See also https://berty.tech/

Yeah I think Islam as it's practiced is disgusting, even if some would say that's not Islam, that's a radical minority. Somehow this radical minority seems to rule the roost in too many countries.

But I've read the Old Testament (didn't have much choice about it when I was a kid). I wonder to what extent Israelis see Islamic people as the modern Canaanites, to be exterminated mercilessly because they occupy the land their God gave them? There's also the recent quote from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: "“We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Of course dehumanizing one's enemies is always a necessary first step before getting really merciless. And as long as the US backs them up, they are able to be bigger bullies than they would otherwise be, even though they make so many of their own weapons.

I can relate to the love Jews must have for their historical lands. But it's also said that Islam has roots there. So if both sides say this land (especially Jerusalem) is fundamentally important to them for religious reasons, and they can't move beyond that, how can there be any resolution? Not until the people in power, and everyone but the small inevitable minority of the citizenry on both sides, are able to adopt a completely secular viewpoint. Impossible, right? Reasonable secular Islamic countries have been on the wane for the last few decades. (Afghanistan, Turkey and Iran for example)

As for Gaza, what an impractical situation... the so-called nation of Palestine is divided into two parts, one of which is only as big as a big city, and accessible only by crossing land that belongs to their mortal enemies. Why can't they give it up, make a deal to trade for a bit of land somewhere else, perhaps adjacent to the other part? It ought to beat the life they have led so far. Well Gaza is on the sea, but still. But Hamas is rather based on the principle that Israel has no right to exist at all. Doesn't that sound familiar... Besides, Hamas only governs Gaza, and they don't want to lose power... the usual reason for most wars being some individual dudes that crave power, fear losing it, etc. Yeah I guess we're all just "human animals" with that kind of thinking being so pervasive still.

So I think they're both wrong, but I expect Israel to win this round in some sense, while actual peace with the remaining Palestinians remains unachievable.

I know, I should never buy an Acer... should have known better; but it's a cool hardware design. I figured I'd run mostly Linux if possible, but keep Windows just in case. Well... first problem is Acer cannot do proper power management. After a month or two running Linux every day, one time I let the battery run down too far, and it wouldn't charge anymore. No signs of life. I had to send it in for repair. When I finally got it back (long story, but Acer will only send it to a US-based address after warranty service), Windows 11 was out, so I let it install the upgrade. Then it just couldn't do much without blue-screening. So I gave up and reinstalled Linux on the entire SSD this time (except the uefi partition is still there). That also got past the problem that Acer made it so hard to boot anything other than Windows if Windows is installed. And I'm just hoping https://github.com/electrickit... will keep it from running the battery down all the way.

China got the chips to market first, so I'm happy to have a couple of SiFive chips plus a MangoPi to play with. I shudder to think how long I've have needed to wait for the likes of Qualcomm and Intel to get around to it. As it is, any news on Horse Creek is very thin, even with that competition. I'm just waiting for Intel to show the rest of the world how it's done. But they tend to drop anything that's not x86-related in practice. (xscale, for example)

So what's the point of reacting that way now? As if China won't keep iterating their designs anyway. They can prevent American companies from sharing future specific hardware designs and any IP that is actually proprietary. But they can't prevent China from continuing to read the instruction set architecture and come up with their own chips. They could prevent Americans from importing whatever China does put out, but that would hurt developers.

It's not quite a game engine, but almost (in fact, games have been developed with it). And it's being actively developed. QML is easy enough to get started that even people like me who don't have experience with game development can put together 3D worlds with it (although I have plenty of experience with QML as a language: it was only for 2D until the last few years).

If your application is open-source, Qt is open-source too. This will not change. (Qt Quick 3D is GPL-3)

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtquick...

(disclaimer: I work for the Qt Company, just not full-time on the 3D stuff)

My 386 only had 5 MB if memory serves (I think I started out with 2MB, it had 8 slots which had to be used 4 at a time, so then I got 4MB and had to remove 1MB). I put a couple of old 5.25" hard drives in it and used it as a server, after having gotten the shiny new 486 for my main machine. The 386 ran a web server on dialup for ecloud.org. I had an ISP that was letting me get away with it. All just for fun. I forgot whether I successfully ran X on the 386, but I'm sure I tried it. And I think I started with 16MB in the 486... sure seemed like a lot at the time.

Yep, all those redundant package formats. I really don't see the reason for inventing a new one every time. In the early years, sure, dependency management was new, and Debian came along and fixed that. But since then?

I was just trying Alpine on the Raspberry Pi over the weekend, because Postmarket OS is based on Alpine, so I figured maybe they're onto something, and maybe there would be some advantage to having my Librem 5 be part of a network of devices with a compatible distro and architecture. But it was a real pain to set up (see how vague some details are at https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/w... ) and I didn't end up with a working GPU for Qt Quick purposes either, on the original armhf pi; I'm pretty sure that used to work on other distros back in the day. So far it has seemed like only Rasberry Pi OS and Ubuntu are able to get the drivers right, plus Vulkan on the pi's that support it. Trying armbian now... their Qt packages suck, so I'm building Qt, will see if it ends up working. At least vulkaninfo output looks promising. I chose armbian because it's also supported on libre.computer boards, so now I have a heterogeneous aarch64 icecc cluster that nevertheless supports the same compiler.

Maybe more device distros should be built with the openembedded/yocto approach. It can generate packages too, in several formats.

For that matter why did Alpine go away from being Gentoo-based? That also would have made some sense: just provide the missing pre-compiled packages to make Gentoo easy to install on a lot of niche machine architectures.

I assume if asked this, it will start with some advice on how to set an appropriate water temperature, and a suggestion that actually a bath is the more common way of keeping a baby clean.

I'm not sure if the rewrite is done, but isn't Firefox the poster child of "rewrite it in Rust"? The impulse to use such a safe language to eliminate whole classes of bugs was really the right direction IMO. If someone said they wanted to start a browser from scratch, I'd suggest using Rust, but here we are: much work is already done.

I like using Firefox because it's the main non-Chrome alternative, and we just can't trust Google to run the whole web like they are trying to do.

Yeah I'm not a fan of the pushiness when installing a new version, and needless UI tweaks, but whatever. I keep using it anyway.

There are all kinds of bloat on the web, and I'm interested in blocking the aspects of the web that don't add any value. (Trackers, ads, auto-playing videos, needless JS, wacky layouts, fonts, excessive intervention from web "designers", particular kinds of paywalls that just obscure content that is already downloaded, and so on) But ok, reader mode is that idea... I just didn't get in the habit of using it much so far. Guess I should try it more often and see if anything actually breaks.

I suspect more can still be done about memory consumption. Other ideas were posted here about inspection tooling to make troubleshooting this easier.

TBH I don't know why the market share isn't higher. It's still a pretty good browser for me.

Puh-lease. These are politicians and the military you are talking about: they don't have morals, and they want more control of things themselves. "Supporting democracy" is just how they sell to the proles certain plans that they already made.

Currently it seems like a little chip-production protectionism is in vogue (although I suspect that won't continue indefinitely: the oligarchs steer the government towards globalism, most of the time; whereas protectionism is a kind of market inefficiency, most of the time). So OK TSMC builds factories in the US now. That's nice from one side, reversing the old brain drain: we invented a lot of technology in the early years with semiconductors, then Asia ended up with the expertise, with our help, and then surpassed us. Now the factories are coming back to Arizona: that makes me a little proud, having grown up with those Motorola and Intel (and other) plants around the Valley, and then watching them get shut down over the years. But on the other hand, if saber-rattling continues, and something disruptive happens in Taiwan, it will cause much more disruption in the supply chain than if we simply let China grab the reins over there. Depends how much that production really shifts to the US. Maybe that's the endgame: the US can reduce risk for itself, and then can pursue its own selfish goals, without having to care as much about Taiwan and its people? Taiwan is useful as an outpost, and a goad in China's side, and can continue as a trading partner for as long as that continues to work. The US powers-that-be will keep trying to increase the strength of their hegemony, as a higher priority than any of that. But they might want to reduce the risk of disrupting the supply chain, to prepare for taking bigger risks politically and militarily.

So many other things are currently made in China, though. (I remember when the gold oval "made in Taiwan" stickers were much more common, on silly cheap things that they are too rich to bother manufacturing now.) The trade war is going to get more and more disruptive in many other industries (not only for the US, but for all the lapdog countries that go along with everything they propose). Being able to make some of our own chips again is just scratching the surface.

Look at the map though. An independent and rebellious Taiwan from China's perspective is kindof like an independent Cuba from the US perspective. China can be expected to try to meddle there, for sure; whereas it's not in our backyard at all. And it's definitely not worth risking war over that island. Almost nothing is actually worth the risk of provoking a war, anywhere. The military should be for the defense of the homeland, not for shenanigans on the other side of the globe. I hope China sees it that way too. Hopefully all this neo-imperialism of ours just comes from the old habits of our English ancestors; I don't get the impression that the Chinese are so ambitious about controlling the world politically: only about preserving trade, and feeling secure in their own neighborhood. But we on the other hand make a lot of other countries uncomfortable, with our shenanigans. And our oligarchs are just happy to sell more weapons, regardless how they will be used.

I'm glad Taiwan still has their independence, and they should be prepared to defend it too. The US government has no moral high ground that wouldn't be given up in a heartbeat as soon as it's in conflict with some other US interest.

Yeah I might have an account on diaspora somewhere, I forgot. Not crazy about the architecture: most of the "decentralized" ones are not really, they are just federated, made for small servers hosting a number of users, rather than everybody running their own. So in practice, your account lives somewhere else, unless you are going to put in the time to be an admin of your own server, lemme guess you have to manage postgresql or mysql too? All that is avoidable now. But for that kind of network, maybe mastodon has more traction now?

Secure Scuttlebutt is pretty nice, I've used it (but not regularly). People seem more genuine there, rather than posturing and trying to sell themselves, so it feels comfortable to me; and SSB is technically built almost how I think it should be, too. Some flaws but not bad.

Peergos sounds like it might turn out OK for users, but it's Java, so not really interesting to develop for. Urbit... maybe interesting, but without endorsing the political position of the founder; time will tell whether that matters. It's more than a social network though. (widweg-walfet here, it's yet another just-in-case thing for me)

Exactly, I don't buy laptops without touchscreens anymore. Yeah it's impractical for most of today's applications, but I need one for testing and prototyping touch UIs anyway. (If Apple can pull it off, why can't the open source community?) My favorite laptop design is the Thinkpad Helix, but my 2013 model got long in the tooth, always generated too much heat for its size, and the display is not as good as today's models. What I want is a detachable like the Helix, with an ergo keyboard layout (reduced ergodox or enhanced atreus), preferably fanless: just get creative with heatpipes going to external cooling fins on the back of the tablet part. It should support some sort of stylus too.

I'm settling for an Eve V in the meantime: not really a laptop, but I stopped daily subway commuting when covid started anyway, and so far just keep working from home, so actually I don't have anything on my lap very often anymore. With that machine, I practically need a table (the kickstand is much worse than the Helix design - no idea why _that_ is so trendy), but at least I get my choice of keyboard, and absolutely no fan noise. Most of the time I'm using a fast desktop machine instead though.

The next best was a Yoga. But mine developed a problem with some peripheral ports, so the internal SSD will not work for more than a minute or two after booting, and the type C ports don't work; so I can only boot it from the full-sized USB3 port now, which means it's not a laptop anymore, it has to sit on a desk with storage attached, and I don't have desk space for gimpy machines like that.

And it's going well. I've charged my non-Tesla EV at supercharger stations a couple of times now. It's the same CCS connector, so that was easy for them to open it up. They tend to have more chargers at each location than the other companies do, so it's more of a sure thing to be able to find one, not have to wait for it to be available. Usually there is food and/or shopping nearby, even out in the countryside.

With the right technology it wouldn't take so much money. Just go peer2peer and get the users to host their own content, leaving a daemon running all the time (tray application for the windows users), and mirroring each others' friends' posts, for redundancy. Of course it should fit into the fediverse too. That's the way to build a social network these days. But he's going for the old centralized model, so he needs money again. Boo hoo.

But I'm on it, FWIW, just to see how it develops.

Assuming the infrastructure is built out already, I don't see why a subsidy is necessary. But of course it would be considered an overreach of federal power to simply mandate that ISPs must provide it for that price nationwide, without subsidies... Anyway this is basically just more pork for them, and they don't really need it. Hopefully 100 mbps for $30 will become the new normal, and some future law will end the subsidy. And until we are completely dependent on telepresence via VR or something like that, I don't see why most people need more than that bandwidth, either. I have it, and it's still more than fast enough for me.