the same thing.

Thankfully, development of Servo has been revived, and it’s now fully independent of Mozilla. I believe it’s now being stewarded by the Linux Foundation of Europe, with a lot of contributions from Igalia.

The fact that there’s no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it’s accelerating the destruction of our climate.

I have stopped giving Apple my money, for this among other reasons. I have to say, though, that Asahi Linux makes a compelling case for repurposing their hardware for better use.

I’ve heard it as a word, “Rustles”. Not sure how canonical that is though.