Its all about how an application goes from “I would like to display X on a screen” to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It’s then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There’s a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that’s the general idea.

Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to “look at” what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn’t focussed).

Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we’re at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there’s still odd bits of software that either haven’t been ported, or that still rely on some features that don’t exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.

I suppose a complete history of Tory government was out of scope for what’s already a dissertation-length essay.

Actually, at the end the author begins to slightly contradict himself by arguing that (neo-)Thatcherism is the long-term objective of the conservatives. I suppose the consistent narrative is that the Tories have a long-term commitment to policies that can only ever yield short-term gains.

This does lead to the rather dire conclusion that British politics is stuck in a cycle where Labour slowly rebuilds the British state, only for the Tories to sack it the instant our fickle support for progressive government waivers.

Not that I saw. A nag screen maybe, but it was dismissible

Its just the symbol The Register uses at the end of an article. Like how some papers use a filled in square.

Kotlin targets the JVM right? I think you’d need either a port of the runtime (dalvik?) Or an api translation later a la WINE.

But I don’t actually know anything, so don’t listen to me. Having a fully Foss phone with support for the android app ecosystem would be wonderful though

I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole…

Machine learning is just gradient descent through a subset of algorithm-space

Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).

There’s a former apple designer on the team I think, which they’ve been leaning into hard to get the hype train rolling.

How bloody dare you!

Thanks, fixed! (TIL you need the https:// bit on Lemmy)

There is, they just don’t publicise it. Actually one of my favourite features of the service tbf. Just load up a web page and all my messages are there, regardless of where they came from.

Iirc microkernels have been the future since before Linux existed. There was a bit of a flame war between Linus and the guy who wrote the MINIX kernel about how being monolithic would be the death of Linux.

GNU Hurd also wanted to show the world how good microkernels could be, but sadly never got off the ground.

I’m not saying microkernels are bad, but I do wonder if there’s some reason we don’t see them out in the wild much.

Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.

There’s a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group’s recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2’s for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.

The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you’re neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.

Is it me or does this feel like it was originally a saga?

The mention of cost has me curious. Are by-elections costly for (I’m guessing) the electoral commission to run?

I imagine the main costs involved are party funds for campaigning, but they probably see it as a proxy for the main event, so hardly money wasted. Even if it were, its not public money.

I do wonder if this being an election year has an effect? Maybe there’s a trend if you go back far enough.

By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously

This is… very smart actually. Any reason this is limited to Xwayland? (Is that XDG portal a thing yet?)

Is this the one that was planning to be a full open world RPG originally? (Sui Generis IIRC) I’m guessing that’s unlikely to happen by this point. Exanima still looks fun though