samc

Thanks, for computing some useful statistics! As much as I believe the implied hypothesis that working at Amazon is bad for one's health, I think the guardian intentionally tried to present the largest number possible with no context.

Frankly, "Amazon warehouse employees 10x more likely to need an ambulance" is a more impactful headline anyway.

Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I really don't find the "chip makers don't have to pay licence fees" a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.

I imagine it's likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn't what's holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.

Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community's focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I'd be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.

Am I right in thinking that the article's main complaint, namely that the means testing excludes those too poor to retire, is wrong? You can still claim pension credit if you're on a low income.

Firstly, I reckon it’s debatable whether having an active monarchy is a net gain financially (how much could we charge for admission to Buckingham Palace?).

But, for me at least, it's simply a matter of principle. I believe we are all born equal, and that nobody should be given special treatment due to something as trivial as their ancestry. Having a monarchy flies directly in the face of many values I think we as a nation value deeply.

Also they have a lot of land that their great great ... Grandad nicked from the Saxons and I wouldn't mind that being nationalised.

I feel this. I remember spending ages trying to figure out how to remove the bar in doom modeline (yes eventually I realised I could just make it the same colour as the background...), only to discover that it was necessary to control the size of the modeline.

I imagine this stuff is really deep in the internals of Emacs, which is why people are less keen to touch it. But if we were in the mood to do that, I would like even more CSS-like features, such as the ability to configure each side of a box property independently

In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.

If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system

Its all about how an application goes from "I would like to display X on a screen" to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It's then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There's a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that's the general idea.

Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to "look at" what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn't focussed).

Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we're at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there's still odd bits of software that either haven't been ported, or that still rely on some features that don't exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.

Machine learning is just gradient descent through a subset of algorithm-space

I do wonder what percentage of Linux users reject the survey compared to Windows users. Not that it's changed much, but every little helps right?

Games.

Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I've not yet found an open source game I've enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.