LocalSend. It’s exactly like Apple Airdrop

This may be super-nitpicky (and I lose LocalSend and use it a lot), but there is one difference between LocalSend and Airdrop. LocalSend requires network connectivity (and requires the devices to be on the same network), whereas Airdrop can work without any network connection (using Bluetooth).

I recently discovered that he believes it’s theft if you watch one of his videos with an adblocker. Just out of spite, sometimes I put one of his videos on in the background (muted) with an adblocker.

Something something broken arms

Edit: Wow, thank you for the gold, kind stranger!

To be honest I’m more concerned by language-humor. Like not even saying what kind of humour, just any type of humour at all. Jokes are for adults only!

Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.

If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.

Why the quotes?

If you ever see quotation marks in a headline, it simply means they’re attributing the word/phrase to a particular source. In this case, they’re saying that the word “security” was used verbatim in the intranet document. Scare quotes are never used in journalism, so they’re not implying anything by putting the word in quotation marks. They’re simply saying that they’re not paraphrasing.

Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.

Anyway it’s a chat protocol

If you pump out enough research papers, maybe Microsoft won’t move you over to the Office team.

Reminds me a little of the old Jonathan Shapiro research OSes (Coyotos, EROS, CapROS), though toned down a little bit. The EROS family was about eliminating the filesystem entirely at the OS level since you can simulate files with capabilities anyway. Serenum seems to be toning that down a little and effectively having file- or directory-level capabilities, which I think is sensible if you’re going to have a capability-based OS, since they end up being a bit more user-visible as an OS.

He’s got the same problem every research OS has: zero software. He’s probably smart to ditch the idea of hardware entirely and just fix on one hardware platform.

I wish him luck selling his computer systems, but I doubt he’s going to do very well. What would a customer do with one of these? Edit files? And then…edit them again? I guess you can show off how inconvenient it is to edit things due to its security.

I just mean it’s a bit optimistic to try and fund this by selling it. I understand he doesn’t have a research grant, but it’s clearly just a research OS.

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

And not all GNU is Linux! Beyond the world famous GNU Hurd, there’s also Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Nexenta (GNU/Illumos, which is the OpenSolaris kernel).

I think the most esoteric of them, though, is GNU Darwin (GNU/XNU). Darwin is the open source parts of OS X, including its kernel, XNU. There used to be an OpenDarwin project to try to turn Darwin into an actual independent operating system, but they failed, and were superseded by PureDarwin, which took a harder line against anything OS X getting into the system. GNU Darwin took it one step further and removed just about all of Darwin (except XNU) and replaced it with GNU instead.

It doesn’t change the larger point that GNU is way bigger than Linux, though. There are a tonne of things that are larger than Linux, and GNU is one of them.