I guess I would be more excited if I hadn't abandoned Windows on my own personal devices (still have to use it via RDP at work). I think the Wine project has done an incredible thing, I just don't have any particular use for it anymore.

Almost as bad as a non-existent succession plan is a succession plan even the successor knows nothing about. If Linus has a successor, that successor should be well aware, and already be a contributor to that succession plan. This isn't a will where you're pleasantly surprised your rich great-uncle left you his house on the French Riviera, this is a major project that is an integral component of thousands of technologies and workflows.

Absolutely true. Reduced (or in many cases halted) investment in business growth is likely the primary driver of the poor economic numbers we're seeing. It's probably also helping to reduce inflation, though that effect seems to be offset by the early impact of the tariffs. As the tariffs bite harder I expect inflation to go up significantly even with the slowdown in business. If Trump manages to force Powell out early and replace him with an ideologue who lowers interest rates, inflation will really skyrocket.

Monetary inflation and price inflation are different things, but monetary inflation (which is a measure of monetary supply) is basically irrelevant to anyone but a macroeconomist, and both CustomBuild and I are talking about price inflation. Monetary inflation is a red herring.

Food prices are not going up significantly faster than overall inflation. That would actually be strange, since food costs are a major component of the consumer price index; for food prices to to up more than overall inflation the other stuff in the CPI basket would have to go down (in relative terms), quite a lot.

That's very regional. Rents have actually declined a bit where I live, thanks to a massive construction boom. This is an area where red states do considerably better than blue ones, thanks to lighter (though still excessive, IMO) construction regulation. Nationally, housing prices are flat (inflation-adjusted) over the last six months. Also, there's basically no way Trump could affect housing prices in such a short timeframe. The effects of presidential decisions on the economy generally take 2+ years to even be measurable. Tariffs are an exception, but even tariffs take some time to have an effect, and housing prices are a long way downstream.

AFAICT, healthcare costs aren't tracked on a monthly or quarterly basis, so we don't really know how they've changed during Trump's presidency. Eventually I expect the tariffs to increase healthcare costs relative to what they would have been without the tariffs.

CustomBuild's claims that the economy is improving during Trump's presidency are false, and even if they weren't, his argument that economic improvement would make massive corruption acceptable is both offensive and sad. In fact the signs are generally negative, but let's not veer into fantasy or anecdata in the other direction either.

Though... knowing what the objective reality is may get a lot harder if Trump's strategy of firing statisticians for bad news has the predictable effect.

Ah, so you're one of those who believes it's fine for leaders to steal, as long as they do a good job otherwise? Kudos for admitting the corruption, at least.

But the jobs and inflation numbers aren't really good. We're gaining jobs, not losing them, but we're gaining them at the slowest rate since the pandemic. Inflation was trending down, but has stabilized and then ticked up the last couple of months. Also, manufacturing is down and manufacturing investment is way down, as is capex investment across all industries, and the tariffs -- which even with the "deals" reducing them are still at the highest level since the 1930s -- haven't really started to bite yet.

Fingers crossed that job creation ticks back up, inflation turns around and starts going back down (or holds steady), and that the business environment stabilizes enough for businesses to begin trying to grow again, but I'm not holding my breath. Randomly jerking the business environment one way and then another is not how you encourage a healthy economy.

LOL

We don't have generations, and if you think government is a bigger threat than climate change, then you demonstrate ever more the utter idiocy of humanity. You want a free pass for being a greedy idiot, but the universe doesn't care about ideology either. It's rather pathetic to watch someone try desperately to convince themselves they are immune from the physical forces of nature. Well, amusing and depressing, because people keep doing it.

The minute you assert that somehow young men have some sort of right to sexual experience, even within the context that they need to "man up" so women will have sex with them, dehumanizes women and creates this sense that there is the entitlement that can be unlocked.

Women are human beings, not sex toys for good little boys. Toxic masculinity stems in part from a sense of privilege, that men have inalienable rights to sex and affection from women. While I'm sure you care about the plight of young men, you're simply repeating the same dehumanizing language that typifies toxic masculinity. You just think that you can say it if you preface it with "I'm from the Left".

Do you think I'm a fucking idiot? Do you not know how transparent you are?

It really isn't.

Because those recovery mechanisms have created account access attack vectors.

This is true for YouTube Music and other things where there are contractual limits they have to abide by. But outside of that, there is no limit on the number of devices you can have logged into a Google account.

There are really good account security reasons for this.

No, you can also set up other factors. Configure Google Authenticator (or another TOTP app; they're all the same) or, even better, get a USB or bluetooth security key. You can also generate backup codes and store them in a safe place.

All of this comes down to the simple fact that account hijacking is a huge problem, for Google as well as for users, though mostly for users, and passwords suck.

I know it's more fun to be cynical and assume it's all just BigCorp being nefarious, but it's not true. I know people in the Google account security teams and they're pulling their hair out. What they really want to do is deprecate phone numbers, too, because they're actually not a good authentication factor. But users aren't willing to use TOTP or security keys and while passkeys are great, if you lose your device, you lost your passkey. The least common denominator authenticator that provides some measure of security is the phone number.

And here we go with the whole "we can't change, we just gotta keep going". You're precisely the example of the sheer unimaginable idiocy of humanity that I am talking about.

You're going to find out, like all of us, that the laws of physics don't give a flying fuck about your comforts, and will strip them from you without mind, thought or feeling. They are undeniable, unavoidable and they are our master.

Alberta wants to increase extraction and use of fossil fuels, and its politicians strongly imply that if anything is done to reign in emissions, they'll try to secede from the country. Alberta is one of the problems, not some sort of saintly jurisdiction. Its government is precisely the kind of institution which makes moronic arguments like "we need more pipelines to pay for the green economy."

Fuck me. Actually blaming women and claiming most of them are liars.

No one owes anyone sex ever. Not even once. If you're not having sex, that's your problem. Women don't exist to service men, ever. Get over yourself.

No one should be using RSA now, even ignoring QC. RSA is slow, unwieldy and error-prone. No one who knows what they're doing uses it except in very narrow niches where it has properties that EC doesn't. Every cryptographer and cryptographic security engineer I know (including me) treats the use of RSA in protocol designs as analogous to a "code smell", a strong one. If I see a protocol design that uses RSA, it's an immediate red flag that the designer very likely doesn't know what they're doing and has probably made a bunch of mistakes that compromise security. Unless, of course, the design explains in detail why they did the weird and risky thing. Competent people will know it's weird and risky and explain their rationale for using RSA in the first few paragraphs of the doc.

However, the EC-based things people should be using are also at risk to QCs, and everyone making hardware with a lifespan of more than a few years should be moving to PQC algorithms now. At minimum, you should make sure that your cryptography-dependent designs explicitly plan for how you will migrate to PQC (including on devices in the field, if relevant). You don't have to actually move now as long as you have a clear path for moving later. But if you're, say, shipping hardware with embedded firmware verification keys, you should probably make sure that it contains a SPHINCS+ key or something and some way to enable its use in the future, even if only to bootstrap the use of some more manageable PQC algorithm.

I see no evidence that it's true. It's almost always the case that competition pushes progress faster. The only real exceptions are when the competitors are able to keep core elements of their approach secret, which isn't the case here; both IBM and Google researchers are regularly publishing most of the details of what they're doing.

This is definitively, objectively, not true, at least with respect to code quality, performance and security. Where Linux shines is in support, both in terms of available device drivers and niche-specific features, and in terms of having the broadest base of experienced users and admins. If you need a kernel and OS that will run on nearly any platform, with nearly any devices, and for which you can easily hire people who already know it, Linux is your best option. It got that way not by being supremely excellent at anything but by being reliably good enough (barely) at almost everything.

But it's really not the best kernel. In fact, if you want to look at widely-used OS kernels, I'd say that both of the other alternatives (Darwin and ntoskrnl) are technically better in important ways, and that both are less buggy. I do security, so from my perspective that's the key measure, and both are definitely better than Linux, as are many of the *BSDs.

Note that I'm not knocking Linus. It's actually rather amazing that Linux works all the places and all the ways that it does, and it's a powerful testament to Linus' ability that he's still running his project, even now that it's critical to world technology stacks, including at the biggest tech companies. Being good enough at everything is hard, and that goal is probably fundamentally incompatible with being extremely high-quality, or maximally-performant in a particular niche, or highly secure, etc.