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?

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.

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.

I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.

Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.

My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.

For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.

Proton Pass already supports passkeys: https://proton.me/support/pass-use-passkeys

More specifically, he argued (and the recent and upcoming releases of most major frameworks agree) that rendering most content on the server with islands of client-side interactivity is the future.

That’s not necessarily a huge revelation, but the big difference from what people have been doing with PHP for decades is the level of integration and simplicity in mixing server-side and client-side code seamlessly so that a dev can choose the appropriate thing in each context and not have to go through a lot of effort when requirements change or scaling becomes an issue. I would say that this represents a new level of maturity in the “modern” web frameworks where devs can choose the right technology for every problem to serve their users best.

I think you would be pleasantly surprised by the direction web dev is moving if you gave it a chance.

For example, I suspect that you think one of the ways the web has gotten shittier is because sites are too bloated and JavaScript frameworks are too heavy and slow.

One of the key takeaways is that, across almost all frameworks and stacks, web dev is moving back to doing as much work on the server-side as possible, while retaining the minimum necessary interactivity via Islands of Interactivity with much lighter JavaScript than what was pushed for the last decade.