WAIT LET ME IN I WANT TO HAVE THE LAST WORD IS IT TOO LATE!!!

Also, I respect your insistence on using a term other than American to describe people from the US.

Because no one else belongs to a state and so calling ourselves “statesians” is therefore better?

That might have been an apt name at first, but the UX has come along way since the early days.

As someone who regularly has to deal with code that has been broken needlessly into smaller functions so that I have to constantly jump around to figure out what is going on, this really resonates with me.

The latest case was someone who took something that really only needed to be a single function and instead turned it into a class with a dozen tiny methods.

And thank god for that!

They’re basically like the elves in Tolkien’s world: they’re the elder race that is wise in a lot of ways, but also have a lot of flaws.

Yes, exactly, which as we all know stands for GIF Image Format.

Best of all, they would not have to work for Bezos anymore.

(I tried staying a subscriber to support the genuinely good investigative journalism they do, but Bezos’s changes to it were got to be too much for me to swallow; what finally drove me over was the incredibly congratulatory editorial that the editorial board posted in response to the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela.)

So what would you name the category that includes Alpine Linux and Chimera Linux, as was brought up in the article?

Why do it that way instead of basing it on something that already exists like LibreOffice?

It would have helped a lot if GNU weren’t such a weird acronym whose pronunciation is not at all obvious.

I guarantee this will have a comment 😄

You do know that, when you edit your comment to pretend that you had predicted something in advance, that there is a timestamp showing when you made the change, right?

Thank you for introducing needed some levity into the discussion. 😉

Those are all good points.

We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.

Where would you say Firefox fits into this? (This question is not a gotchya; I am genuinely having trouble seeing whether it is a valid counter-example or not.)

It’s interesting that there are comments that say things like:

The cult [emphasis mine] of Rust developers just won’t give up.

We like the Rust, we hate the cuck [emphasis mine] license. Simple.

Going from GPL to a weaker license was a terrible idea and whoever supported it should be held accountable. [emphasis mine]

Whoever is suggesting and perpetuating MIT over GPL needs to be tarred and feathered [emphasis mine].

And yet you have decided that it is my comments calling this out as being the trollish ones, as if I were the one being unreasonable.

Right, and likewise just because your code was written in C99 does not make it any better than assembly code that accomplished the same task, as long as it was written carefully and audited.

I was responding to the following paragraph in the article:

We used to get proof-of-thought for free because producing a patch took real effort. Now that writing code is cheap, verification becomes the real proof-of-work. I mean proof of work in the original sense: effort that leaves a trail: careful reviews, assumption checks, simulations, stress tests, design notes, postmortems. That trail is hard to fake. [emphasis mine] In a world where AI says anything with confidence and the tone never changes, skepticism becomes the scarce resource.

I am a bit wary that the trail of verification will continue to be so “hard to fake”.

Unfortunately, the next step is for AI to get better and better at generating verification trails that look correct but are not.

Yeah, the transition from the third frame to the fourth frame just doesn’t make sense as currently depicted; why would people playing video games suddenly start to revolt?

However, if the third frame were to depict rich men getting richer as you suggest, then the revolt in the fourth frame would make more sense.