You forgot about apathy. Even with a healthier plurality of political parties, the big thing is the majority of potential voters don’t bother. Some because of being lazy, some because it is unreasonably hard for them to get time off of work/contend with suppression.

This administration also highlights that the president matters too much. You can’t have even two parties interest honored when a singular man gets his way so much.

It’s not for no reason, it’s to make Putin happier, maybe extort a bunch of mineral rights out of Ukraine. See, plenty of reason…

I suppose that maybe not prioritizing Arch. Broadly speaking I feel like Arch isn’t the target for a GUI-exclusive usage scenario.

The global astronomical community expects the odds of an asteroid to hit Earth in December 2032 to eventually fall to zero.

I love how they make it seem like some insider expertise versus knowing basics of how percentages work.

I think the file managers do this for you nowadays, though I generally use ‘cloud’ style file syncing nowadays and so I’ll confess to not having done it lately.

Yep, when posting how to do something, between ‘select an example and paste to answer’ or ‘series of screenshots to illustrate a gui way’, the text copy/paste wins on laziness of answer.

Besides, there’s a decent chance that a person has to solve it for some arbitrarily large number of systems, and speaking in CLI is a vocabulary that can more trivially be made headless across a bunch of systems.

I actually use KDE’s discover to apply all the updates (flathub and yum). Mainly because I’m lazy and the update icon appears and it’s quick to just click through.

Nothing like having an config.sys/autoexec.bat menu to make sure you have the right TSRs and XMS or EMS configuration to run this game or the other. The ecosystem forced you to learn things you may have never been inclined to learn to get at the experience you actually wanted.

The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.

For example, if AOL back in the day had made ‘campus edition’, then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the “modern” connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL’s strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.

Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren’t already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been “worth it”.

So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been “contained” to the places where it’s pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.

Note that this isn’t exclusive to FOSS, but it’s just more transparent.

Over the last decade I’ve seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.

But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.

He’d have a pretty long runway to make his lack of charisma not matter.

He’s likely the key figure in drafting a lot of the executive orders that Trump is rubber stamping. Trump and Musk get a lot of the attention, but Vance is more quietly behind a lot of the stuff, happy to let Trump get the credit for Vance’s and Trump’s contributions.

agggggggggggggggg

He must have died while typing …

Bread and circuses

Note that it being only part of a key is a technology choice that does not require the reality map to it. It may seem like overkill, but someone may not trust the political process to preserve that promise and so they add the birthdate, just in case something goes sideway in the future. Lots of technical choices are made anticipating likely changes and problems and designing things to be extra robust in the face of those

Frankly the whole exchange sounds like Hollywood tech jargon.vaguely relevant words used in a not quite sensible way…

Note that it says article (and headline) were updated. At the time the article just had the State department document about 400m in armored Tesla. Then after initial backlash the document was amended to say armored electric vehicles. Then eventually the Trump administration declared this was not a thing and to the extent it was a thing, it was Biden.

Now it could be as they say, but it is also the Trump administration, that isn’t too big on the truth. So hard to say if this was a mishap about a misleading document, or something that was fired off without the broader approval of the PJ2025 folk and it getting killed after coming to light and needing a cover story as to why things didn’t get close to as blatantly corrupt as it sounded.

Oh look, $400 million of waste and corruption, DOGE should get right on that…

Oh look: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administration-order-400-million-worth-of-armored-teslas

They don’t have to take it away, they can just set up the backend to blackhole those requests. So presence of the report issue facility does not imply they actually will ever even see the issue.