Rust's whole concept of an unstable language is terrifying to me as a developer.

I don't want to have to get the latest nightly/unstable version of a compiler ever. In fact, unstable is exactly the opposite of what I want from my compiler or my language specification.

I know that Rust maintains good backwards compatibility. But after two or three rounds of adding "the new hot way to do something", older tutorials and libraries effectively become obsolete/stale. And this can make the language look like a constant treadmill to an outside observer.

If the Rust team wanted to encourage broader adoption, I'd recommend:
  - Freeze the language for a few years.
  - Deprecate the concept of unstable and nightly versions of the language and compiler.
  - Expand the packages available in Linux distributions. Using Cargo to download everything feels too much like npm, and is vulnerable to authors taking down their packages.

So the toilet-paper situation is actually a little bit more subtle than you'd think.

It's true that toilet paper usage per-person hasn't changed as a result of quarantine. But the _places_ where TP is used have changed.

Instead of spending half your day outside the house (where you're using work TP, restaurant TP, coffee-shop, etc), you're doing all your pooping at home. And chances are you don't buy TP though the same supply-chain as your local restaurant or office complex.

Supplier agreements/logistics don't change overnight. A TP manufacturer typically makes many different kinds of TP, packaged in different ways. And the distribution channels are completely different.

So what we wind up with is a huge surplus in the business-to-business TP supply line, and a huge shortage on consumer TP.

Eventually these can (and will) equalize out. But it takes time - and the consumer shortage isn't purely caused by hoarding.

I think we all agree - it's hard to argue that the stars control our personality.

Now with that said, you could absolutely argue that some of your personality comes from when in a year you're born. hink about the things in our society that are cyclical around the solar year. School years, holidays, vacations. Seasons too.

If you were born just before the beginning of the school year, you're almost a year younger/smaller than your classmates who were born just after the beginning of the school year.

If you were born near Christmas, you probably got stiffed on gifts because you got combo christmas/birthday presents. If you were born in the summer, fewer friends might be around to attend your birthday parties.

So do the stars affect our personalities? Nah probably not. But maybe our brithday does.

I've always assumed that Facebook reads all messages to improve its ad targeting. If so, isn't that fundamentally incompatible with the concept of encrypted messages? Or do they just mean 'encrypted to and from Facebook.'

Congress can end this shutdown without the president's support or approval. They can pass a budget bill, and send it to the president. If he vetoes it, they can vote to override the veto.

I don't understand why more people aren't holding Congress to task on this. They literally don't need the president's buy-in at all to get a budget passed.

Facebook and Google are the worst offenders. We should be asking the EFF, and taking some cues from GPDR. Asking Facebook to write privacy legislation is like asking Wells Fargo to write banking laws.

Oh, wait - murca

That's logically true, yeah - but browser UIs make it increasingly tough to accept self-signed certs. Tough enough that my grandma wouldn't be able to figure it out. Which effectively makes a revoked cert into a death sentence for a website.

I'm all for encrypting web traffic, but this push for HTTPS-everything is kind of terrifying. It puts us in this dystopian future where we rely on CAs to decide whether or not we can visit a website.

If a couple of CAs decide (or are told) to revoke my cert, there's literally nothing I can do about it. And all of a sudden my website is inaccessible to 90% of browsers, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I would happily support some kind of peer-to-peer encryption scheme (HTTPS with no CA, maybe). But centralizing everything through CA gatekeepers is just asking for a government to butt in.

If a pitbull owner looses his dog on somebody and the dog kills them, the pitbull owner is liable yes. But the dog is also almost certainly euthanized.

There are other jokes/easter-eggs in Glibc's documentation. I get a kick out of them every time I run across one.

Should we also go through and strip all of those out? What if I decide that EIEIO is insulting to farmers? Who decides what's a trigger-warning and what isn't?

Should we remove HTTP error 418?

The UNIX/Linux hacker subculture of the 80s and 90s produced a ton of interesting technology, and arguably shaped the internet into what it is today.

I don't want my operating system to be a sterile, soulless entity. I like the in-jokes, the fact that 'fortune' exists, and the recursive acronyms. People have poured their vitality into making tools that are free for the world - the least we can do is let them express a sense of humor if they choose.

UNIX cultureLinux/UNIX is born from a really unique, amazing kind of culture, which

DHMO is benign compared to the dangers of hydrogen hydroxide or hydroxic acid. Those are truly the silent killers of our era.

I use http://www.inoreader.com/ for my RSS feeds, and I love it!

I don't use RSS for things like Slashdot as much as I used to, but I still read all of my webcomics through there. For me, RSS is ideal for websites that post one or two updates a day. For websites with more frequent updates, I usually just visit the front page.

To be clear, we don't have a computer that can survive on Venus, or anything near that. What the research team made is a ring-buffer, which is a collection of maybe 20-30 transistors arranged in a big circle (with one inverter).

That's a very far cry from even an Intel 8080, which is approximately 4500 transistors. And that's without any RAM, Flash, or anything else. This is an impressive milestone to be sure, but it's nowhere near an Arduino (let alone a full computer).