Sorry, but no.

I mean, on the one hand, sure, eventually _something_ else will displace the US dollar as the world's leading reserve currency, because that's how history works: nothing stays in a dominant position forever.

But the statement you added "yet" to was much more specific. And no, Communist China's ridiculous "dedollarization" propaganda campaign is not going to have any measurable impact on the dollar's dominance, any time soon. Among other things, the RMB has never been anywhere near stable enough to make it into the top five currencies, and as things stand now, it looks to only be getting worse. It's relatively heavily traded, but it's not stable, at all. (Contrast with, say, the Canadian dollar, which is stable enough but nowhere near heavily-traded enough.)

The further into the future you try to look, the more difficult it is to see clearly, but if I had to predict based on what we know now, I'd say the currently-existing currency that is most likely to eventually unseat the US dollar would probably end up being the Euro; the Pound Sterling and the Japanese Yen are potentially also in the running. History is seldom predictable, and it'll probably end up being something we cannot forsee right now; but even something like the Brazilian Real, has a much better shot than the RMB, which will never be stable with the CCP in power, and probably cannot survive the CCP's collapse.

As for gold, that's not new, at all; we know what its role is, and that isn't changing. People have always turned to precious metals as a reliable store of value whenever financial times are tough. And that generally works except when new technology messes things up (e.g., what happened to the price of aluminum when people figured out how to do high-temperature electrolysis). For gold, the most likely new technology to mess it up would be if somebody managed to devise an energy-efficient way to extract the dissolved gold from sea water; but even then, gold would still be a precious metal, just not quite *as* precious as it is now. (The total amount of gold in the oceans, is only a few times the quantity of gold in circulation, and less than the amount of silver in circulation.) Short of affordable transmutation (which would be *much* more disruptive than just lowering the price of gold), I can't think of any other way to turn gold into a base metal like aluminum.

Honestly, I can't think of a single use case for bluetooth on a desktop computer, that isn't better served by some other set of physical-layer and data-link-layer standards.

For a cellphone, yes, it makes sense to have e.g. a bluetooth headset.

On a desktop computer? Are you kidding? I don't even. *Maybe* on a laptop, but even that is a bit of a reach.

With that said, Windows 11 is undeniably a terrible OS option for a desktop or laptop, either one. Its main use is to make a modern multicore 64-bit system with gigabytes of RAM, perform like a Pentium-era single-core system with RAM measured in megabytes, spending most of its time ignoring user input while it swaps memory pages in and out. In case that is an era of history that you wanted to revisit, for some reason. Nostalgia for the Good Old Days, perhaps. Enjoy.

I'll be over here using a system with a virtual memory subsystem that actually works, and an update subsystem that doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory every time there's an update. Because I like being able to actually *use* my computer. Call me crazy.

Honestly, I think there are probably more such users on Libera chat (the largest IRC network) than on Slashdot at this point.

I see.

It's not like the X server needs a lot of major changes, at this point. It certainly doesn't need new capabilities; it *has* all the capabilities it needs. A bit of optimization, maybe? But honestly, XFree86 ran just fine on 1990s hardware, so unless you're constructing a Russian nesting doll of multi-layered virtualization or some similarly wacky pathological case, you're not going to have user-noticeable perf problems in 2025 that are best solved by changing the X server. There are some changes I would like to see in the desktop environment that I use; but none of them would require any changes to the X server itself. Apart from any security issues that come up, most of the changes it actually needs, are related to changes in other things that it has to work with: newer video cards, newer compilers that are stricter about what they will compile, newer security systems that e.g. require the software (as well as the user) to have permission to do various things, and so on.

If he's trying to make Wayland-inspired changes to the X server to compete with Wayland, he's an idiot. *Wayland* needs changes, or better yet a complete from-the-ground-up rethink, to meaningfully compete with X11. Changing the X server to do what Wayland does to compete with Wayland, would be actively counterproductive.

Wait, so let me see if I can get this straight: because Wayland is an inherently pointless project championed principally by the same people who have been systematically removing all useful features from Gnome since just before the release of version 1.0, this guy decided, based on that, that the main X11 implementation that almost everyone uses, that has absolutely nothing to do with Wayland, needs to be forked again, because... because WHY?

Where is the logical connection between those two entirely unrelated ideas? I agree that Wayland is not now and probably never will be a viable substitute for X11. That premise, is fine. What I don't understand, is how that leads to the conclusion that the X server needs to be forked yet again. Frankly, I'm still not even entirely sure I understand why XFree86 needed to be forked the first two times, but at least those times there was a stated reason for forking. It didn't make any sense to me (as far as I know, there's no particular reason for other software running on the system to _need_ to be license-compatible with the X server), but at least there was a reason given. This time... what was the reason again? Because Wayland is bad? What does Wayland have to do with anything? If Hurd is still useless after all this time, will you fork the Linux kernel, as well? What?

I don't know if the forward blind zones are getting worse; those seem pretty similar to me. But I know absolutely for certain that the blind zones behind the vehicle are much, much larger and worse than they were 25 or 30 years ago. It's the difference between "maybe if a subcompact car matches my speed precisely and gets into exactly the wrong spot behind me in the next lane over, I won't be able to see it in my mirror" in the nineties, versus "Oh, there was an eighteen-wheeler passing another eighteen-wheeler back there, and an SUV was weaving around trying to get past them? How was I supposed to know, when it was all behind me?" The rear windows on a lot of cars these days, look like a portal on a ship's lower decks. It's absurd.

I'm extremely sympathetic. People should not be so insensitive as to mistake her for a bot, how dare they. What, just because she's doing a bot's job, and doing it badly? That's profiling. She deserves better. Even a bot deserves better treatment than that.

What? No, no, I would never. I have no idea what sarcasm even is, how would I possibly engage in it? Don't be ridiculous.

Eh. I'm pretty sure you have to already be pretty severely reality-challenged to even seriously *consider* taking medical advice, or any kind of critical life advice, from a chatbot. I mean, if you are on the fence about whether to order olives on the pizza or not, and you let Magic 8-ball decide, that's one thing. The decision is expected to have relatively minimal consequences, so it probably isn't a very big deal one way or the other. Letting Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or anything along those lines, decide whether you should or should not take psycho-active meds, is entirely another level of YOLO. Either you're thinking "This may go horribly wrong but so what who cares", which is grossly irresponsible (what are you, nine years old?), or else you've genuinely got yourself convinced that life is so meaningless that decisions like that don't matter, which is, if anything, worse. Either way, I don't think Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or that Kirkegaard text you read, or whatever, is at the root of the problem. Turn your brain on, think stuff through, and take responsibility for your actions, and you'll be completely safe from these kinds of ridiculous influences.

"I was born here." -- Henry Cho (who was raised in the US South by Korean parents), on why he became a comedian rather than a doctor or lawyer or whatnot.

Eh, and I suppose you think most of those 36% will get real engineering jobs when they graduate?

Because that is really, really not the direction things seem to be going in China at the moment. Most of them are going to be lucky to get a 996 job on a factory floor.

More to the point, cargo-ship fires are an inherently self-limiting phenomenon, because the economic costs involved (and the manner in which those costs are born) generally motivates people to work to avoid them. I'm not saying they don't have any environmental impact at all, but it's always going to be a relatively limited impact, compared to the amount of economic activity.

Do container ships full of EVs have on average a larger impact per-vehicle than ones full of ICEs and the associated tankers full of petroleum? I honestly have no idea, but I'm certain it doesn't matter, because the cargo-ship fires are not the bulk of the impact that cars and such have on the environment in any case. The construction of the *roads* that the cars drive on, has a larger impact on the environment, than cargo ship fires from transporting the vehicles overseas, and the construction of the roads is a small fraction of the total impact the vehicles have.

Don't know if I can switch as I'm still on a locked in rate, but I'm already a customer paying the extra for unlimited data.

Yes Comcast is notorious for high prices and bad customer service, and I'd love to support my local ISP (which I did for a long time), but the local guys have absolute shitting reliability. I'm paying more for Comcast and I'm locked in for a year or two but honestly the increase in reliability has been more than worth it (with the local guys I was getting disconnects probably a dozen times per day - with Xfinity aside from a cut cable that resulted in several hours of outage, its been rock solid).

Maybe it'll help some iPhone users migrate, but that's a hard no for me. Every time somebody hands me an iPhone I'm confused for a second on why the URL bar is at the bottom.

No, what I *want* is pre-chatGPT Google. It was at least two orders of magnitude better than any search engine that exists today.

Well, what I *really* want is LCARS, but that's a pipe dream.

Doesn't matter if it takes years. Steam isn't going to get all gamers to switch to Linux overnight.

Understand - I like Linux. I first installed it in 1998 and have been a heavy Linux user since 2001 or so. Nobody would like to see Linux succeed as a desktop OS more than me, but Steam isn't going to be able to do that.

And frankly Microsoft isn't likely to want to go that route anyways. It would likely draw anti-trust penalties and they're already doing pretty well as it is.