When IT folks say devs don’t know about hardware, they’re usually talking about the forest-level overview in my experience. Stuff like how the software being developed integrates into an existing environment and how to optimize code to fit within the bounds of reality–it may be practical to dump a database directly into memory when it’s a 500 MB testing dataset on your local workstation, but it’s insane to do that with a 500+ GB database in production environment. Similarly, a program may run fine when it’s using a NVMe SSD, but lots of environments even today still depend on arrays of traditional electromechanical hard drives because they offer the most capacity per dollar, and aren’t as prone to suddenly tombstoning when it dies like flash media. Suddenly, once the program is in production, it turns out that same program’s making a bunch of random I/O calls that could be optimized into a more sequential request or batched together into a single transaction, and now it runs like dogshit and drags down every other VM, container, or service sharing that array with it. That’s not accounting for the real dumb shit I’ve read about, like “dev hard coded their local IP address and it breaks in production because of NAT” or “program crashes because it doesn’t account for network latency.”

Game dev is unique because you’re explicitly targeting a single known platform (for consoles) or targeting for an extremely wide range of performance specs (for PC), and hitting an acceptable level of performance pre-release is (somewhat) mandatory, so this kind of mindfulness is drilled into devs much more heavily than business software dev is, especially in-house dev. Business development is almost entirely focused on “does it run without failing catastrophically” and almost everything else–performance, security, cleanliness, resource optimization–is given bare lip service at best.

I’d give strange new worlds a pass as being better than Orville, but yeah, it’s definitely the exception to the rule.

Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.

ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).

Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

This bird definitely listens exclusively to metal bands from Nordic regions featuring an opera singer dressed like an ice queen backed by instruments that sound like they just got dragged through a tar pit

Yeah, IIRC a knight’s suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari

The entire point of the season 1 finale is that if Pike’s fate gets retconned it’ll turn out very, very poorly. If Pike doesn’t end up the way he did in TOS, it means he doesn’t vacate the captain’s chair on the Enterprise, and when the events of Balance of Terror happens, Pike’s inclination towards compromise and peaceful negotiations leads the Romulan empire to conclude that the Federation is weak and declare war, causing the death of millions. Future!Pike even says at the end “every timeline where you don’t end up in that accident ends up with something horrible happening, and someone else taking your place.”

Iirc There’s a remaster floating around that revamps the super dated CGI. It’s no SNW but if you can stand TNG & DS9 you’ll be OK.

Isn’t the entire concept behind Lower Decks is that the Cerritos isn’t a big, important ship? The California class only has 13 decks, which is the third smallest ship in the entire series–the only ships smaller than the Cerritos were the Defiant (which was an “escort ship” not intended for long missions) and the NX-01 Enterprise. It’s also slower than everything else in the 24th century–while most other ships can handle warp 9 without problems, the Cerritos flies itself apart if it goes above warp 8 for too long. It’s not all that strong either, practically every time it gets in a fight it gets its ass kicked.

I really don’t want to rely on security through obscurity… MS-DOS was written back when every programmer trusted everything that ran on the computer, security wasn’t even an afterthought, and encryption was the sole domain of math nerds, conspiracy theorists, and the nerd equivalent of doomsday preppers because it was “too computationally expensive.” Its sole saving grace in terms of security is that it doesn’t support multitasking so malware can’t run in the background, but you can just target whatever software it’s running, instead.

🎶These horrible mooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally memed!🎶

The one time they purposely “backed up” a human via the transporter it took up so much space they had to dump the backup into the holosuite and it still nearly brought the entire station’s computer to its knees.

To say nothing of how Crusher looks like a RealDoll in a bad way

The reason I know I’d fail as a politician is because the instant I get asked anything about Israel / Palestine, I’d either run away screaming or I’d throw my hands up and say “I’m not touching this with a ten foot pole, they both suck and everyone except the civilians caught in the crossfire deserve whatever they get.”

This whole conflict isn’t black and white morality, or even black and gray morality. It barely qualifies as black and slightly-less-black-if-you-squint morality. It’s like Luke trying to blow up the Death Star, if the Death Star was populated mostly with families, children, and puppies, and Luke ate a baby while he was rescuing the princess.

Advertising is largely a cargo cult, with the “advertising/marketing is the most important thing” mindset being pushed by people with a vested interest in getting you to spend money on advertising. Actual, real businesses buying actual, real advertisements have said they saw basically no difference in revenue before and after buying the ad.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like there’s no point in advertising–small businesses need it to jumpstart their client base, and medium/large businesses use it to make sure their products maintain mindshare so that a customer is more likely to think “I want a Coke” instead of “I want a soda.” But in terms of directly influencing customer purchasing decisions, the biggest influence is old-fashioned word of mouth and direct customer experience, not advertising.

I daily drive it at work and it’s perfectly solid, but I also don’t do anything cuhRAAAAZY because it’s a workstation. 99% of the time I’m just running Flameshot to take screenshots, a few Firefox windows with one or two dozen tabs total, a company chat program, and on rare occasions I’ll use LibreOffice to open a file or do some very light image editing.

Linux is pretty much universally free, with the exception of a few select distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and even then, there’s variants of RHEL that are free like CentOS and Fedora, the main attraction for RHEL is paid support).

Most distributions are fairly similar, these days, with the main differences being the desktop environment (i.e. how the UI looks and feels), the update cadence (some distros are much more aggressive about deploying updates to the software and utilities underlying the distro, which gives new features faster at the cost of breaking things more often, while other distros prefer to stay on older, known-stable versions longer, at the cost of being slower to deploy new features that sometimes a program needs to run), and the methods used to configure settings (some distros go out of their way to make as much configureable in the GUI as possible, while others are primarily configured through console commands, and others like Gentoo expect you to manually compile pretty much all the software yourself–this makes it extremely customizable, but extremely difficult), and the default file format for package installation (rpm, deb, flatpaks, snaps, etc).

My personal recommendation is to check out a few of these:

• Ubuntu

• Linux Mint (or Cinnamon)

• EndeavorOS

• Pop!OS

I also recommend that when you first format the disk, you make two partitions: one smaller 50-100 GB partition for the root partition (where Linux stores its system files and software), and a larger partition for /home, which is where all your personal files are stored. This way, you can easily swap between different distros without needing to really worry about losing your files.

Thank you. It’s critically important to recognize that each party does do similar things sometimes, but it’s also crucial to recognize the difference in motivation behind those similar actions, and to acknowledge that the motivation is sometimes just as important as the action that results from the motivation.

He offered the Democrats no concessions to vote for him, and reneged on a deal he personally negotiated in May during the debt ceiling hostage crisis negotiations. Why in the world would democrats vote to keep someone who actively betrayed them in power without major, binding concessions?

I’ve had the car in the shop for repairs precisely zero times, and the one actual problem I’ve had was mostly my own damn fault and once I figured out what was going wrong it was a literal 5 minute fix. I’d call that zero issues.

And the air cooled battery is literally not an issue unless you fast charge it multiple times in a day. The number of times I fell under that scenario in 4 years of ownership was precisely once, when I going on a weekend road trip for my birthday, and I opted to rent a hybrid for that instead. I consider something that covers literally 99.999% of my driving needs, has needed zero shop time beyond routine maintenance, and has saved me literally thousands of dollars in gas money to be a pretty good deal.

Now, to be 100% fair, I wouldn’t recommend someone buy a Leaf today because its CHAdeMO fast charger is obsolete. But the car itself is perfectly fine.