I’m not really looking forward to another season of Gorn PTSD. We just did that with La’an. We don’t need to rehash it. It’s boring.

Time will tell if they justify it.

I did love the costumes in this episode, although I also felt like they were a little too present-day. But if they’re playing Wham I guess that’s what they were going for.

Pike also commented on the wedding planner being Andorian. Spock didn’t seem to react to that statement, so I guess he also saw the Trelane as Andorian at that point.

These actually aren’t big for black holes. The largest ones are billions of solar masses. This is notable because it’s a collision of two black holes, which we can’t observe often.

The article has some confusing phrasing.

Yeah, I don’t understand the fixation on BTRFS in the article. Nobody’s going to have BTRFS problems unless they’re doing advanced things that the documentation clearly says are experimental and unsupported. Nobody’s going to accidentally set up a RAID5 array, or accidentally create a swap file on a non-swap-friendly volume. The average user won’t see any difference between BTRFS and EXT4, except that BTRFS snapshots might save their butt in an emergency.

BTRFS is a perfectly reasonable choice as a default filesystem. Probably the best choice in general. Last year I thought bcachefs was the future, but now that’s getting dropped from the Linux kernel so nope, guess I’ll stick with BTRFS.

Yeah, it’s weird to talk about OpenSuse MicroOS and Fedora Atomic when they are not even the flagship desktop distros of their respective families. I guess the author drank the atomic kool-aid and thinks that’s a killer feature for a consumer OS.

That said, Ubuntu is not really aimed at beginners anymore. Canonical has shifted hard to enterprise offerings over the past 5 years or so. Take a look at their web site — they barely spare a word for desktop Linux anymore. This is what you’ll see on the main page:

“The complete guide to RAG”

“Modern enterprise open source”

A “Products” dropdown with thirteen items, maybe one of which is comprehensible to a beginner.

For all the hate Snaps get (and rightfully so), they make a lot more sense in the context of enterprise deployment. It’s like Flatpak but for headless servers and with professional support. It took me a long time to understand Canonical’s game there, because I couldn’t shake the idea of Ubuntu as a beginner’s distro.

I guess it would be cool to have an atomic OS designed for beginners, since the current crop are more complex than traditional distros, not less. But I don’t think atomicity itself really matters, especially if you’re talking about systems that are mostly locked down to begin with.

Note that even GrapheneOS no longer supports the 5a, since it is no longer getting firmware security patches. You’ll need to install an archived version of GrapheneOS, or go for something else like LineageOS.

With LineageOS, you’ll continue to get OS patches, but you’ll be stuck with an unlocked bootloader, so there’s a security tradeoff there.

SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.

Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.

do they just want everything to be crawled

Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.

The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

When people say eat the rich, I think they generally mean to start from the top.

Cool, sounds promising!

I wonder how much power Valve even has here. I mean, we’re talking about Windows compatibility. How many Windows games can run properly in a 64-bit WINE environment?

Dropping 32-bit support has to happen eventually, but there’s bound to be collateral damage. It wasn’t a painless change even on macOS, which is generally a more tightly controlled “adapt or die” platform.

:o

The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.

Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.

Are those odd choices? My knowledge of emulators is more outdated than OP’s hardware.

Agreed, seems weird. But I’m optimistic when a series ending is announced well in advance. It means they’ll have time to finish it properly instead of hedging their bets, uncertain if they’ll be renewed.

Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.

I guess I’ll look into XFS and see if it’s suitable for my use cases (I know almost nothing about it), but this supports my opinion that BTRFS is an easy choice over EXT4 at least.

Edit: No snapshot support in XFS, so I’ll stick with BTRFS. My performance requirements are not that high on desktop. If I set up a high-performance server that would be another matter.

I was surprised to learn that F2FS has rather small maximum volume sizes. 16TB with 4K block sizes, 64TB with 16K block sizes. But your whole kernel needs to use 16K pages to use 16K F2FS blocks, which seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Either way, it’s so non-future-proof I’m not even going to think about it.

For context, Debian dropped support for 586 in Debian Stretch (9.0), release in 2017.

I have not done the legwork to compare this to other distros, but Debian generally supports older hardware than most other major mainstream desktop distros.

It’s an extra step in macOS 15. You need to go into System Settings now.

Used to just be able to use the contextual menu to open it and get an approval dialog.

I’m actually using an atomic distro now (Bazzite). But that’s not why I chose it, and honestly I don’t think the advantages are significant.

There are some downsides that affect me on a regular basis, though.

I need to reboot more since every update requires it. That feels like going back in time 25 years.

I need to deal with the complexity of multiple distros with DistroBox to get the functionality I am accustomed to. I think that alone is proof that atomic distros are not quite ready for prime time.

The advantages elude me. Snapper or timeshift handle rollbacks just fine, as long as you use a modern filesystem like btrfs. So I haven’t worried about busted updates in years.

I’m quite happy with Bazzite, but I can’t point to anything good about it that is specific to immutable distros. I just don’t get it, really. I guess the advantages are more for the developers and maintainers than for end users.