esa

Yeah. I think the first one was a GSM phone; the NMT ones were too expensive to be handed to kids. But it was before Nokia became dominant.

Leaking isn’t really the issue, though I suppose Rust helps with that as well. Its memory sales pitch is more about memory safety, which is not reading or writing the wrong parts of memory. Doing that can have all sorts of effects, where the best you can hope for is a crash, but it often results in arbitrary execution vulnerabilities. Memory _un_safety is pretty rare and most prominent in languages like C, C++ and Zig.

Rust also has more information contained in it, which means resulting programs can actually be faster than C, as the optimizer in the compiler is better informed.

Rust is already in the kernel and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being obstructed by C purists, who at this point are the people who should fork the kernel if they see anything but C as heresy.

One rather obvious reason is that society has a lot of greybeards in general. The baby boomer generation was named that for a reason, and people have been living longer on average. Lots of countries are struggling with the demographic effects. There’s no reason to expect that tech or something even more specific like FOSS would be exempt.

Another aspect here is that FOSS is still kind of new in society. There’s just more people who have had the chance to age into FOSS greybeards than when those greybeards were young. (And they were thus likely to a lesser degree blocked by entrenched greybeards when they were getting started.)

To be a bit more generic here, when you’re at government scale you’re generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.

E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we’d have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.

This needs some work to reconcile with how Trump appears to act towards the pretty poor Russia vs the wealthy EU, though.

Likely he’s just personally uncomfortable with powerful allies, and would rather have weak & subservient underlings. That this would leave the US worse off seems to be a sacrifice he’s willing to have the Americans make.

Thing is, there is already Rust in Linux, and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being sabotaged by C purists, who at this point should stop acting unprofessionally, or at the very least make their own “only C” fork if they disagree with his leadership so much.

This is the first I’ve heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.

Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.

At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.

>What is C++? A miserable huge pile of "should"s

TIOBE literally ranks languages by search results. It’s at best a measure of SEO. It is, generally, a trash metric that shouldn’t be used for anything.

Reads more like if you made a mess as a kid and cleaned up before your parents came home. The state between when they leave and when they arrive is up for experimentation.

When the leader of the world’s largest superpower dreams of Anschluss of their otherwise allied neighbour, that’s not clickbait, it’s the state of international policy and diplomacy with the leader the US elected.

not the “I have no mouth and I must scream” future, just the “I have a mouth and I must groan” present

Texting vs talking has some situational context. E.g. if you’re somewhere public, talking on the phone is often frowned upon, but you may text quietly. In a car it’s reversed.

But a lot of us old folks do want people to sit down and shut up. It likely also plays into impressions of foreigners—a lot of immigrants are probably doing something they consider normal by talking on the phone on the bus, while everyone around them thinks they’re being incredibly rude.

Calls and meetings can often be an email, too. Better to not disrupt others if you can avoid it.

It’s one of many things out of the bible that have pretty much just become a saying (the splinter/beam one)

Yeah, this is just pot calling the kettle black, or seeing the splinter in his neighbor’s eye but not the beam in his own (or whatever it is in English).

I’ve moved on from vim to neovim, and I think I’ll continue using something in that family in the future. It’s a pretty stable experience overall, but the inclusion of LSPs and tree-sitter have been good improvements too.

Ultimately editors are tools, similar to keyboards, os-es, screens, chairs, shoes and so on. There are some objective quality differences between a well-constructed tool and some slapdash nonsense, and there are a huge amount of subjective quality differences. What suits me may not suit you, and vice versa.

It’s generally good to try out some new (to you) stuff and see if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, well, now you know. I think my worst experience was with Acme (or Wily? can’t remember), during a phase where I experimented with Plan 9 stuff. Ultimately very not my cup of tea, but apparently Rob Pike (who made it) and some other gophers still enjoy it? Which is good for them, just like it’s good for me that I can choose not to use it. It’s just personal tastes, and I still think it’s good that I gave it a go.

The debate over holding down modifier keys vs modes is also a part of the Emacs vs vi debate from many decades ago. There might be some statistics for what works best for the most people now, but again, use what suits you. And try some new stuff when you get curious, it’s generally good for you.

The Energiewende seems to be progressing okay as far as I can tell: Solar rollout is exceeding expectations; wind is lagging but still proceeding.

They seem to be struggling more in a couple of other Wende: The Wärmewende hasn’t even gotten to the point where they ban fossil heating in new construction (we banned oil furnaces in existing buildings back in 2020 here in Norway).

And as for the Verkehrswende, the rule seems to be don’t mention the Verbrenner. They seem to be pretty good at pulling out any excuse not to drive less, or at the very least drive electric. Meanwhile with some tax breaks on EVs and high taxes on fossil cars Norway almost has no new fossil car sales; even the buses here in Oslo are almost all electric now.

I guess at least they’re paying us well for the fossil fuels we sell them. It’s starting to feel a bit like being a sober drug dealer.

How do you know a post was written by a systemd hater? Easy, they’ll spell it with a big D for some reason. It reminds me of how Norwegian rabid anti-cyclists are unable to spell “cyclist” for some reason.

Claiming you don’t want to restart an old debate and then trying to restart it anyway is pretty funny.

You might also want to keep in mind that you can’t really force an init system on Linux distros. Systemd became the norm through being preferred, as in, the people using and maintaining it think it’s good. At this point you might as well be ranting about how “LinuX is evil somehow” and we should all be using GNU HURD or Minix or something.

Also: Haven’t thought about suckless in well over a decade, maybe closer to two? I guess way back in the day I was kinda intrigued by their ideas and used some of their products; these days I’d rather see them as something between an art shop and people who are playing a somewhat unusual game with themselves, but not particularly relevant to mainstream software engineering.