Yep. I used to code a lot in JVM languages, then started learning Rust. My initial reaction was “Why the hell does Rust have two string types?”.
Then I learned that it’s for representing actual memory vs. view and what that meant. Since then I’m thinking “Why the hell do JVM languages not have two string types?”.

Bad code can certainly be part of it. The average skill level of those coding C/C++/Rust tends to be higher. And modern programs typically use hundreds of libraries, so even if your own code is immaculate, not all of your dependencies will be.

But there’s other reasons, too:

• Python, Java etc. execute their compiler/interpreter while the program is running.
• CLIs are magnitudes slower, because these languages require a runtime to be launched before executing the CLI logic.
• GUIs and simulations stutter around, because these languages use garbage collection for memory management.
• And then just death by a thousand paper cuts. For example, when iterating over text, you can’t tell it to just give you a view/pointer into the existing memory of the text. Instead, it copies each snippet of text you want to process into new memory.
  And when working with multiple threads in Java, it is considered best practice to always clone memory of basically anything you touch. Like, that’s good code and its performance will be mediocre. Also, you better don’t think about using multiple threads in Python+JS. For those two, even parallelism was an afterthought.

Well, and then all of the above feeds back into all the libraries not being performant. There’s no chance to use the languages for performance-critical stuff, so no one bothers optimizing the libraries.

Honestly, it’s still ridiculous to me how slow Python, Java, JS, Ruby etc. continue to feel, even after decades of hardware optimizations. You’d think their slowness would stop being relevant at some point, because processors and whatnot have become magnitudes faster, but you can still feel it quite well, when something was implemented in one of those.

Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Big problem there is that the internet spans between nations. You can’t just nationalize service providers and have everyone with a webpage register it there to receive their rightful share of money.

Obviously, some system could be created, just as some global government could be established, but with hardly any structures in place so far, it would be difficult to regulate.

The difference to me, between this thing and what Google is building (“Privacy Sandbox”), is that I trust Mozilla to have user interests in mind. They don’t have shareholders, they don’t have a massive foot in the advertising market, so if this thing turns out to be bad for users, then I expect them to fix it or to pull the plug. With Google, I rather expect them to worsen it for users, when they get the chance to do so, without journalists writing about it.

You’re criticizing advertising in general and looking for a “fix” which does not involve advertising of any kind.

What Mozilla is doing here tries to address your critique of advertising. It tries to fix the system that’s in place. Obviously, we’ll have to see, if it works out, but I don’t feel like it’s that different from your vision.

I mean, that’s just your ISP ripping you off. They would just increase prices even more, if they’d have to give some of it to webpages.

They listed it prominently in the official changelog, they’ve got a support page for it and they have a toggle to disable it. If they wanted to sneak it in, they would not have done any of that.

It’s also still unclear, if this will improve the situation for users. If it sees no adoption, it’s dead on arrival. If it ends up being abused by advertisers without evidence of it improving privacy, they’ll throw it back out.

Like, I agree that a blog post engaging into the discussion would be nice, but I also get that it’s not easy to time this correctly. Since Mozilla does develop out in the open, a feature like that could be discovered by journalists as early as the conception phase. Arguably, it still is in the conception phase. People are now stumbling over it, because they made it transparent.

You can liken it to rape all you want, it is very much reality. I’d even go farther, that under capitalism advertisers don’t just have an excuse but an obligation to rape you, if there is no other cost-effective method to get the data their stakeholders want.

Well, this isn’t about you. If you’re blocking ads anyways, there’s going to be no data to report.

But Firefox needs webpage owners to be able to make a buck off of supporting Firefox. Otherwise, we’ll see even more webpages suggesting to switch to Chrome.

Personally, I feel like more advanced use-cases are better covered by extensions.

You mean the usual $0 “it’ll rain eventually” special.

Damn, that first GIF looks so much like Trump.

Maybe JuK: https://juk.kde.org/

It is for the most part as minimal as it looks, except that it’s actually quite good for playlists and managing one’s music collection.

It doesn’t have a ton of devs behind it, so I would be surprised, if they had native Pipewire support already. Otherwise, I think, it covers what you’ve listed.

I agree that (1) is particularly painful on openSUSE, because of (2), and I do agree that Fedora tends to be more similar to Debian/Ubuntu, but package names differing between distros is pretty universal for any non-derivative distros.

For example, I tried to use nix-shell, which basically lets you set up a small, reproducible build environment using packages from NixOS. And it was working excellently, except I could not figure out for the life of me, what the names of the NixOS packages are that provide certain C libraries…

Tumbleweed does also feed into Leap. Leap uses SLE packages for most of the core libraries, but then user-facing applications see new versions integrated from what’s been packaged in Tumbleweed. Particularly, they also automate lots of the package testing in Tumbleweed, so that can be reused for Leap. Well, and also for SLE, which will also grab stuff from Tumbleweed when they do plan to upgrade their packages.

As for minimal VM images, they do offer downloads for those.
On this page, you can click on “Download”, then “Alternative Downloads”.
These don’t seem to be available for Leap currently. Not sure, if it’s because Leap 15.6 has only been out for a few weeks. Could also be that I’m missing something here.

As for Wicked, they only use it for server systems as the default, and they do make it easy to switch to NetworkManager, if you prefer.

I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI).

From what I understand, that’s not a coincidence. We’ve had the technology for LLMs for a long time. We just didn’t make them Large, because the training would have taken an eternity.
Then cryptocurrencies caused the GPU market to boom and then implode, which meant lots of cryptominers were selling their GPUs for dirt cheap. Perfect time to buy a bunch of GPUs, stick them in a server and try to do that eternity-long training.

And yeah, as for local chatbots, I do also imagine they will continue to be a thing, even if they won’t get any better anymore when the big companies stop doing the training.
But as you kind of also reasoned, I still don’t expect most of these companies to host their own chatbot…

Man, I’m so curious when and to what extent this whole hype bubble will implode.
Like, we’re not talking blockchain, there is some legitimate use-cases for generative AI, which will continue to exist.

However, there’s also many legitimate use-cases which will not continue to exist, because Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree.
When the hype falls off, investors pull out their money and Microsoft cannot continue subsidizing, which will make prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

And of course, there’s also the complete fucking bullshit use-cases, which will be gutted immediately when investors/management stop being hyped.

Is '06 the year? What in the crime against humanity…

GMT doesn’t have daylight savings, but most people won’t be as precise in language. Here in Germany, we might also tell people “GMT+2”, even though it changes to GMT+1 in winter. Like, I don’t even know what the correct shorthand would be for our timezone…