If you don’t drive, you cease being a driver.

If you drive a typical distance per year, the purchase price of a new vehicle is almost always more than the cost of all the fuel or electricity you will use in the lifespan of the car, so for some people the lower initial purchase price of an ICE vehicle could produce durable savings.

Some US drivers would not save money by switching to an EV.

I’ve got no strong contenders.

“Blind coding” “Script slopping” “Junk writing” “Not knowing what you’re doing, but it’s fine because you also aren’t capable of knowing what you’re doing” “Slop slapping” (as in “I had a problem with my computer, so I slop slapped a solution on it”) “Wasting GPU cycles so you can also waste CPU cycles”

When you account for inflation, oil prices today are in line with oil prices in the early 2000s. The price is too low, and the risk is too high for massive infrastructure spending that would extract more oil from Venezuela to be worth it.

Possibly, green energy technologies are now on a trajectory to overtake fossil fuels altogether - and they are already a factor in driving the price of fossil fuels (and therefore the profitability of many wells and mines) down substantially. If that happens, the long term value of Venezuela’s oil reserves, without suitable infrastructure already built for extraction, could be close to zero.

In line with small government ideals, the best thing to do is let companies decide whether and how much to invest, but that won’t be a headline worth showing off. So Trump is trying to make $100B happen, and believes that that (alone) will restore the Venezuelan economy to the way it was.

That’s a much better question, though! “Here’s a stack trace and the source code. Walk me through where to go from here.”

Most places use at least some open source software, so most places can do this, and if you ask your sys admin team nicely, there’s probably some stack traces available, hot off the prod.

The universe can’t be a simulation, the framerate is way too good.

I’m destined to go to heavim forever.

Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).

I dislike systemd less than I dislike sysvinit, so it has that going for it.

It’s already been made perfect once. What updates would you make it divinely inspired code?

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.

Huh, I always thought Linux stood for “Linus eXtreme”. The more you know…

“Trunk records” for indie music seems 110% appropriate to me.

WaterSeer was initially somehow related to some part of UC Berkeley, rather than MIT.

You may be thinking of this device: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30444-X

… Or the metal oxide framework predecessor to it, or the newer thing that uses some sort of gel.

I’m not aware of a commercial product based on this work.

I once forgot to install the Linux package when I was installing Arch on a system. Linux even let’s you not use Linux, if you like.

It didn’t boot.

We used to have good, strong open source tools made out of C (which is a lot like steel - it can only be worked by blue collar computer nerds with muscly brains). Now that steel core is corroding because of the influence of hackers and other white collar computer sorts with their creative problem solving, and unintended uses of memory.

That new corrosion is called rust, and it eventually appears on every C project that’s left outside, unless someone comes along to brush it off occasionally.

Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that’s impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.

I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.

Releases should be fast and rare.

The secret is that rats are committed Luddites. They chew through wires, but maintain and restore the elegant mechanisms of times long past.

You may expect that a few rats couldn’t roll a 6 ton stone boulder back up a hill, but rats are also capable of growing to very different sizes depending on their environment.

You can skip 3 of these adapters if you upgrade to the latest libraries, downgrade your microcode, turn off WiFi, and bench press a goat. It turns out it was the goat involved I’m the process, rather than the sacrifice, that made that stuff work.

“Graphical UI” it is