You want to replace factory workers with robots? Sure, sounds great. It's worked well for the automotive industry, among others.

You want to replace the secretary pool and filing clerks with computers? Already happened, worked out just fine.

Simple tasks, such as replacing the greasy dude behind the counter at the local burger joint with a touchscreen ordering system? OK, I can see the use in that.

But stop replacing customer service positions with computers. People know how to interact with people. When we get a "friendly AI" on the phone, it's usually an exercise in frustration. It won't fair any better in meatspace. If I wanted my bank teller to be a robot, I'd just use the #**$ing ATM.

When, and for whom, do you wish to write OpenGL/Vulkan for?

If you plan on writing code for platforms that universally support Vulkan (or will by the time you actually write your code), then learn that. If you plan on writing code for platforms that don't or won't anytime soon, learn OpenGL.

An example: Blender is just now removing OpenGL 1.3 code from the codebase, because the official policy is to enable backwards compatibility for low-end and older cards (there's a lot of third-world use of Blender). I believe the current release was the first to officially drop Windows XP support. If you wanted to write code for Blender, OpenGL is the way to go.

If you want to write for PCs, learn OpenGL. There's a ton of legacy OpenGL code out there and no GPU manufacturer is going to drop support any time soon. For high-end games that require the fastest and newest machines, Vulkan is an option, but probably not the way to go for a couple years at least.

On the other hand, if you want to write code for phones and tablets that will all have Vulkan support, then learn that.

Yes, it'd be hard. It'd be impractical for most people. But you do still have the right to live a nomadic lifestyle if you want, which was the only point I was making.

My family comes from the Ozark mountains (a hilly, forested region in the U.S. around Arkansas and Missouri). They were poor, but they owned a small farm and had no debt. They didn't make much money from the farm, but were able to keep themselves alive by a mixture of growing their own food and supplementing that with gathering and fishing. My grandmother and her brother spent quite a bit of time in the forest searching for edibles as children. Her father and uncle brought back fish and the occasional critter (squirrel, opossum, whatever they could trap). Her mother and aunt canned and preserved food to keep them alive in the winter.

The trespassing wasn't legal in the U.S. From what I understand, it would be legal there (although the fishing would be harder, since you're not allowed to use a pole, and the hunting would be out). Had law enforcement cared, my family would have had to join the hordes of homeless, wandering families looking for work and food that were so common in that era. The right to wander would have made the difference.

I've never been to Norway, nor do I personally know anyone from there. All I have to go on is the Wikipedia article, which states:

Its primary use might be to allow you to enjoy nature, but I highly doubt that was its primary function. I'm not an expert on Scandinavian history, but I doubt the tradition was formed with recreational camping in mind.

I didn't insinuate that you could.

I read "hunt their own food" more in a "eat all the wild berries and mushrooms you can find" sense than a "shoot all the moose" sense. Perhaps I should have been more clear.

Not disputing your point, but providing information:

It's called the Freedom to Roam. A number of countries have it. It's considered a basic fundamental right in countries like Sweden and Finland.

Like most things though, it only works if only a few take advantage of that right. There's not enough wilderness to sustain everyone if we all decided to adopt the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

That's not quite how freedom of speech works.

You can say whatever you want as yourself*, and the government can't stop you.

If you're speaking as a representative of the government, however, the government can put limits on your speech, just like any employer can. As an example, IBM is well within their rights to fire an employee that badmouths their products while on service calls. A police officer that badmouths the mayor while in uniform can also be fired.

The government can certainly discriminate against employees or potential employees based on their views and political leanings**. I believe I was asked if I was a communist whenever I enlisted in the military.

TL;DR: Erik Barnett, the guy that lives on the corner and has the green lawn flamingos, can say whatever he wants. Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and attache to the European Union at the Department of Homeland Security, can't.

[*] within various limits, fire in a theater, etc.
[**] imagine the lawsuits for every presidential appointee if this wasn't the case

One thing that caught my eye was this:

and

(There's a Unicode tau there that slashdot won't pass)

I've seen this in Emacs LISP, but I haven't seen it elsewhere (granted, I mostly use older languages...). I imagine non-ASCII characters in code are going to be a point of contention among developers.

Related:

I haven't payed much attention to Perl 6 (I use Perl 5 for a lot, though), but now I'm looking forward to playing with this.

It sounds like you don't use GNOME like it is intended either. Sure, you get what you want - for the most part - if you go without the panel and use compiz and build an OSX-like interface, etc. etc.

At that point, you're not running GNOME. You're using GNOME components.

As far as what's missing, it was like I said: configurability. There was a constant push to remove options from settings panels, and a constant push towards a Windows-like workflow. That's great for people coming from Windows. It sucks for people like me, who actually liked OpenLook, FVWM, and Afterstep, and whose first actions upon a new install is to put a launch icon for xterm and add a grid of desktops with edge flipping.

It's been fifteen years, I can't give you specifics. The mailing lists should still be there, and you'll find people on them (including myself) complaining about the process. My point was merely that people have been complaining about UX designers mucking about with GNOME for long before 3.x.

Oh, and I like Motif, too, in a strange sort of way. Want to talk about removal of configrability, just ask where X resources went.

Emacs isn't hard to learn. It's certainly no harder than vi. It helps to ignore all the parts in the tutorial about being compatible with old terminals - in other words, if you like using PgUp/PgDown and the arrow keys, use them - they work just fine.

If you do a lot of text editing, you just switch to it. In a couple weeks you'll be up to your old speed or faster than you were in whatever you used to use (unless what you used to use was just a simple editor, in which case you'll be up to speed in much less time). Learning to customize it involves learning some LISP, but LISP syntax is simple and you can pick it up pretty quick (probably quicker than vimscript, anyway). I came from vim so I use evil mode, which gives Emacs vi keybindings.

So, you have coworker with a different skillset, and you blame his choice of tools rather than the person himself?

Did you come here from 4chan?

I can't make out your point. Something about Unicode, some implication that open source doesn't offer features (which is false), a bunch of talk about various graphical stuff with the implication that those are unavailable in open source (the only one that might apply to is CAD, but I don't do CAD so I don't know), and then some sort of rant about GUI vs. CLI that doesn't apply to any of this (are you under the impression that all open source apps are CLI?).

I hope your coworker is more coherent than you.

Emacs by default has menus and point-and-click functionality. A lot of users turn all that off. Of course, that's not saying that Emacs is easy, even with all that turned on, but what does market share mean to an open source project, anyway? As long as enough people use it to maintain the community, the project continues.

I don't disable the menus because they're useful for rarely-used functions. I spend most of my time in org-mode or one of the programming modes, but every now and again I run something off-the-wall and the menu comes in handy. And hey, what's the point of having large monitors if I can't give up a few pixels for a menu?

The interesting thing about Emacs is that the above two limitations are not because Emacs can't do those things, but because no one was written the code to do them yet.

Art mode's about due for an upgrade, anyway.

That process didn't start with GNOME 3. GNOME 2 is a result of the exact same thing. And I'll enthusiastically disagree with your assessment that it was the "best desktop environment of its day." Maybe it was great if you were coming from Windows, but coming from earlier versions of GNOME or from other UNIX DEs, it was lackluster at best.

Sun provided UX people for GNOME because it wanted to ditch CDE (ironically, right after it had switched to it from OpenLook). The Sun people came in and said, "fuck the power users, let's make things easy!" Options were considered confusing and omitted. The traditional UNIX workflow was replaced with a very Windows-like workflow. This lives on today in MATE - if you compare the standard Windows workflow with MATE, it's basically the same.

Metacity is the perfect example here. It's the most brain-dead, unconfigurable window manager ever. It's less configurable than TWM. Thanks, GNOME, no, I don't want to be productive, what a silly idea! The first official WM for GNOME was Enlightenment, which was all kinds of configurable, and then Saw[mill|fish] (which I've been told was very configurable, although I didn't know LISP at the time so I never found out for myself). Going to Metacity was pretty much par for the course and indicative of their "options are evil" mentality.

Those of us who started using GNOME back in the 0.x days watched our beloved features go away. Some adapted. Some, like me, ditched GNOME as a DE and ran a mixture of various software, including GNOME and KDE apps, and put up with the times when stuff just didn't work right. I eventually switched to KDE, since KDM can do most of what I wanted FVWM for and supports something closer to the traditional UNIX desktop workflow, but I can see where the UX people have been "innovating" there too.

I'll admit that I don't hang out on the OpenBSD mailing lists, but I'm surprised to hear the LibreSSL team doesn't get much support. Theo himself was working on it, at least in the early days, and I had the impression the other devs on the project were pretty high profile. If they're not being funded out of OpenBSD's development fund or equivalent (again, I'm speaking out of ignorance about how the OpenBSD organization works), I'd be very surprised.

Things have shifted quite a bit - it works more or less a drop-in replacement for OpenSSL on OpenBSD now, so current efforts are aimed more at ports and the new API - but I imagine it's still pretty important to the OpenBSD project.

Dunno if 2015 is a good year for the OpenSSL project.

LibreSSL is being ported to other operating systems, and they're working on a new API that is supposedly much easier to work with than OpenSSL's.

We'll see how it goes adoption wise, but I would not be surprised if 2015 is the beginning of the end for OpenSSL.