That seems an extraordinarily high efficiency rate. I am very dubious.

the classified reason is the USA economy obviously. It is in bad shape and cheap oil is not helping to keep production going, oil is cheaper now than a few years back. Between covid, the wars, Saudis opening the spigots, the price has been going down steadily. Thus USA is no longer in the way of Ukraine hitting ruzzian oil tankers and facilities and thus the attack on Venezuella (by the way, USA is not worried about ruzzia helping Maduro. Americans have to admit that Ukraine tying up one of America's main rivals, ruzzia, a nuclear power at that, is quite an accomplishment for a non nuclear smallish country, that trump hates so much). Anyway, this is all about oil prices, oil demand and the fear of losing oil revenues, that is the classified part.

Let's get real here.

Yes let's.

I live near a light rail line, and that's still a 15-minute walk,

I wouldn't say that's near. I can hustle to my second closest station in 15 minutes, the closet being 8. I live in an area of london with a PTAL (public transport accessibility level) rating of only 2 out of 1 to uh... 6b with 6b having b for best I guess... yeah strange scale. But basically it's rated low for public transport. And there's buses too.

Or I can spend fifteen minutes, ten of which are on the freeway, and drive myself.

So, not in SF, so this doesn't really apply to the discussion...

Rail only makes sense if traffic is so bad that cars are completely infeasible. Otherwise, they're the wrong tool for the job.

You haven't even specified what "the job" even is. And, you do realise a substantial fraction of Americans can't drive, right? And a substantial fraction more really shouldn't be. Unless you like your 85 year old gramps with incipient dementia and cataracts to be driving.

it depends on where I'm going.

Yeah that's the point. With a car, people don't just "set off", even though this is often the claim. Same as a public transport system, whether you just set off or check conditions depending on the journey. I just set off from my office when I want to catch the bus because there are shed loads of them. I set off from home to get the closest train into London because it's frequent enough that it doesn't really matter. I check the journey if I'm heading somewhere unfamiliar or something I know has less frequent service.

So yeah, having to make unexpected changes to your plans is more common than you think.

Well it's not: you've picked a technique that's optimised for a car. Would you insist on a non drinking designated train rider if you go by train to meet a bunch of friends for a drink? No, that's daft! This is why if you use a different mode of transport you do things differently.

Naturally this does depend somewhat. If you live somewhere largely car dependent, then doing anything not in a car will suck royal dick, and its an exercise in frustration. The mere existence of an infrequent, poorly connected train doesn't make it a good option. If you live somewhere largely car dependent, you'll probably have mostly isolated big box stores with poor delivery options.

But that doesn't mean trains suck or are the wrong tool for some unspecified job, it means your city is poorly zoned and with bad connectivity.

On the flip side, for long-distance trains, the interval is usually anywhere from several hours up to a whole day, so if you do have a planned stop for some other reason, it's going to be a long stop, and will usually require a hotel stay.

This is not that trains suck and are the "wrong tool", it's that your trains suck. I've been travelling London to Bristol quite a lot recently. Not sure if that qualifies as "long distance", but it's much better by train since it has a top speed of 125mph which shaves off quite a lot of time, an it can hit that even inside London, somewhat beating the traffic. It's 4 trains per hour (depending on how you count it). If I hated my life and wanted to stop randomly at the city of Dis, or Swindon as it's known locally, to wallow in despair I could do so without too much delay. Though I've heard it said that an hour in this realm is a year in Swindon, so YMMV.

Sadly, that's not most places with trains. Subways, maybe, but surface trains tend to be more like every 15 minutes or more.

15 minutes is within the realm of "won't bother checking" for me. It's a bit irritating missing by a minute, akin to getting stuck in a traffic jam, but the mean wait is ~7 minutes, which is way less than the variance in equivalent car journeys due to traffic. Even going by bike (the lowest time variance mode of travel), traffic lights and general conditions can add on about 7-8 minutes to the journey time (speaking about the same destination as the train). I also don't take the train for very short distances, because there's generally a better way.

The most frequent ones in London has a heavy rail train every 2.4 minutes on one line. As you get further in, trains get very frequent as they un branch.

It's an interesting scenario for GNSS receivers. Most are multi constellation these days. They will have one of three or four constellations giving them a very different time and location.

I'm sure the better ones test for this scenario, but even there the proof is the real world application.

Biden doubled down on some of the trump nonsense.

He certainly didn't undo nearly enough of it. I don't know what is wrong with the democrats.

All that battle tested C++ code, both from a security and a compatibility perspective, gets replaced by poorly tested Rust. Microsoft fired most of the testers. They will likely use automated AI conversion and running MS Office as the test suite.

There is a reason why some Windows code is decades old.

implements != extends.

Implements is a subset of extends. Extending a class with noting but abstract methods is "implements".

which is absurd as this repeatedly made claim by C++ developers is total bullshit,

Show me on the doll where the C++ programmer touched you. Seriously what is your beef?

Unsafe rust is still a HELL of a lot more safe than C++. Among other things, RAII is still enforced, whereas with C++ not only is it optional, most C++ developers are very bad at sticking to it even when they try.

This isn't correct. Let's say you make an unsafe low level call to an OS primitive from Rust, such as open() (yeah I I know this is windows not unix, but same principle applies). You'll get back an int. Rust won't enforce RAII file descriptor semantics on that int. It's memory safe, not telepathic.

Because inheritance is an anti-pattern.

Well, that's just, like your opinion, man. Inheritance has its place.

And what exactly is "non-standard OO"? C++ allows multiple inheritance, whereas JavaScript, Java, C#, and others do not. Why don't they? Because it's an even worse anti-pattern that even those

Good grief. Java and C# both allow for multiple interfaces, which is very closely related. That's the majority of use for multiple inheritance in C++. It's more or less nonsense to talk about that in JS anyway since it's fully dynamic and duck typed. You can completely smoosh two objects together. You can fuck with the prototype chain (even at runtime).

shitty languages have the good sense to stay away from.

Oh huh it's not just C++ that you've got a massive chip on your shoulder about.

When you pick up C++, everything looks like an object oriented nail, that inherits needle, that sometimes inherits metal, that inherits atom, that inherits proton, neutron, and electron, and those in turn inherit quark, that inherits...Fuck.

Right... tell me you've not touched anything newer than 1996 without telling me you've not touched anything newer than 1996. A lot of people jumped on the hype train of OO and wrote code like that in C++ in the 90s. They were bad and had many segfaults and jumped ship to Java. I've not need a codebase like that in decades. I gather many of them have left Java now and people are slowly unpicking the mess there as well.

or why other systems language developers say that keeping C++ out also keeps out bad programmers.

I can only assume those system programmers have no idea how to set permissions on their repo to be anything other than global write access. As such I don't think their opinions are worth listening to...

Also seriously bro, they're advocating C, not C++. You know all the lack of safety of C++ but with absolutely no zero tools from the compiler to manage the resulting complexity.

Watch the Hobbit movies on a high frame screen. You can look at world class effects and makeup and it looks fake because the high framerate makes it so much clearer

Yes. Human eyes can perceive between 300 600 changes per second

There is no clock so talking about Hz isn't helpful. It's reaction time to pixels changing that matters in games.

Not just jobs. Without cheap, clean electricity, the economy as a whole is going to suffer. Some of the damage will be offset by passing the costs on to you, especially the pollution, but it can only do so much.

I expect he will announce tariffs on China for "cheating" by building so much cheap energy soon.

The desktop background is the modern customized splash screen.

Window decorations and effects matter to me, for both functional and aesthetic reasons. To me, KDE is a sort of modernized cross between Windows 7 and NeXTStep in that department. And it gets right things that Windows has gotten worse about in 11, like being able to read the fucking clock. I seriously don't know who came up with that idea, but on the same display, I can read the taskbar clock on KDE without glasses and not on Windows unless I scale everything and throw away the benefit of the high-resolution display. And that's on the automatic display mode, but you actually also get settings.

I tried using Wayland with Devuan Excalibur (Debian Trixie) and my experience with it was not good. I had some games not work and a lot fewer windows could reopen where I left them. This is with AMD graphics. With Nvidia on Devuan Daedalus it really just doesn't work at all for me, and I'm not interested in figuring out why.

This is irritating, but hopefully X will last until my next PC or even my next GPU, which will probably be from AMD. The Nvidia Linux driver situation is unsatisfactory — they will not miss my money in any case, which no doubt helps explain the lack of attention. While their Linux drivers are typically current these days, and have approximately the same performance as the Windows drivers, they still just aren't very stable. Also, the installer sucks, where with AMD OSS drivers that's simply not a thing.

I ran every wm under the sun back in the 90s as well, designing whole desktop and widget themes around each one, and now I just use KDE. Does it do every single thing I used to do, no. Do I care, also no, because it's a great desktop. It does pretty much all the things I used to actually do with compiz. The thing I really want it to do (per-window scaling) I didn't have with compiz either. Yeah I know compiz still exists, but it's flakier than ever.

It's little better on PC. Or Raspberry Pi, which should be one of the very best supported platforms.