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Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 4, Interesting) 47

> 2. Democratic voters tend to be more concerned about the environment.

This is technically true but is counterbalanced by the fact rural areas tend to be extremely NIMBY. Unbelievably so. It's hard to get permission to rebuild a dilapidated strip mall, let alone build a data center.

There's a railroad near where I live that was freight only, but wanted to run passenger trains - completely unsubsidized (beyond a tax free loan, and I've never bought the argument "tax free" means subsidized, but that's for another day) - on the same lines. Virtually nothing changed. No impact on the local community. Two trains an hour tying up railroad crossings for a maximum of 20-30 seconds, a minute an hour.

Every fucking "community" North of the Miami-West Palm Beach-Jupiter metropolis raised objections. This was for an existing railroad, with zero impact beyond long sought after safety improvements and quiet zones!

You think rural areas are going to support building actual buildings?

Pffft.

Indeed, I wonder if it'd be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

Unpopular view: Javascript itself is a decent language, it's the fact it has to be used with the DOM in most contexts that makes it unpleasant. Give it a set of Python/PHP/Java/etc style desktop libraries and most people would have no problem with it. But because everyone encounters it within the context of a web browser as a scripting language for web pages, it gets a bad rap.

That said, I recall the original Eich JS being kinda sucky, with little or no OOPs beyond associative arrays. So there's that.

The biggest issue here is that the bigots managed to rewrite history, and managed to persuade most people that Mozilla "fired" Eich for his opinions, when in fact Mozilla ignored his blatant bigotry when it happened, and considered him worthy of promoting to CEO despite effectively calling 10% of the (blameless) people he'd lead a danger to children, co-funding a political campaign that was promoting that blood libel.

They say Mozilla fired him. Mozilla did no such thing. Mozilla promoted him to CEO. They saw blood libels against gay people as no barrier to leading a massive team of people.

The rest of the world voiced their disgust, Mozilla started to lose users at an alarming rate within days of the announcement, and Eich saw he had to go, so he quit, despite Mozilla's backing.

Mozilla isn't "woke", they're the exact opposite. That's why they've embraced fashtech so enthusiastically despite it being such a danger to the open web. They're gross. The only reason to use Firefox is literally that the alternative is fashtech and at least Firefox is second hand fashtech.

But whenever this troll posts, can we PLEASE set the story straight because I'm so fed up with seeing this bullshit that Eich was fired, when he was actually promoted to CEO. And resigned because of world wide disgust, not because of a single Mozilla employee expressing concern.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

Depends. If they're afraid of heights they probably shouldn't have a job cleaning the windows of skyscrapers. And if they promote the lie that gays are a danger to children, they probably shouldn't be leading any organization sufficiently large enough that 5-10% of their employees are likely gay.

Regardless, Eich wasn't fired by Mozilla, he was promoted to CEO. Mozilla explicitly endorsed his views. It was the rest of the world that voiced their disgust, and Eich resigned after it became clear more than 5-10% of humanity was going to have nothing to do with Mozilla if he continued in that position.

Mozilla should be ashamed of itself, for its blessing of homophobia and endorsement of a blood libel, not for something it never did.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

He wasn't fired, he was promoted, to CEO.

Unbelievable this lie continues to be spread that he was fired from Mozilla. The reality is he quit after it became obvious that nobody saw promoting someone to CEO who co-funded a campaign saying gays were a danger to children as a sign Mozilla was for "everyone". But nobody at Mozilla pushed him out, the rest of the world voiced their disgust. Something they had every right to do.

Because he was an awful person. And certainly unqualified to lead a diverse open source business.

Comment Re:FSF maybe ? (Score 1) 26

If they're the copyright holder, they can, legally, do whatever they want. And closing the Github repo isn't against any OSS license I'm aware of: they may, depending on whether they've accepted contributions without copyright assignment, be required to provide the source code to those who have obtained binaries from them directly, but that's about the extent of it. I don't know if their Github had binary releases, but assuming it didn't, nobody really has a legal case against them.

The best that can happen is what the article is talking about: people fork the last known good version.

Comment Re:So... (Score 0) 30

FORTRAN? TIL.

The old joke was that Python was basically COBOL++, but thinking about it it did actually end up replacing FORTRAN the same way Java and C# replaced COBOL.

Regardless, Python was a decent language. It has quirks I'm not overly happy about, but there's no denying it was a useful addition to programming, as is Rust, and as was Java and C# and a host of other popular languages. And while there are some communities I might avoid, the fact that people's advocacy gets tiring after a while isn't an excuse to boycott a technology, especially as you can safely assume that the better something is, the more likely it'll have its advocates.

Though never did understand the love for Arch Linux...

Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 30

Yeah. I get the impression there are a hell of a lot of people who just make up reasons to hate Rust because of some perceived (rightly or wrongly) annoying habits of those who advocate it.

Which is ironic because Python zealots literally had the same reputation as Rust advocates today 20-25 years ago.

Rust is theoretically a massive step forward if we use it properly. People spend far too much time getting tribal because of whether they want to be associated with advocates or critics rather than the tech underneath.

Comment Re:Enshittification (Score 1, Troll) 103

The mods who boycotted found their forums handed over to scabs by Reddit's admins, and very often were told to fuck off by their forum's users who didn't care how much damage the API changes did as long as they got their "fix" of cat videos each day.

Reddit is a very, very, different place to what it was pre-boycott. Moderation has gone way downhill, with lazy feckless "mods" depending upon automoderators to shadow delete posts that vaguely fit some criteria, often as ridiculous as "This contains a link". These are not the same mods.

Comment Re:Stop the abuse (Score 1) 103

OK: Why is open source being used for a profit a problem? Why is Amazon adopting an open source tool a problem? On what planet does WPEngine "seem to think they own Matt Mullenweg" when actually they've been the victim of an abusive campaign by the latter who's tried to pull the FOSS rug from under them after previously welcoming their participation and contributions to the WP ecosystem?

As for the "AI companies who have used it all for training", that's the nearest you've come up to a legitimate complaint but that's a problem with copyright law in the US. Given the Windows source code has leaked multiple times, I suspect that's in their training sets too. We need to reform copyright law so the people whose works were incorporated into the genAI training sets co-own the output of them, whether "open source", forums, books, or whatever else.

Comment Re:People still use reddit? (Score 2) 103

And the sad is that'll effectively remove a huge amount of the open web. Search engines will have difficulty indexing it, with the result that you won't be able to find that information anywhere except by going to Reddit and using their inadequate search tools directly.

You can find a lot of answers to relatively obscure questions by, today, searching for site:reddit.com blah blah blah, and that's going to go away if this continues.

I don't completely blame Reddit themselves, though they've been closing up their website for a while, but it's another consequence of the absurd pivot to genAI.

I keep hearing the bubble is about to pop. It hasn't. Modern civilization depends on it popping. I don't think we're going to make it.

Comment Re:what kind of bugs (Score 4, Interesting) 85

This argument makes zero sense.

First, people are asking what the number is, they already know that it's being used to justify a two week release schedule.

Second, I think most people here would like to know what on earth a volume of unknown bugs has to do with a two week release schedule. That's not how bug fixes works.

- If bugs are causing problems NOW for people and/or are security issues, you release ASAP, you don't want for a rolling release.
- If bugs are not causing problems now, you provide testers with a reasonable period of time to test the software out in the field before doing a release.

Two week release time isn't sane, it's PR that's proposing something apparently stupid in response to something people might be concerned about. It's like a company bragging it's making its employees work 23 hour a day shifts to get things done.

I already swore off Ubuntu because of the snap/Firefox fiasco. But if I hadn't, this dumbass fucking policy that all but guarantees hastily untested "bug fixes" are going to be foisted onto Ubuntu users who have made software choices that reflect a desire for stability and reliability, would be the reason I switch.

What a bunch of fucking cretins.

Comment Re:what kind of bugs (Score 1) 85

Yeah, the curl devs (to name one project I monitor) are still having to swat away the vast majority of bug reports from what I've seen even if they're being far more positive about slopreports than I would be.

I'm also interested in how many bugs are being added en-mass by people trying to fix minor issues an LLM identified.

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