Maybe they asked Quora if it was legal.

In all seriousness, though, I don’t get that site’s popularity. I only ever visit Quora by accident (because Google ranks it highly) and it’s basically always garbage answers. And speaking as a developer, the UI/UX causes my eyes to roll back in my head and say, “REDRUM” in a demonic voice. It’s hard to even tell where the answer is because there’s so much superfluous shit on the page.

Yet another example of leveraged buyouts being bad and dumb. The “risk” may be technically on the company you’re buying’s books but it’s really on the employees who actually face the real consequences of the bet failing.

I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.

My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)

I don’t use KDE as my daily driver but it’s on my SteamDeck and I haven’t once been trying to change a setting or something and encountered a window that looks like Windows XP because no one at a whole multi-trillion dollar company could be bothered to update it. It’s way better than Windows 11.

I obviously got it. But not everyone appreciates high culture.

Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?

Are there shared whitelists? It seems like something that isn’t really practical without them. I’m a web developer who has never served one ad but the front-end tools now basically export all JavaScript. You’d probably just get a blank page on any site made recently that’s more complex than a portfolio/resume page.

GitHub owner Microsoft would never engage in IP theft of source code. They leave that to OpenAI and then rebrand it as GitHub Copilot.

Someday, we’ll have the technology to generate an image of a centaur with 4 boobs without using more energy than a small hospital. Very exciting stuff.

Spice Rat and Sugar Ghost was one of my favorite Hannah-Barbera cartoons.

This isn’t about internet. This is about landline telephone service and being able to call 911. For those that don’t remember, landline phones work even when the power is out. No big deal if you have a cell phone and service. Very big deal if you live in a mountainous region where you rely on WiFi at home due to bad phone signal and would have to get in a car to drive somewhere with service to get emergency help or, say, report a forest fire caused by power lines snapping.

In the landline era, AT&T agreed to be the provider of last resort and they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got something in return. And even if “superior” technology exists, it’s not superior for “last resort” situations. One day, maybe we’ll all have satellite internet as a fallback on our mobile devices and landlines really will be obsolete. But that day isn’t today.

Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.

If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.

On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.

A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.

This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.

They already have Larry Summers, the laziest has-been “economist” on Earth. Sam Altman is similarly a charismatic fraud who continuously fails up. I don’t know anything about Paul Nakasone but given his NSA connections, this might be the worst board in history.

Elon Musk trying to be “edgy” and just coming off like the most divorced man on Earth is pretty funny. I’m still not using Vichy Twitter but it is funny watching a grown ass, 52 year-old man try to be an edgelord.

It’s not just America having an election this year. India just had theirs and it’s the biggest election on Earth.

I did twice a week when I was management: once at the start of a sprint, once on the first Friday where we only identified blockers, and once the following Wednesday where we talked about what can ship and be ready for QA.

The goal was to have a release fully ready on Thursday so Friday could be for emergency bug fixes but most releases are fine. If everything is perfect, great! Everyone go have a three day weekend. If QA catches a bug or two, we fix it and then ship.

If a deadline is gonna slip, just tell me when you know. It’s not usually a big deal.

Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.

I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)

I think it’s perfectly possible to use Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora without the terminal. But a lot of online tutorials are like, “Just run this command.” because it’s faster.

I’m an experienced terminal user but I know with my Steam Deck, I barely ever use it. Really the only time is when I want to update packages quicker than using the GUI tool. But you could successfully use a Steam Deck without ever launching into Desktop mode, much less opening a terminal.