No idea.

I don’t have access to any CRT TV. I also don’t remember ever hearing it on CRT PC monitors as a child, only on the TV. If I did, then it was just much quieter than the TV.

What I found fascinating at that time was, that it was so noticeable to me, but my parents didn’t believe me at first, when I mentioned it. I had to prove it to them. To me, that was just a normal noise.

Like growing up with an additional sense, and assuming that everyone else has it too.

I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.

“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers. Most projects are from single developers that just throw their project on github et al. and release it from there.

Only really nice when not CLA is required and every contributor retains their copyright. Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.

Otherwise it allows the owner to just take the changes from their contributors and change the license at a later date.

The AI part is what makes this fuck up special and international news.

We are used to human fuck ups, but a in person event where the organizers where so lazy that they used AI to create the content and that it sucked is something novel.

AI generated pictures, blogs and books are old news, generated in person events is new.

Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.

IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.

Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.

Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.

A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.

IMO the whole byte stuff is pretty confusing, people should have just sticked with bits, because that avoids implementation details.

One bit is the smallest amount of information. Bytes historically had different amounts of bits, depending on the architecture. With ASCII and the success of the 8 bit processor word of the Intel 8080/8085 processor, it is now defacto 8 Bit long.

But personally, byte seems a bit (no pun intended) like the imperial measurement system.

Or other standard archiving formats like WARC.

There also is https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox which looks a bit similar.

Luckily in many European countries it is not used.

I would credit institutions like the chaos computer club and other non-profits, which where instrumental in convincing the government about the dangers. It was a difficult battle against the corporate lobbyists, and is understandable that other countries could not fight against the corporate interests or corruption and succumb to use them.

There where and still are so many issues with them, one of the most fundamental is described by Ken Thompson in his Reflections on trusting trust, which is especially effective for electronic voting machines, where no other way of verification is possible.

The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn’t designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren’t features just permanent residents in your code base.

Rebuilding everything from scratch will take ages and cost everyone a lot of money, because you have to replace all your hardware (router boxes, PC s, phones, smart watches, …), because the internet protocols are often designed into the hardware itself, and changing them fundamentally means a lot of trash. Also there is no system that guarantees that the result will have fewer issues or will not required to be succeeded by something else a couple of minutes later, because some new issue was discovered.

Also software is highly complex and need to adapt to many different scenarios, while maintaining compatibility to each other, which the other disciplines of human engineering don’t have to deal with as much, they are much more purpose driven.

It is like trying to create a universal building code (for building houses) that simultaneously works on every country on earth, hell, maybe even on multiple planets, with wildly different and constantly changing environments and is guaranteed to result in save houses. Not really possible in one shot, only possible by constantly trying to adapt. That is what software has to deal with. I am talking about fundamental software like the Linux kernel here, for example.

You cannot just start over and be better.

I think with BG3 it worked quiet well as well. It let the devs get feedback on the game mechanics, but limited the story so that the full release still offers something new. It was a good demo, that let people see the direction of the game. And it also let people get familiar with the game engine so modding tools and some release compatible mods where available very early after the release, that allowed to customize the game experience somewhat.

I have not read anyone serious stating that the game was dead, while it was in early access, but maybe because that is a bigger title.

If you want a tolerant society, you cannot tolerate the intolerant.

If you want democracy, you must suppress anti-democratic ideas.

You have to fight for want you believe in, and not let antithetical ideas fester and subvert yours, just because they exploit your tolerance and use the space you give them to fight it.

I mod my games on my PC and sync it to my SteamDeck. I also sync the save files back and fourth, to continue playing on different devices. Mostly non-steam games.

I also sync my eBook collection to my eink reader with syncthing.

Everything is also mirrored to my always-on NAS, so syncing always works.

When you buy “wood screws” that doesn’t mean that the screws are made of wood, it means they go into wood.

What I really like is that they double down on hackabilty by switching to metal torx screws, etc.

That, and a Linux system are IMO the main selling points of the SteamDeck, compared to any clones from Asus or Lenovo, etc.

I am currently playing a heavily modded version of Mass Effect Legendary Edition on my SteamDeck, works really well, even Mass Effect 3.

But I had to install a no-EA-link patch, because EA requires to be online to start the singleplayer game. Which hurts playing it on the go. But with that, great experience.

Well, the idea behind FOSS is that you can share the common stuff and build your own stuff on top and while doing so improving the common stuff, testing uncommon usecases and adding features.

Personally I would love to have another bigger company working on Android next to Google, because that means they would (hopefully) implement their own “google services”, to not rely on Google.

If that takes off, then apps will need to support both, making it more sensible to either create stable generic interfaces, where a third completly open-source implementation can more easily dock into, or not rely on them unnecessarily.

The only real problem with android is that the license is not GPL, so companies are not required to cooperate and likely end up creating their own silos.