Over the years I have used as my main development machine:

* 2011 17" Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM
* 2016 iMac with 8 cores and 32GB RAM (with 2 additional 4K screens)
* M3 Max 14" Macbook Pro with 36GB RAM (and an additional 4K screen)
* M4 Max 16" Macbook Pro with 48GB RAM (and an Apple Studio screen)

I havent really ever run into a resource issue - I had to retire the iMac just last month because the screen was ghosting, but it was still perfectly usable for development purposes right up to that point (ie I never get frustrated with it in terms of performance). The M4 Max MBP tho is worlds ahead of it in performance, so I dont regret upgrading - I just didn't upgrade for performance reasons).

I have used Jetbrains Rider now for the past 7 years and I can definitely recommend it (and I pay for it as well). I switched because I moved to Mac for .Net development, and really hated Microsofts .Net story for VSCode - and since switching to Rider, I haven't found myself wanting Visual Studio at all.

Slashdot has progressively got shitter over the past decade, and its noticable that that also correlates to a decline in the number of comments being left on stories.... The community has shrunk.

Slashdot used to allow me to give them money to avoid ads, but they took that away - so I have no moral or ethical issue with blocking ads on this site. Especially as they also used to provide an option to hide ads for long term users - which they started to ignore for specific ads, and then got rid of entirely.

But thats the entire point - at that point you arent scratching your own itch, you are voluntarily scratching someone elses.

If people stuck to scratching their own itches, we would either have fewer large projects or more involvement from users who are scratching their own itches.

But in the meantime, many OSS projects exist on the following flow:

1. Scratch your own itch, and make the solution public because it might help out others
2. Someone else finds your scratching to be valuable to them, so uses your solution
3. You like being involved with something someone else finds valuable, so you start scratching more of other peoples itches to increase your solutions value
4. Growth
5. You complain that other people are having their itches scratched without helping out

All of that is voluntary, and you put yourself in that situation - but you end up blaming others because thats easier than accepting that you made your own situation.

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

If you're going to attempt something outrageous that is almost certain to fail, why not a Space Elevator? On the off-chance you do succeed, that would be a hell of a lot more valuable.

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

A baby in a cradle is the wrong analogy -- a better analogy is an internal organ inside a body. Yes, you can (with advanced technology and at great expense) remove the internal organ from the body and keep it alive externally for some time, but it's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, and sooner or later the disembodied organ will wither and die, unless it is returned to the environment it was specifically evolved to live within.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?