Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an option" is one of the best reads a geek can have; it's about all the technical problems they had during the Apollo project and how they solved them.

Erlang is... weird. 15 years ago I wanted to learn a new and different language and I tried it but i could not wrap my brain around some of its constructs. Then I read a paper by a guy claiming that some things were impossible to do with Erlang (with examples in other languages) and since I didn't have any projects to do with it, i basically forgot all about it.

Why did they change name ? Usually companies do that after some big scandals...

Same job here. You put into words what I've been thinking. I find getting started on embedded projects with new boards increasingly difficult. I thought I was just getting old, but the documentation is hidden on download sites (and gigantic), applies to heaps of incompatible boards (spot the difference !), mixes payware (very $$$) solutions and open source (which the vendors won't support or even explain), the forums take a week to have a single barely related answer...

Or well warmed at least. We have a server room at work (about 10 racks) and we use ambient air cooling for it (aircon only on the hottest days of summer). In winter we can heat the entire building (250 people) with the air that comes out of the machines.

There are 5 Linux laptop at home. None crash. Except the one my wife uses, when she touches the screen. It just goes dark with a few bright pixels on the top line. Nothing in the logs. Last week I changed the inside screen cable... and the problem disappeared. Must have been some kind of short because the cable is twisted in weird ways in the hinges. So I don't think it was an OS problem !!!

Ever read The Last Ringbearer ? It's the LOTR, but see from the loser side ("History is written by the winners"). And it shows the orcs as some kind of industrial society (aren't they ?) and the elves as some kind of lordly rulling class (aren't they ?). It twists things around in a way that can give you cold sweats...

Simple, just ask the LLM to fix it, doh ! /s

Yup. Nowadays there are some scam sites that scrape the entire content of others, change the stylesheet, put everything on sale at 50%, let the orders roll in and run away with the cash. Some even manage to stay up for years. One the ripped me off 20$ for a hard to find bike part 2 years ago is still up and running for instance. So good luck to those using AI purchasing agents, they'll need it !

I browse with ad blockers and JS blockers and increasingly more sites just block me outright or won't work ("Content available after you disable your ad blocker" "NO").

Particularly since the name is already taken by a revolutionary telescope... that will now take bad images thanks to all those fucking satellites passing in front of it !

Let me just add that if you provide a way to copy files via a physical cable, there should be a way to find those files, no ?!?

Maybe locking down the filesystem makes sense on a smarttv (not sure about that one as I don't have one) or a car, but a phone/tablet is now as general a computing device as can be (you still need to copy your pictures to your PC, and copy your mp3 from your PC). I don't know about the Mac, last time I had one was in 2000 and I did not like it back then.

I don't really want to go back to that issue, but your first point makes no sense to me. What is a "device with no direct file access" ? There's a file browser. Apps save files. If the files are already on the device, what sense does it make to transfer them to a server on the other side of the world just so they can make it back. That's total bullshit.

Any time I use anything Apple, I'm violently reminded of why I never want to use anything Apple. Kind of offtopic but last week my dad asked me to copy some directories of images from his Linux PC (which I admin remotely without issues) to his iPad. It took me no less than 2 fucking hours to figure out how. I could connect via USB and transfer easier than I would have expected... but then impossible to find the images on the iPad, no matter what app I used. I tried several other methods to.