open source license violations/takedowns of legitimate open source forks, and other anti consumer practices. casual users likely unaffected, unless you're philosophically offended (rightfully, imo)
Yes. sometimes specs are badly designed. Targeting a constantly moving goalpost for a spec mainly implemented by embedded devices seems to me like, best case, questionable judgement
My ideal software: buggy in ways you can't diagnose, for reasons you can't intuit, reproducible by literally no one in the world, and with no one to file a bug report to
I've found many developers having switched to non-github forges (e.g. forgejo/gitlab/sourcehut or what have you), but particularly self-hosted instances, to sort of opt-out of the culture around mpdern-day open source. My sense is the barrier of entry is a social signal that they'd like to opt out of being assigned community manager+tech support+moderator for anonymous users. typically there isn't a functional issue here, but I guess avoiding the town square is a good way to avoid having to interact with the town drunk/crank/large language model
An inane point. Obviously it's a "preference" rather than a "requirement" that my text editor boot in less than 30 seconds. But it's also not a functional requirement that Home Depot's POS terminals take a long time to start. If you could do the same checks and caching in a few hundred milliseconds it would only improve the usability for the cashier. You haven't made a case for why some user interfaces shouldn't start instantly, only that their slow start-up _might_ be justified
> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.
I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain
This implies that the harm caused by this broad surveillance technology is "hypothetical/theoretical", when there is long history in this country's government using private companies to launder otherwise illegal surveillance of political activists[1].
And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].
This is relatively niche, but that's a thing for anime fan-encodes. Some groups publish their vapoursynth scripts, allow you to produce the same re-encoding (given you have the same source video). e.g.:
The assertion that it is possible or the attribution to Feynman? Scientific American [1] references Feynman's 4th Messenger lecture at Cornell: "Symmetry in Physical Law" (1964) [2] [3]
Modern pixel artists far from "misunderstand" the legacy of pixel art. They're specifically designing for a sensibility and context that didn't exist when pixel art was originally made. Actually talk to pixel artists and they'll explain this to you themselves perfectly fine
> don't keep up to date with the upstream software that has bug fixes
It is a very rare occurrence that my distro's packages are more than a week out of date from upstream releases
> That's precisely why software authors prefer to release as flatpaks
This implies that "software authors" do "prefer" releasing flatpaks, a plainly false statement for the vast majority of software.
> distros can't provide assurances that software will work
based on interpretation, either plainly false or a misrepresentation. They can't guarantee that software will always work because they operate in the realm of reality, but their raison d'etre is to package software together so they interoperate.
> They can't fix it if it's broken
In fact, distros regularly patch software so they're not broken before (if ever) those patches are merged upstream
> a tiny minority of users
A "tiny minority" of users prefer using their system's package manager? Implying that the vast majority would prefer all their software be packaged and flatpaks and appimages and docker containers? I don't know where you're pulling these numbers from but I bet it smell crazy in there
Sure, but the ratio is way different. I frequently cook the exact recipe the exact same way as I've done before, but I'd struggle to think of a reason to rewrite the exact same implementation of the same program.