The best way for that to happen would be Obama meeting with Zelensky and Putin, brokering an unmitigated success of a peace deal somehow, receiving the Nobel prize for that specifically, then next time he sees Trump giving him a, “You’re right, Don; that was easy!” with double finger guns

Nice consent check, my heart when they ask for more scratches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_erasure

I’ll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning “AI” tools, I think the chunk of people who don’t want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition – for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don’t think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.

The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-“AI” features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It’s tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an “AI” implementation has been broken and it’s nice to have options I don’t have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn’t considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.

If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.

News feed with a comment section

This is the explanation for why:

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v883-self-signed-certificate/

The fact that the explorer can regularly completely freeze up nowadays or flat out crash is actually insane.

This was literally the trigger for my very first Linux experience, it’s fucking asinine that something so fundamental to the UX could perform so poorly for such an extended period of time.

I love having to reboot the explorer.exe process in task manager because my taskbar search stops working.

Try new stuff, get some toys.

Firefox reader view worked well here. Whole thing copy/pasted below:

www.heise.de

Missing Link: How Linux would continue without Linus Torvalds

Thorsten Leemhuis

8 - 10 minutes

1. Missing Link: How Linux would continue without Linus Torvalds

   • Successor is ready
   • Kroah-Hartman can take the reins at any time
   • Different flight paths and working independently
   • New development leadership, old problems
   • Distribute responsibility across multiple shoulders

Nobody is immune to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or fatal heart failure – not even Linus Torvalds, who still has the final say in the development of the kernel he named Linux. This worries many, as there is no public record of who or what would take over leadership in case of an emergency.

This repeatedly leads to speculation in forums and articles in major media; no wonder, as it is a typical “bike shedding” topic that everyone can have an opinion on. Much of this is, however, far-fetched, as hardly anyone outside developer circles knows about the succession plan. While it is not written down, it de facto exists.

Successor is ready

A developer, considered by Torvalds and the maintainers of the most important areas of the Linux kernel, takes over the leadership. This person also needs the backing, as anyone can take the current Linux code at any time and start a direct competitor.

Was fehlt: In der rapiden Technikwelt häufig die Zeit, die vielen News und Hintergründe neu zu sortieren. Am Wochenende wollen wir sie uns nehmen, die Seitenwege abseits des Aktuellen verfolgen, andere Blickwinkel probieren und Zwischentöne hörbar machen.

• Mehr zum Feuilleton “Missing Link”

For the past quarter century, those familiar with the scene have always known who the designated successor is. At the turn of the millennium, it was Alan Cox; around the introduction of Linux 2.6 in 2004, it was Andrew Morton for a few years. For over a decade now, it has been Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Kroah-Hartman can take the reins at any time

This became fully clear in 2018 when Linus Torvalds took a break after tirades: Kroah-Hartman then took over development leadership for a few weeks. He still has access to Torvalds’ Git repository with the main development branch of Linux, as the lead administrator of kernel.org recently mentioned to the author.

In any case, it has been Kroah-Hartman for some time now, not Torvalds, who usually signs the new versions of Linux distributed by Kernel.org. This includes new releases of the main development branch maintained by the Linux father, as he now only publishes them via the Git source code management system.

He usually does this on Sunday afternoons in Oregon, USA; they appear on Kernel.org often six to nine hours later on Monday mornings in Europe, after Kroah-Hartman, who lives in the Netherlands, has signed them. It is not known whether this happens before or after the first coffee.

Was fehlt: In der rapiden Technikwelt häufig die Zeit, die vielen News und Hintergründe neu zu sortieren. Am Wochenende wollen wir sie uns nehmen, die Seitenwege abseits des Aktuellen verfolgen, andere Blickwinkel probieren und Zwischentöne hörbar machen.

• Mehr zum Feuilleton “Missing Link”

Different flight paths and working independently

Kroah-Hartman could therefore take over development at any time if something happened to Torvalds or if he stepped down. The former also once mentioned to the author that he and the Linux founder have not been on the same plane for years. Many would also welcome the fact that they now live on different continents and thus in different countries.

Similar to Morton before him, Kroah-Hartman, just like Linus Torvalds, receives an income as a “Fellow” at the Linux Foundation. This makes the two most important Linux developers largely independent: If they were employed by companies that contribute heavily to Linux, such as ARM, AMD, Alphabet/Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, or IBM/Red Hat, suspicions would quickly arise in contentious issues that they would influence kernel development in favor of their respective employer.

New development leadership, old problems

To whom the baton passes is, of course, enormously important. Even more important, however, is that the person enjoys the trust of the most important developers – above all, the maintainers of the kernel’s most important subsystems. Because if they don’t like the new leader at the top, they could start a fork of Linux at any time; such a thing would even be the probable outcome if the Linux Foundation or the Amazons, Googles, Metas, and IBMs of this world were to somehow seize control of Linux development.

Unlike other projects, such a fork could even start without an immediate name change: Torvalds has protected the term “Linux,” but it has always been used for operating systems built with it and their kernels, even if the latter differ significantly from what is distributed via Kernel.org. This is particularly the case with Android or the distributions from Canonical/Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse.

Almost 25 years ago, a developer fork even began to compete with the original unintentionally: In the first year of the Linux 2.4 series, Alan Cox’s “linux-ac” kernels were temporarily considered the better and more stable Linux kernels. Some distributions therefore use them by default; after fine-tuning for a larger and controversial course correction on Torvalds’ side, the two strands then merged again.

Distribute responsibility across multiple shoulders

Like a new CEO, Torvalds’ successor would naturally bring new ideas. For example, the person could bring in one or two developers and lead Linux development as a team. In the past five to ten years, some of the kernel’s larger subsystems have already begun to distribute the load across two or three shoulders. Much can be speculated about this. What will actually happen will only become clear when someone else takes the helm. However, there is currently no indication that Torvalds will give it up anytime soon.

(nen)

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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.

The opposite would probably be worse, honestly.

My favorite thing about this is the explainxkcd page keeps it going by also spelling out all punctuation

Weird number of downvotes here – I thought they were meant for low-effort or non contributive comments, not an “I disagree” button. This person is giving a unique perspective as a subscriber (in this thread, anyway) and should be met with curiosity, I think. It is helpful to know that there are people who enjoy paying for it, so thanks for giving your opinion here.

I disagree because they have a dominant position for reasons other than having a good product – they squash competition trying to make the space better while themselves actively making it worse. Subscribing means supporting that style of inhibiting innovation, not to mention the other user-hostile practices they embrace (extend, extinguish). They are an ad company and obligated to make a profit, I get that, but I refuse to abide this style of using investor money to operate at a loss for years while deceptively capturing the market before raising prices. If your product is good, it shouldn’t need to be artificially propped up.

Yeah I feel you. I don’t think the content is necessarily bad, but LLM output posing as a factual post at a bare, bare minimum needs to also include the sources that the bot used to synthesize its response. And, ideally, a statement from the poster that they checked and verified against all of them. As it is now, no one except the author has any means of checking any of that; it could be entirely made up, and very likely is misleading. All I can say is it sounds good, I guess, but a vastly more helpful response would have been a simple link to a reputable source article.

You have yet to suggest or confirm otherwise, so my point stands that your original post is unhelpful and non-contributive

The issue is you didn’t confirm anything the text prediction machine told you before posting it as a confirmation of someone else’s point, and then slid into a victimized, self-righteous position when pushed back upon. One of the worst things about how we treat LLMs is comparing their output to humans – they are not, figuratively or literally, the culmination of all human knowledge, and the only fault they have comparable to humans is a lack of checking the validity of its answers. In order to use an LLM responsibly, you have to already know the answer to what you’re requesting a response to and be able to fact-check it. If you don’t do that, then the way you use it is wrong. It’s good for programming where correctness is a small set of rules, or discovering patterns where we are limited, but don’t treat it like a source of knowledge when it constantly crosses its wires.

Sounds like a globe made of hands

RTX ON

I think I see your point, you’re saying what I’m calling “bloat” isn’t necessarily useless, right? Sure, but that still kind of supports my point – they include software/features by default that aren’t necessary and should be opt-in instead of opt-out regardless of how easy it is to set up. That’s the dictionary definition of bloatware, and they have a lot of it. I’m not trying to say it’s a terrible OS, but it is definitely bloated.

The whole point of LTSC is reduced bloat and increased stability for enterprise customers – doesn’t the existence of a bloat-free version tell you all you need to know? They don’t seem to have an issue selling enterprise software, but the users on the home versions definitely suffer from bloat and choices they never asked for.

Did you mean to paste a source link for that quote?