He should be awarded a prize for services to womens’ horticulture, given the number of women at MIT who filled their offices with houseplants just to keep him away.

RMS doesn’t approve

I love Weimar America as much as I love Weimar Germany. ICE can have jazz, rock’n’roll, the beat poets, David Lynch, Prince, Bikini Kill, Calvin & Hobbes, etc. when they take them from my cold, dead fingers

Surely when number goes up far enough, it magically gains sentience and godlike powers

Big “Nation’s Stray Dogs Call For Increased Wino Vomit Production” energy there

Does iOS use RCS everywhere, or only if your and/or the recipient’s phone carrier are specifically supported?

We need to fork Firefox and fund enough developers to make it viable as a standalone project that’s not just a laggy, disenshittified version of Firefox. It has been done with LibreOffice and CoMaps, so theoretically it is possible.

Does the iOS one get this sweeping access to everything as well (which would require Apple to specifically give it entitlements)?

Well, one’s vital statistics would include things like heart rate and blood pressure, so the name is presumably a reference to his strained demeanour.

X11 was nifty, but limited by low ambitions. Its client/server model was simple: the application ran entirely on the UNIX host, and the terminal was just a dumb graphical display device: drawing commands went one way, and key/mouse events the other way. If only Sun had seen fit to open up NeWS, we could have ended up with apps’ UI layer running on the terminal, handling events and showing the interface, and the communication down the bottleneck between your terminal and the big UNIX machine running the business logic of the app being more structured (like, say, view-model objects and business-logic events). Of course, you’d have to write your UI code in PostScript, at least until someone invented Lua or something.

The problem is that GPS signals are weak, and generally need a line of sight to the sky. Phones don’t rely on GPS alone, but also get location data by triangulating base stations and/or querying databases of WiFi SSIDs over the internet. And AirTags don’t contain either a GPS receiver or an internet connection: they’re just simple, low-power Bluetooth beacons which send an encrypted ID to any nearby iPhones, which add their locations and forward it to Apple.

Basically, all the smarts are in Apple’s infrastructure (including the numerous privately-owned devices running Apple’s location services). Replicating this without a network of roving receivers is a nonstarter.

“It was for our team-building circle jerk”

Don’t they also have far-right leanings of some sort? If so, it’s not surprising.

On a large scale, doomed (see also: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

On a personal scale, not having children is a perfectly legitimate choice.

They’ll eat them. Depending on the frog species, they may even do so more than once.

“I’ve read The Hobbit three times and I know what to do with a strap on Bilbo.”

I use 1Blocker, which seems to be pretty good at blocking annoyances. Would there be anything to gain from switching to uBlock?

In the fediverse, “underage” means under 40.

Go to mullvad.net and make an account. It’s a 16-digit number, and you’re never asked for personal information. There’s no credit on it, but you can pay with a card, crypto if you do that sort of thing, or by sending some banknotes in the post to the company along with the account number to top up.

Threadbare. In cities like NYC, it approximates European transport, though is somewhat more dysfunctional. Elsewhere, you have things like “commuter rail” (like a regio/S-bahn, only with next to no off-peak service, running solely as a shuttle between CBDs and dormitory suburbs). There’s Amtrak, but it’s slow and infrequent and runs on tracks owned by freight railroads, and often is delayed by hours from waiting for freight trains to pass. Bus services have a stigma, associating them with poor (and typically non-white) people, to the point where people who have a choice avoid them, and vote to minimise the amount of their tax money that goes to pay for them. And in some Republican states, the government has scrapped even buses, replacing them with Uber vouchers mailed to households.

So yes, DB is creaking and needs investment to bring it up to scratch, but its service levels (even when wracked by delays) are utopian compared to most of the US.