A friendly heads-up: I think you mean "Liberation Serif". Serif and sans-serif ("without serif") are common categories for fonts.

I sympathize with the point of the article, but if someone's seriously citing Flash, which had widespread success for a run of about 15 years before being overtaken by later developments (driven in part by a billionaire with an axe to grind), as a short-lived "dead end" that was best avoided, then how long do they think is a sensible amount of time to wait to see if something's worth spending time and effort? Nothing remains on top forever.

Man pages are the only reference material I know that has more information-free circular definition chains than Wikipedia. And I imagine that it's for much the same reason; they're primarily written and fought over by experts who only need terse reminder notes for themselves, and who can't remember what it was like not spending every day up to their elbows in the subject.

I think that the big, highlighted quote a few paragraphs down--which I believe is also by the author of the article, even though they refer to themselves in the third person--seems somewhat at odds with what they say in the rest of the article. I would guess that they started writing it to make an emotional argument, then tried to back it up with logic, but along the way they lost their emotional momentum and forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing.

There's an interesting section further down, though:

What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn't let it, anyway.

There's no need to get it back in the barn; the thing is lame, and only being kept propped up by a lot of (cash) injections and diversions. The facade will fall before they actually get it to work the way they pretend it works.

I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing "VIbc coam" on the spine.

JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.

Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.

Reading the FAQs, the whole situation smacks of changing for the sake of change. It seems like some important functionality of the old system isn't available in the new system, but they're pushing it through regardless. Combined with this downplaying of Linux support, perhaps some political representatives with low technical skills have been talking to some lobbyists. And unless the Finnish school system has bought into Chromebooks in a big way, they seem unusually eager to support ChromeOS.

I wonder if the whole Secure Boot/Microsoft shim key issue is a part of this.

How about that worst of both worlds, the tutorial where the author starts out writing as if their audience only barely knows what a computer is, gets fed up partway through, and vomits out the rest in a more obtuse and less complete form than they would've otherwise?

1. Turn on your computer. Make sure you turn on the "PC" (the big box part) as well as the "monitor" (TV-like part).

2. Once your computer is ready and you can see the desktop, open your web browser. This might be called "Chrome", "Safari", "Edge", or something else. It's the same program you open to use "the Google".

3. In the little bar near the top of the window where you can write things, type "https://www.someboguswebsite.corn/download/getbogus.html" and press the Enter key.

4. Download the software and unarchive it to a new directory in your borklaving software with the appropriate naming convention.

5. Edit the init file to match your frooping setup.

6. If you're using Fnerp then you might need to switch off autoglomping. Other suites need other settings.

7. Use the thing. You know, the thing that makes the stuff work right. Whatever.

Congratulations! You're ready to go!

I wouldn't be surprised if book readers spend 92% of their time on older books. Or if music listeners spend 92% of their time on older pieces.

Icons that are based on English puns and wordplay are easily understood by speakers of other languages.

This reminded me of one of those Top Gear "drive across a foreign country in weird vehicles" specials where Jeremy Clarkson needed to borrow a cable to jump-start his car, and laboriously mimed out jumping for "jump", and walking a dog for "lead", to a perplexed local. Richard Hammond was cracking up but finally managed to point out what a fool Clarkson was being.

Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.

And as an addendum to this, in 2025 nobody should be using Windows' "Non-latin/-unicode character set" setting to guess the user's preferred language. That's a pre-WinXP kludge. I'm specifically looking at you, Intel integrated graphics software writers, but you have plenty of company, don't worry.

This is a short, interesting video, but there's really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio (/s). The video hardly goes any deeper than that, and also makes a couple of very minor layman-level flubs.

There is a preservation effort for the old NASA computing hardware from the missions in the 50s and 60s, and you can find videos about it on YouTube. They go into much more detail without requiring much prior knowledge about specific technologies from the period. Here's one I watched recently about the ROM and RAM used in some Apollo missions: https://youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=EKiLO-ZpQnJa-TQn

One thing that struck me about the video was how the writers expressed surprise that it was still working and also so adaptable. And my thought was, "Well, yeah, it was designed by people who knew what they were doing, with a good budget, lead by managers whose goal was to make excellent equipment, rather than maximize short-term profits."

I once had a manager hand me a project brief and ask me how quickly I thought I could complete it. I was managing my own workload (it was a bad situation), but it was a very small project and I felt that I had time to put everything else on hold and focus on it. So, I said that I might be able to get it done in four days, but I wouldn't commit to less than a week just to be sure.

The manger started off on this half-threatening, half-disappointed rant about how the project had a deadline set in stone (in four days' time), and how the head of the company had committed to it in public (which in hindsight was absolute rot). I was young and nervous, but fortunately for me every project brief had a timeline of who had seen it, and more importantly, when they had received it. I noticed that this brief had originated over three months prior, and had been sitting on this manager's desk for almost a month. I was the first developer in the chain. That gave me the guts to say that my estimate was firm, and that if anyone actually came down the ladder looking for heads to set rolling (one of the manager's threats), they could come to me and I would explain.

In the end nothing ever came of it because I managed to get the job done in three days. They tried to put the screws to me over that small of a project.