I thought GCC dropped support for compiling to the abacus?

Colour me cautiously optimistic

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

I remember when Mandrake was a young distro – a redhat derivative – and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!

tl;dw?

You say pickerel and know about Goldeye. Manitoba or Minnesota or similar? ;)

I hate fishing games. Just chance games to waste time. But I also hate fishing so…

Probably someone’s pet project

Yeah, it’s easy to forget sometimes that they were actually pretty good coders to get started. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to corporate leadership. But hey, assembly is far better than Zuckerberg’s start (PHP?)

This is because AI (vis-a-vis LLMs) became a religion to many, rather than a technology.

It’s going to be much much worse than just “hard to get a visa” – this shitball is rolling downhill and anyone brown should be considering another country.

First they came for…

I’m sorry you had a bad experience. I’ve used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I’ve found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.

The only actual pain point I’ve seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer … required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to “home”, you’re pretty golden.

A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)

I use old.reddit in desktop mode still, on occasion. Today I clicked on a screenshot of a game cause I wanted more detail. I was directed to the new Reddit interface. I right clicked on the image and chose “open image in new tab” and got the new Reddit interface. I tried CTRL-scroll to zoom in the image, and it made the UI elements larger and in the process shrunk the image. I left the site.

Or, hear me out, they went public and now they are making their product worse as enshittification takes its toll.

I was trying to keep my comment short(ish), but you’re not wrong. There are other complications :)

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.