It isn’t just annoying, it often breaks for people on less-popular browsers. Plus, it requires you to run Cloudflare’s Javascript. You think this outage was bad—what do you think would happen if someone slipped them a bit of malware?

You can still compile a surprising number of modern programs and libraries without unicode support (that is, they provide an explicit compile flag to switch it off)—it’s just that no general-purpose distro does it by default. I’m not sure you can set up an entire unicodeless system using current software versions, but I wouldn’t bet against it, either. And glibc isn’t the only game in town—musl is viable and modern (it’s the default libc in Alpine Linux and an option for some other distros), and designed for resource-constrained environments. Those two things between them might bring down the size by considerable.

Thing is, most LLM submissions are low-quality as well as low-effort. If you forbid them, well-meaning numbskulls will hopefully not clutter your bug tracker by submitting them, and those who are more interested in adding a line to their resume than following the rules can be blacklisted immediately for breaking said rules. As for the odd undeclared one that’s not low-quality and slips through without being spotted, no big deal. By my understanding, they’re unicorns, though.

Because the submissions are so low-quality overall, chances are that projects requiring that submitters admit there was an LLM involved in their submission will end up effectively shadow-banning most such submitters because it isn’t worth wading through their tripe. That’s just a different version of non-transparency.

The endgame we want isn’t blacklisting LLM submissions into perdition, it’s the code version of xkcd 810. Currently, most LLM code submissions are about as useful and desirable as porn spam on a forum. Maybe in a few years, that’ll be different. If it is, policies can be reviewed.

Actively offensive branding might turn me off, but I have a high tolerance for low-quality artwork and such, or I wouldn’t be able to use FOSS at all. Honestly, most programmer-generated branding has never been very good—at best, you might get a witty project name, but it’s often accompanied by a cheesy tagline and a cruddy icon that doesn’t render well at small sizes and so is useless as an icon.

Seems awfully elaborate for something I can accomplish by backing up a few text files and directories of same. The only real issue I had with spinning up the new laptop this spring was due to an underdocumented and partially broken UEFI BIOS that I had to figure out how to work around. Once I got past that, transferring other packages and settings was trivial.

Nothing. The sole Windows key on my keyboard has never been intentionally pressed except by my cat.

Conditions on freeways are usually more controlled than conditions on surface-level roads, and Waymo’s accident record isn’t bad, unlike Tesla’s. I suspect that this isn’t going to generate any post-debut news stories of much significance. (If something bad and avoidable does happen, though, Waymo is 100% accountable—no handwaving it away.)

In my case, part of it is that sudo is an extra installation for me on Gentoo, while su is part of the base system on any Linux. Given that all nontrivial software has bugs, every unneeded package you install adds very slightly to your security risk.

In terms of security, sudo is better in the environment for which it is intended: a system with multiple human users that has a dedicated sysadmin who curates /etc/sudoers and makes sure that no user has more permissions than they absolutely need. However, only a small fraction of all machines running Linux meet those criteria. On the typical home system that’s using some distro’s default sudo-with-user-passwords setup, you can get root authority with only one password, whereas with su you need the passwords for both a wheel account and the root account. That isn’t much added security, but every little bit helps. On the other hand, sudo can be set to require you to enter your password again after a period of time, while su will allow a root session to hang on unto infinity, which may matter if untrusted Linux-savvy people have physical access to your machine (I don’t have that issue).

In other words, the benefits are real but minor and situational.

(None of this holds if you’ve done something really stupid in your configuration, like always starting an SSH server that allows both password login and direct root login when the system comes up. Always follow current best practice—in this case, certificate login only, and no direct root login—when setting up something that can be accessed over the network.)

(Some people claim that sudo has stopped them from unintentionally running a command as root. I just assume any console I’m using has root privileges and I shouldn’t run dodgy commands in it to begin with.)

All non-trivial software has bugs, and it’s unsurprising that in a sudo implementation in any language, many of those bugs are security-related. This is still quite young software. Ubuntu was premature in making it their default, I think, but that just means it’s immature, not that it’s completely broken.

Then again, I use su exclusively and don’t even have sudo installed, so I’ve got no dog in this fight.

(As for Rust itself, I am neither for nor against. It’s a programming language. It has some issues that mostly seem to be related to how building and distribution is carried out in practice, rather than the core language design. I have never met a programming language without warts, and I’ve used several. If you’re experienced with the language—whatever it is—you learn how to handle them.)

As with all the other alternative browser-related projects, I wish them luck. It isn’t easy just keeping pace with the details of current standards documents for rendering webpages—climbing up from zero (even if they’ve already made considerable progress) has got to be even more difficult.

For what it’s worth, Pale Moon can still be built for 32-bit Linux ( fish through contributed builds, or build your own). Sufficient for many, many sites, although a few will break or require workarounds.

“Artificial Intelligence” doesn’t actually want anything. It has no agency. Meta/Facebook wants to sell you stuff while the world burns, but that’s nothing new.

TDE will run quite happily on pretty pathetic hardware (that laptop with 2GB RAM that I retired this year ran TDE). It can’t do anything about Firefox being a pig, though.

If you can’t, it’s probably because no one’s tried yet. (30x30 display’s pretty small, though, so I don’t know how playable it would be.)

Not unless they’re complete boneheads (which, admittedly, is not impossible). If they do that, they effectively lose embed-video-in-external-sites functionality, and that might just be enough for unpaid content creators to dump the platform en masse and cause their effective monopoly to crumble. The content creators who are actually making decent money may never leave entirely, but if another viable platform comes into existence, I bet most of them would mirror to it.

No extension—even Netscape 1.0 had most of this stuff built in. I use Pale Moon as a primary browser, but the settings required still exist in modern Firefox, under General > Language and Appearance > Contrast Control and General > Language and Appearance > Fonts > Advanced. Note that although the font labels may say “Serif” etc., Pale Moon at least doesn’t care what you put there—you can set “Serif” to a sans font if you like, or vice-versa.

Of the Chrome-based browsers I have lying around for work and emergency purposes, Vivaldi has the font settings under Webpage, but doesn’t have full webpage colour settings (although you can force a dark theme, which might be enough). Chromium has the font settings under Appearance > Customize Fonts, but lacks anything that looks like useful colour settings.

If you’re looking for browser extensions that will restore the colour-forcing functionality for Chrome-based browsers, “Accessibility” is one category to look under.

Like what are the drug cops even supposed to do now, arrest Facebook?

We can only hope.

My browser is set to override the colour scheme of all pages I visit. It breaks the odd site that doesn’t know how to present image content correctly, but I consider that an acceptable tradeoff. It also forces a specific font and minimum font size.

I wonder if Gentoo is going to become the last option standing for some of these obsolete arches. Of course, it may only be matter of time before Portage won’t work on wd40 arches either, given the increased uptake of Rust in Python packages.

There actually is a myth in circulation in some places that China’s electrical vehicle tech is somehow advanced over everyone else’s (my father got sucked in by that one). Tearing one apart is one way to counter that.