VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I’m sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that’s a separate issue)

Its good for two main reasons IMO:

1. It is plugin-based

2. It is (therefore) language-agnostic

Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

And then, because it’s all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don’t like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What’s going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.

Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.

If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)

But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.

This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.

For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*

I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)

OP specifically said they don’t want to dual boot, and I honestly understand why they would say that.

When you dual boot you need to worry about what bootloader is in use and how it is set up. You might find yourself in a situation where you later decide to move fully to Linux and use the old Windows drive as storage but you can’t because if you wipe it then everything stops working.

Windows has even been known to destroy dual boot setups occasionally during Windows updates.

All very solveable if you have the right knowledge, but if you want to keep your life simple then swapping hardware has guaranteed safety (nothing can go wrong with the contents if a drive if it’s not plugged in, after all) and it’s very predictable and understandable.

Personally I feel what it gave them - primarily - was the ability to be independent of Microsoft, not beholden to them in any way whatsoever, and not having to pay them any license fees.

The fact that after putting so much work into making Proton and that whole toolchain amazing it actually turned out faster than Windows, well, that’s juat the delicious icing on the cake, from a commercial perspective.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they use it for creation in some cases, depending on locale, or if you seem “suspicious” to their metrics in some way, e.g. registering while on a VPN

We simply didn’t need those things. Cold winters were more of an issue than hot summers, so our homes historically have been built with brick or stone construction that holds the warmth.

When it is hot for just a few days in a row, that same construction actually helps stay cool, because even if it’s hot outside the heat takes a long time to penetrate, and inside stays nice and cool.

But now that climate is changing and we’re seeing summers with a couple of weeks of intensely hot weather in a row with temperatures higher than ever, that same construction actually becomes a problem. Because now the stone and brick become completely saturated with heat, and even at night when it’s cooler outside the brick is staying hot and radiating that heat. It’s basically like living in a pizza oven.

The past few years it’s been like that maybe only a couple weeks of the year, but nonetheless air conditioners are starting to become more popular.

For insect screens, same deal - we just never usually have a problematic amount of insects. Which is why when we do have a lot of insects it’s in the news.

I guess this means Microsoft’s similar recent move with Office worked out for them financially, even though it caused a lot of backlash.

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I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.

I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.

This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.

When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.

From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.

The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.

Centralisation makes things easy.

If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.

People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he’d accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

If they changed this in the way you describe, I wouldn’t even personally consider it retcon.

To me, “retconning” is changing some point which is kinda substantiative so that it disagrees with what was presented before. “This thing we said happened? Well it didn’t.”

If, as you suggest, they kept the idea of making the Mojave hospitable and pleasant but changed this so it’s more respectful of the existing ecosystem, then to me that’s not a retcon, it’s more like updating the existing concept to be better in line with the ideals of a contemporary audience. A refresh, if you will.

It would be very much in line with what the original was trying to say and mean; that humans have this power to change the environment for the better and we are using it for the good of society, it’s simply that our understanding has changed in the last several decades in a way which means the visual presentation of that concept on screen needs to change.

So I’d be totally fine with that :)

This is mostly the fault of what people search for.

90% of your average buyers don’t go on shopping sites and search “20W USB-C PD Charger” they go on and search “Samsung S22 charger” or whatever they’ve got.

Sellers are incentivised to design the listings around that, or they simply won’t get the clicks.

Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow

The UK is about to ban disposable vapes, but I fear it may achieve little.

What the legislation does is to define what “reusable” means, and demand that vapes must meet that.

In reality, I suspect that manufacturers will simply adjust their strategies to produce vapes that are “technically” reusable and rechargeable and meet the law in a bare-minimum way, but really are intended to be used exactly once, just like disposable ones were, and that’s exactly how they will continue to be treated by consumers.

Cost will probably go up 20% to cover it, but that’s all, and in the end even more material will be going in landfill.

In my opinion, what the legislation should have done is to set an absolute minimum price on the cost of a vape pen. That would be very heavy-handed, but it would actually create the strong financial motivation required to force consumers to genuinely treat the vape pen as something they will re-use.

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

This problem has become more prevalent with AI, but deceptive item listings have been part of the online shopping minefield for a long time.

The same rule applies now as it always has - if it seems too good to be true, then it is.