A few years ago I had a Windows box where I pointed XDG_CONFIG_HOME et al to the corresponding-ish Windows paths (AppData subdirectories, mostly) so that the many Linux-derived CLI programs I was using wouldn't clutter up my userdir, and it worked pretty well, though there were a few programs that didn't get the memo. Unfortunately I don't remember which ones they were. Most programs get it right, though!
I don't know what the official policy is, but glibc uses versioned symbols and certainly provides enough ABI backward-compatibility that the Python package ecosystem is able to define a "manylinux" target for prebuilt binaries (against an older version of glibc, natch) that continues to work even as glibc is updated.
The canonical Boolean values in FORTH are 0 and -1 (that is, all bits set). IIRC the point of that is to unify the bitwise and logical operators, though, not detect bitflips.
Also, at the machine code level, a Boolean controlling a branch or a while loop often doesn't ever make it out of the flags register, where it'll only be a single bit anyway because that's how the hardware works. Not really changeable in software.
There's a new, professionally-published book version of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" out as well[1], if you want to support Sam's work that way. I have print copies of both the self-published V1 and the new V2. I'm very excited about the latter, though I haven't finished it yet.
I don't think it's that the lawyers are undifferentiated; some are better than others, in the same way some real estate agents are better than others (source: people complaining bitterly about theirs).
The problem is that there's currently no effective way to comparison shop. Needing a real estate agent or lawyer is a rare event for most people, so they don't have grounds to make a comparison. And you can't really tell how good they are until you've hired them.
Compare to, say, an auto mechanic. In the US, 90+% of households own a car, and after a few years of car ownership, unless you're a much luckier person than I am, you've probably been to a few mechanics and had some good and bad experiences. On top of that, most of your friends have done the same, so it's much easier to get enough data to figure out who to take your car to next. And, of course, the stakes are a bit lower: a lot would have to go wrong for you to end up in jail because you picked a bad mechanic, and cars are usually cheaper than houses.
Good to know! At previous jobs, that information wasn't available to me (and it didn't matter because the customer bases were small enough that every customer was top priority), so I assumed it was considered more sensitive than it perhaps is.
Tangential, but I wonder if the given example might be straying a step too far? Normally we want to keep sensitive data out of logs, but the example includes a user.lifetime_value_cents field. I'd want to have a chat with the rest of the business before sticking something like that in logs.
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
Bear in mind, the terminal goal doesn't actually require unbiased numbers; the way most TTRPGs work is that you're trying to roll over or under a target number to get a weighted, unpredictable outcome. The idea is that while players (usually) want any given action to succeed, they some of their actions to fail in order to preserve narrative interest, while having their character be better at some things than others.
As such, while randomness is best, the given method is quite sufficient for having fun, and both players can agree that it's fair: they each have equal influence over the result.
This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.
[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.
[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.