It's all up in the air now. Starmer resigned, and it looks like Burnham will run unopposed. He may keep the social media ban, as that has happened in other countries and seems to be reasonably popular and sensible. Should extend it to over 65s as well.

But the VPN ban I can see being walked back quickly as unworkable and unpopular. A pointless fight to have before the social media ban has even been tested.

I do remember that, but the counter argument which seemed persuasive was that the simplifications to the init system and other apps (not just GNOME) was compelling.

And don't they all use systemd? They must have a good reason for it.

Yeah, but to facilitate you continuing to use your familiar commands, the maintainers of the distro have to forego the convenience of systemd. Clearly it offers a lot to them, which is why the vast majority adopted it.

Is there any info on how this location tracking would work? GPS isn't going to cut it, it needs a battery and world wide cellular/satellite connection to track things being shipped, and once installed will be in a Faraday cage (the server enclosure/rack/datacentre).

Are they going to rely on it detecting when it is in a Chinese server somehow? Try to get an external IP address? Something in the driver?

It seems doomed to fail and easily bypassed. I'm sure it will spur further investment in Chinese AI chip manufacturing too, which is already progressing at a very rapid pace.

UTF-8 was a mistake. I get that they wanted to make string handling with existing code as painless as possible, and for most Latin derived languages a 32 bit char is approaching 75% wasted space, but the issues introduced by UTF-8 are far worse. UTF-16 doesn't have enough code points. You could argue for 24 bit.

Cylindrical cells are not the future though, they are older tech and have proven to be largely inferior to prismatic and blade batteries. Prismatic cells for lower cost and higher energy density, blade batteries for extreme performance. Tesla is using older chemistry too.

You botched copy/pasting the quite. I fixed it for you:

That makes complete sense and is in fact how all major operating systems optimize boot times, and how software developers often optimize performance in general. Do as little as possible, and do as much of it in parallel as possible.

Tricky to do with init scripts because there are a lot of dependencies to manage and checks that need to be done for timing and sequencing. systemd makes it easy and I've used it extensively for building a custom OS for embedded systems where hardware init and configuration has to happen in specific sequences, but can be parallel with other parts of the OS starting.

It's interesting that you mention unreasonable costs for end users, because most distros have adopted systemd. That suggests that you want to impose unreasonable costs on distro maintainers for your own benefit.

Users do want this. Watch the final part of the recent Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge. Three of them switched to Linux for a month, and they all kept using it afterwards. Previous challenges had them going back to Windows.

The two big things that changed are Proton making games work, and AI making solving Linux problems less painful. They all commented on the reaction they get when asking questions of the Linux community. It's often hostile and unhelpful, telling them that they don't actually want to do what they want to do and should just do something else, or blaming them for picking the wrong distro, or some other off-putting response. When googling answers, often it comes down to a Reddit thread with outdated information that no longer works. AI is much more helpful and seems to check what solution is needed for their specific, up to date distro.

It makes sense to put an AI assistant in Ubuntu, for users who are coming from Windows, the biggest area of growth for them. If they properly tailor it to their OS, with relevant and up to date information, it could get around one of their biggest hurdles - the toxic community.

I see what you are saying, but also I'm not sure if I'd say it's a disability, but I certainly find typing stuff out is easier than saying it. Especially as I can edit it before submission, where as what I say is what the AI responds to immediately.

It's a lot like talking on the phone, which I also dislike. Face to face, people can see your expressions and when you look like you are trying to think of what to say or how to rephrase something, they can wait. On the phone, or talking to an AI, that isn't possible.

As long as they keep both options it's okay I guess.

It doesn't seem that bad anyway. They can run arbitrary code, for that boot... But the flash encryption key is in the secure enclave, right? So all the user's data is safe, the OS can't be tampered with, and since it's only in memory a power cycle or probably even just a reboot will clear it.

I'm sure some Israeli company is working on a chained exploit as we speak, but I think if you are concerned about that you probably want to avoid Apple devices anyway. They are a very popular target for those companies.

Most people had pretty crappy soundcards back then. Credit to him that he came up with tunes that sounded decent even with the naff guitar and drum sounds on a typical Soundblaster compatible card.

Could also be interesting for cold brew iced coffee.

But this is all looking at the past. Now we have renewables and storage on a scale that was unimaginable even a few years ago, and especially given that new nuclear takes at least 20 years to build in Europe, even when factoring in climate change as a risk, it still loses.