Right, same here. But most Mac users aren't using the Unix nature of macOS in any way. I would guess that 95% or more never open a shell window ever.

That said, the article was specifically talking about Linux desktops. Technically, macOS is not based on the Linux kernel so that's why it doesn't count. That doesn't seem the important part, though: how many users actually care what kernel they're running? I suspect what the survey was really trying to find is the systems using open source, non-commercial software stacks (e.g. KDE or Gnome plus GNU and Linux) as a GUI based desktop. But I'd have to read the original article to understand what the author was really trying to discover.

Yes, but TFA was a bout Linux desktop systems. I assume that means your typical laptop/deskside computers, not phones, tablets, embedded systems, or rack-mounted datacenter gear.

I spend most of my time in a WSL environment on my Windows laptop. I wonder how that would count.

Interesting. If I did a spot poll of my current work environment, Unix desktops would account for approximately 0%.

At my previous job, one with 100,000+ employees, Unix desktops would be approximately 0%. I'm only personally acquainted with one person who insisted on a Linux desktop.

Of all my friends, I can think of on who might have a Linux desktop but suspect he actually uses a Mac.

As summarized, this is a poor question. There's a world of difference between a PhD in medieval poetry, paying full freight at an Ivy versus BS in machine learning from State.

There's also a ton of difference from person to person. My master's definitely paid for itself. My nephew dropped out of a state college because he had no interest or aptitude for education. A college degree would be wasted on him as long as his career goal is professional gamer.

Right. I saw some numbers the other day (don't have them handy) about manufacturing productivity. Mean US worker value-add per hour is something like 6-8 times that of the mean Chinese worker. You could double Chinese factory productivity and it still would lag the most advanced facilities.

It would be interesting to see this as a histogram. My impression is a lot of Chinese manufacturing is (or was) small shops: no more than a dozen people in a shed. But you have to add up a lot of shops to equal the headcount and output of Shenzhen. I'd love to see the output per worker graphed against number of workers and compare that against other societies.

My thoughts exactly. It would be interesting to see an analysis of just how much that's affected the Canadian media industry. I don't know how you'd figure that out given we don't have a counterfactual. One hopes the Australians did their due diligence.

Now now. There's plenty of quality entertainment produced in Australia.

(This one is a favorite of my wife and daughters.)

Well, and that's been the gripe. If the EU marshalled its resources, it should have been able to end this tragedy in weeks. Given that it's on their border, they seem to be in a better physical position to intervene and ought to have much stronger motivation.

At least that's the complaint. TBH, I don't follow EU involvement in the conflict to say what they could or should have done.

interesting post. I do want to respond to this one point.

That's Bastiat's broken window fallacy. We don't become wealthy building weapons or (even worse) destroying things. For example, if we hadn't spend billions building the Gerald Ford, we would have those billions to spend on roads, factories, parks, data centers, any number of other things. If we didn't employ a million soldiers, they could spend their time producing goods and services for civilian uses.

It's not to say that a robust army, navy, and air force aren't important. It's just not correct to say that paying for weapons makes us better off. Weapons and soldiers are a deadweight loss to an economy.

I have no idea how you read that in what I wrote.

If I were the Russians, I'd be updating the software so that if the missile decides it needs to turn 180 degrees, it should limit it's turn to whatever the airframe can safely handle. And I'd update the software to treat location data with suspicion if the missile's position abruptly changes 10,000 miles when it had high confidence it knew where it was. And I'd update the software to fall back to dead reckoning or inertial guidance if I have reason to not trust the location receiver. This all seems pretty obvious to me and if it's obvious to me, it should be table stakes for anyone designing actual avionics.

If I were the Ukrainians, I'd be figuring out how to slowly change the missile's received position to counteract the code the Russians ought to be adding. Don't say you're in Peru, say you're 100 meters north of where you really are. Gradually increase the delta to nudge the missile to a safe impact location. That's sounds pretty tricky: you have to know where the missile is now, where it's targeted, where you want it to land, and how much you have to fool the missile to make it think it's blowing up your command post when it's really landing in Russia somewhere.

It's a game of cat and mouse. Can the Russians reliably detect spoofing? Can the Ukrainians spoof so subtly that the Russians can't detect it?

I'm not sure why you'd say this. From the summary and article, they're using the same gear and techniques we use for oil drilling. I'm not aware of any slavery or dead slaves in the oil and gas drilling industry. It's not like they are proposing hollowing out a giant cavern one mile down and building a conventional power plant there. The proposal, which sounds incredible, is to build something nine meters long and 75 cm wide.

I will note we have conventional mineral mines which are deeper than this. The Mponeng gold mine is 2.5 miles deep and there are a number of mines far deeper than one mile.

That would be epic. Without knowing the missile's actual target, you probably can't spoof it accurately enough.

I was wondering if you could make them collide in mid-air. That would be pretty cool. But if you're under attack, it's probably best to just kill the damn things now and not get cute. Kind of like now Dr. Evil should just shoot Austin Powers and skip the bad tempered sea bass.

Which seems like sloppy engineering. I'm not a rocket scientist or weapons designer but even I realize you'd want to put rate limits on your flight controls. And the flight control software ought to handle abrupt changes in received location.

If I were the Russians, I'd be updating my software, not adding receivers. And if I were the Ukrainians, I'd be getting ready to tell the missiles they are only 10, then 20, 50, 100, 1000 meters away from where they really are.

...I want a statement that autism is created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. For reasons only He understands, He sometimes reaches out with his noodley appendage and gives kids autism.

Is that true? We don't know, we haven't rigorously investigated it, have we now? Since there's exactly as much evidence to support the FSM as vaccines causing autism, the CDC has a duty to mention both possibilities.

I'm puzzled by this. Monarch was trying to do two things:
1. Sell electric tractors
2. Sell autonomous tractors.

It seems lots of other companies similarly conflate "autonomous" with "battery electric". Anyone know why they do this? I mean, I know it was Tesla who first made waves with self-driving(ish) cars and since it was Tesla, of course they were electric. But these seem like two different products with two different sets of challenges to me.

Surely if you wanted to de-risk your autonomous tractor program, you'd start by buying and reselling conventional tractors so you could use your clever beans on the driving software. Or if you want to sell electric tractors, skip the whole autonomy gambit and focus on drive trains and hitches.

Anyone know a good reason why this seems to get all smooshed together?