Which is why Google waited several years to brick early Nest and Revolv thermostats: the factory warranty had expired.

Exactly. Gasoline, mains power, and batteries are standardized. So are LTE, 5G NR, and Wi-Fi. Compare what Mike Masnick of Techdirt and other Internet user freedom advocates have called "protocols, not platforms."

Though even if there were no cryptographic lockdown of these "smart" devices' system software to interact only with the vendor's server, one big obstacle to running your own server (with proverbial blackjack and hookers) is that so many Internet providers nowadays block inbound TCP connections. T-Mobile Home Internet, for example, puts subscribers behind carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) with the whole neighborhood behind one IPv4 address. Even through IPv6, their gateway appliance offers no port forwarding or DMZ option.

so we can unfuck all the things he's fucked.

But the reality is, Trump is a symptom, not a disease. He was elected by the people. Those who voted Trump once were either Nazi sympathizers or fools. Those who voted Trump the second time around were definitely Nazi sympathizers, or definitely fools.

Impeaching Trump won't do anything. The next Nazi in line is JD Vance and he's ten times worse because, unlike Trump, he's not an idiot with a case of fronto-temporal dementia.

And even if Vance and the rest of the Nazi goons are out, the people will vote another fascist in the next time around because the people has proven twice now that they're fucking fascists or fucking morons.

In short, America is fucked because Americans are hopeless.

What's the next step after having been rejected by several companies that had posted entry-level positions in your specialty within 10 km of your home?

Fed up customers fleeing in droves.

Nobody likes Microsoft. Nobody has ever really liked Microsoft. But everybody puts up with Microsoft's low quality products and abuse because Microsoft is a monopoly that's hard to escape - particularly in corporate settings, and for gaming.

But they've really cranked up the abuse to 11 recently, with Windows becoming a terrible advertisement platform, requiring new hardware when people's old machines were still serviceable, the constant privacy invasion, relentless push for online accounts, for their cloud offerings, and now their godforsaken AI shit that literally nobody likes nor want. Not to mention upcoming price hikes for the privilege of getting all that enshittification thrown at your face...

Microsoft has gone too far for a lot of people, and people react by going to Apple or Linux. And quite frankly, personally, I desperately want Microsoft to continue shooting themselves in both feet like they're doing so they make themselves irrelevant as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, and we're finally, at long last, rid of them at last. 50 years we've been waiting! That's like half a century dude...

Given that hiring locally is the rule, how do engineers end up choosing, and affording to move to, a city in which to find their first job after university?

Flying around the country to apply in person costs a lot of money, and I'd be surprised if most recent graduates can afford that plus the minimum student payment on Walmart wages.

"In-person"? How do most companies afford to fly candidates in for an in-person interview?

I don't get the Rust hatred. C has implicitly had an "unsafe" mode for much longer than Rust.

If you're a C kernel developer, you can jump on the Rust bandwagon very easily: just put the keyword unsafe in your comments and you can write code just like Rust developers.

Maybe, just maybe, this mistake was caused by the fact that the same sort of people who are likely to write bugs into their code are the same types of people who prefer "safe" languages because understanding the subtle nuances of how computers work is difficult. They would prefer a system where they couldn't make mistakes, rather than a system where they had to understand the code and the machine to a high level. There's a place in the world for these sorts of people, but it's not in OS/kernel development. The sort of I-can't-make-mistakes-with-Rust mindset probably lulled the coder into a false sense of security, with the predictable outcome.

about as much as having a former WWF executive with a single-digit IQ serving as Education Secy.

I'm sure glad I have a real education in the 80's.

It'd have to support full-text search by default. Mastodon, last I checked, was still in practice stuck with tags-only search that fails unless both the poster and searcher manage to correctly #GuessTheHashtag. I've read that Mastodon added in version 4.2.0, but I've never got it to work because it's not the default: the posting user has to deliberately seek out how to opt into full-text search before sending posts, and the administrator of the searcher's instance has to spend a lot more money for a much larger VPS with the RAM for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

where the sun don't shine.

The Linux Foundation has always been kind of useless, but they're really outdoing themselves this time.

More like old vs new terribleness.

How do you know that?

Being from Google, I rather assume the opposite - and that they probably focused their engineering effort to make sure the reduced battery life didn't give their corporate surveillance activities away.

I get the impression that a company like ADP requires that an employer employ at least some minimum number of employees in an area. Otherwise, ADP appears to fall back to printing paper checks for the employer to mail. I don't know the specifics; I just know that I got ADP paper at one job after a bunch of layoffs, and I got ADP paper when I was the only remote worker in a particular state.