It's mostly WINE though isn't it? Well, Proton but still. That has the 64bit-32bit thunking layer required. Native Linux builds would need to be 64 bit true, but that's where I was going with the "10-20%" bit.

I run 32bit Windows games on ARM via Rosetta/MacPortingToolkit. So long as the game itself is tricked into believing it's in a 32bit universe, it's happy.

gah - Kinoite. Spelling.

That's chicken and egg though. I use Bazzite, Fedora Kinorate with some gaming tweaks. Fedora wanted to drop 32 bit and there was a lot of noise as things like Bazzite or any gaming usage at all from that distro would break.

But, if Steam went 64 bit then that's 80%-90% of the issue solved straight away, and the last 10-20% would quickly sort themselves out in response. Summary is the distros have already indicated they don't want to do the work, and it's userland that's holding them back right now. Would be mutual benefit to lose them, but userland has to move first.

Everyone online knows that. The vast majority of the population doesn't - it's not general knowledge outside of people that spend a lot of time online. That where you get this 'the famed hacker 4Chan' or 'CEO of Bitcoin' nonsense in reports, it's simply not their world and they don't swim in these waters.

I mean, I've been online since about 1989 and even I don't know that much about actual 4chan, to me it was always the Lion King's "You must never go there" scene (and then came 8chan - my god).

It doesn't surprise me that those who aren't immersed in this environment daily don't actually know that much about it.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

This one in fact, saying that survey response rates for official UK data had collapsed from 35% to 5%.

Survey fatigue is one, but I think people are also more wary about having their opinions attached to data these days. At least for formal, official data anyway, obviously social media is still going strong. I think a factor is that people aren't sure how it's going to be used and if it could come back to them in some way.

No, because experience isn't a protected category. Age is, but only in certain cases mostly dealing with existing employees. Youth isn't protected at all:

https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr...

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older."

Lean on your keyboard for long enough and you'll have a valid Perl program. You won't know what it does of course, but then how does that differ from any other Perl program?

"Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive,"

Seems to me that "poorly optimized code" is a bit of an oxymoron.

No, you just don't understand externalities and the necessary role of government in internalizing them.

Absolutely. We should just apply carbon taxes (and tariffs) to internalize the externality, so the playing field is level, and let the market work.

This is why carbon taxes must be accompanied by carbon tariffs. That also incentivizes the foreign seller to reduce their own emissions (or fake it -- enforcement wouldn't always work, but it only needs to work most of the time).

LOL. I just posted this (about how supermarkets find managing cash painful): https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

I spent some time working on a cash management system for a grocery store chain. It treated cash as inventory so the stores could track movement between registers and back rooms, and could help automate the interaction with the banks to deliver cash to the bank and purchase cash from the banks. Between what retailers euphemistically call "shrinkage" (i.e. theft), the fees paid to the bank for pickup and delivery, the cost of management overhead to try to minimize shrinkage and the opportunity cost of having so much money tied up in stacks of paper and rolls of coins, the stores considered cash not the cheapest way to do business but the most expensive. If it weren't for the fact that refusing cash would alienate a non-trivial minority of their customer base, they'd do it.

Part of the reason for the cash management system was to eliminate that "opportunity cost" bit. They had a lender that was willing to lend them money cheaply using the cash they had sitting in 200 stores as collateral, as long as they had accurate real-time reports of how much cash was held so they could prove their minimum cash inventory (which across so many stores was several million dollars). The intention was then to invest the cheap money in various was to generate ROI. This wouldn't address all the other costs of using cash, but it would at least mitigate the concern that they had millions of dollars in capital just sitting completely idle every day.