The D in BDFL is "dictator", it means that what Linus decides is how it will go, full stop.

So if Linus wants Rust in his kernel, complain all you want but there will be Rust in his kernel. I am not particularly pleased by this decision but for now, I am a bit concerned by tooling and slow compile times, though I didn't give much thought to it. But saying that Linux has done well under Linus rule is an understatement. So I trust him. And if Linux loses its way because of that, which I think is unlikely, then it is an open source project, it can be forked.

Some have raised concerned about the Rust community, and I guess the anti-Rust community too, often on subjects tangential to software development, but for me, Linus does a good job at keeping things technical and focus on what's important for the project. Again I trust him on this part.

Musk offered to buy OpenAI recently, why would he want to buy a company that does worse?

And assuming he really wanted to buy OpenAI despite having a better product already, it would have made more sense to wait as a successful release would have increased xAI value compared to that of its competitors.

Except it is not about trans people in particular. It is just that robbers found that these bar patrons, who may or may not be trans or gay would make good victims.

I don't know about Hell's Kitchen in particular but sometimes, straight people sometimes go there too, gays tend to be good at partying, and many straight people with an open mind recognize this. Unfortunately, it also means lots of drugs and people wasted, making these places particularly attractive to these criminals.

From the start, it was clear that there is no real scientific breakthrough with DeepSeek. It was described as using several known optimization techniques, and it worked as expected, which, by the way, is a significant advance by itself.

The real breakthrough is that DeepSeek has shown that the state of the art in AI is not that expensive, not that complicated, and that OpenAI and friends do not really have a moat. They have burst a bubble.

As for DeepMind, how can they be so good scientifically and so bad at production? What is Google doing? They essentially invented modern AI, and continue doing so, and yet, get beaten to market by everyone else.

You would probably be better off with Debian then.

Debian is a stable, reliable and conservative distro, often lagging behind in terms of updates, but if you are the kind who doesn't like to change things that work, then it may be your best option.

The idea is not that $5 is too affordable.

The idea is that with the cost of materials, transport, energy, machines and labor taken to the lowest while still maintaining a decent standard of quality, it may be difficult to make a dress that sells for $5 retail. You can easily find $5 dresses, but *quality* $5 dresses are much harder to find, even in countries where the cost of living is cheap, excluding clearance and secondhand.

Also $5 is not high even for someone who makes that much per day. That would be maybe equivalent to $100 for a middle class person in a first world country, which many are ready to pay for a dress. In the pre-industrial times, clothing used to cost way more than the value a single day of work, maybe by 10x.

$5 is a bit low for a dress, but it is not inconceivable to have good enough quality for a $5 simple, light dress.
The fashion industry wants you to think that quality is expensive, but what you are really paying for is marketing. Also a $5 dress won't be "made in the USA", but this is a political statement that is not necessary for quality.

Cotton is cheap, that's what $1 t-shirts are made of. And synthetic fiber (yes, plastic) can be expensive, a lot of high quality clothes are made of it for its desirable material properties.

Like what? More ads and data collection? More engaging short videos? Yet another LLM?

I am actually glad that Meta spends so much in AR/VR instead of what everyone else does. This is tech with potential, and Meta is the only big company taking it seriously even now that we have passed the hype cycle. How they do it is debatable, but at least, they do it. AI has potential too, but everyone else is doing it. As for social media, most of the progress being done, we would rather do without...

Meta is a tech company, they are not going to end world hunger, develop live-saving medicine, stop climate change or anything like that with that money. It would be great if they did, but realistically, it is not what tech companies do.

Couldn't they let John Lennon and George Harrison rest in peace?

Things have to come to an end, and as great as they were, the Beatles are no more. This is a necromancy award, not a Grammy.

The "free VPN" is available in a small number of countries, none of them being the ones where you really want a VPN, doesn't let you specify the exit point (presumably in the same country), is limited to 50 GB/month, and doesn't work with the most popular streaming services. It is designed *not* to be useful for what most people use personal VPNs for.

And it is not like what they offer is special, there are already plenty of free VPN options with less restrictions.

The only thing it is supposed to do is (partially) protect you when on unsecured networks, like public Wi-Fi, for which https and other encrypted protocols already do a good job. It is useless against state censorship and geographic restrictions, and it is explicitly not for work, where you should use your company VPN instead. The only use case I can think of is something like watching porn on a school network, the fact it is first party software makes the circumvention attempt less obvious. There are, of course, plenty of other ways of achieving that goal.

By comparison I find Copilot much more useful. Unlike that joke of a VPN, it is not *designed* to be useless.

The same argument can be used to make ad blockers illegal. If a website tells you not to use an ad blocker and you use one anyways, is it unauthorized access?

Thankfully, in most jurisdictions, ad blocking is not illegal.

What law throws people who steal $100 worth of crap from Walmart in prison for 3 years?

Assuming it is just ordinary shoplifting I mean, without violence or other aggravating circumstances.

Assuming such law exists, what are the precedents? It is common for laws to mention a heavy penalty for seemingly small crimes, but the actual judgment is typically much more reasonable unless there is something much bigger behind it.

It doesn't mean there isn't a problem with the police, in fact, there is a problem with the police, as in the case of the AI-related arrests the police didn't follow the proper procedure. But anti-shoplifting laws are something different. In fact, I would like theft in general to be taken more seriously, unlike drug use, theft is not a victimless crime. If you have ever been to a low-crime place like Japan or China, not having to constantly worry about your stuff being stolen is really nice. In the case of China, it almost makes constant state surveillance (which I don't support) feel justified.

The BIOS is software, you don't own the software, you only have a license, which you likely agreed to without reading it. The license does not allow you to make copies, including for your own use. The copyright law gives you no rights since you don't own the software.
There are some exceptions to copyright, which vary depending on your jurisdiction. For instance, you may be allowed a backup copy, but it doesn't mean you are allowed to run it in an emulator. Talk to your lawyer if you want to know.

The console is yours, you can use it for parts for instance. I think running Android on it is fine too. But not all the data in the console is yours. Emulators are legal, but you can only use them to run software you have the right to.

Conveniently forgetting the little detail that Hawaii is a remote island and the reason they get any tourism at all is because of air travel, which is currently impossible without fossil fuels. Same thing for ships. If anything Hawaiians are the ones who should pay, profiting from a form of tourism with high environmental impact.

Or even better, stop pointing fingers and try to do something productive.

Note: suing oil companies for doing something illegal, like causing an oil spill is fine, but what did they do that is illegal here?

If it was the case what was the motivation? I don't think it helped sell more USB devices, win over its competitors, etc...

I don't remember USB 1, 2, 3 being a problem from the consumer point of view. The low-speed/full-speed distinction never really made a difference to consumers, some devices were faster than other, but what protocol they used was just internal stuff. USB2 meant high-speed, I don't remember ever seeing a reputable USB2 products that didn't support it. Again, some USB2 product are faster than others, but the "USB" part was well understood. Same thing for USB3 / SuperSpeed. The actual numbers didn't matter much in practice, bigger number = faster was essentially true.

It became a mess after that, but speed usually isn't the problem, few people really need speeds above USB3 (5 Gbps). The concerns typically are: "will my external dock work?" and "how fast can I charge my device, if at all?", and a number of GBps and Watts won't tell you that. The number of Watts could tell you about charging, in theory, but it is not clear at all in practice.

As for BS cables, it is hard to stop knockoff manufacturers from using the thinnest wires available and claim they can do 100W, as well as other crap. All standards are affected: MicroUSB, USB-C, HDMI, lightning, etc... Yes, even Apple with their captive market fell to it.

But to be fair, it isn't that bad. If you buy reputable brands from reputable suppliers, it tends to work quite well, and USB-C adoption went remarkably well for how complex this "do everything" standard is.