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

To be fair, it's the newest rule change, so some older players may think it some new-fangled whipper snapper thing. We've only had about 150 years to get used to it.

aborting everytime you are black

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

won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.

Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they'll ever do, and it'll only get moreso. If it weren't for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn't open a single modern web page and was limited to the "retro" web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I'm guessing it won't be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.

(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)

I mean...yeah. Just because something is provably the best possible thing, doesn't mean it's good. Sorting should be avoided if at all possible. (And in many cases, such as with numbers, you can do better than comparison-based sorts)

You're not wrong, but there's a kind of irony in it when you talk about ending humanity because of it. There's a lot to hate about humanity if you have humanity and have human values. There's nothing objectively wrong about being cruel or destructive or dishonest or greedy or abusive or murderous and I imagine most hypothetical alien species would look at those things and say "what's wrong with any of that?"

But because humans evolved as social creatures and our survival depended upon trusting one another, we're constantly trying to judge ourselves against values that can't actually be met. So we look at ourselves and say we're a really horrible species, but that statement only makes sense because ironically we're a really glorious species that's fabricated these completely irrational things like love and compassion and empathy and honesty and sacrifice that no other species has (though many other social species do have bits and pieces of them).

And we'll forever hate ourselves for not being able to live up to our own values.

If you ever see a headline that says "x% of people believe/want/feel y", it's nonsense. You can manufacture a crooked methodology to get x% of people to say anything.

"Can I have a minute of your time? There has been evidence that people who use alternative browsers are more likely to commit acts of terrorism and human trafficking. Would you be in favour of more support for alternative browsers, or would you rather have higher quality public schools?"

And just like magic, you can now write a headline that only 2% of people want a browser choice screen.

It's a bit more complicated than that. System load is a count of how many processes are in an R state (either "R"unning or "R"eady). If a process does disk I/O or accesses the network, that is not counted towards load, because as soon as it makes a system call, it's now in an S (or D) state instead of an R state.

But disk I/O does affect it, which makes it a bit tricky. You mentioned swapping. Swapping's partner in crime, memory-mapped files, also contribute. In both of those cases, a process tries to access memory (without making a system call) that the kernel needs to do work to resolve, so the process stays in an R state.

I can't think of a common situation where network activity could contribute to load, though. If your swap device is mounted over NFS maybe?

Anyway, generally load is measuring CPU usage, but if you have high disk usage elsewhere (which is not counted directly) and are under high memory pressure, that can contribute to load. If you're seeing a high load with low CPU utilization, that's almost always due to high memory pressure, which can cause both swapping and filesystem cache drops.

I was with you until the last paragraph. Just about every init system is different from historical init systems. Do you really think OpenRC or runit or any of the other init systems people are using have any similarity to SysV init? I think you're attacking a strawman in the last paragraph. (Edit: Except Slackware users. Slackware still does init the way it's traditionally been done, but I can't think of anyone else who does)

Not the exact StagingTool, but the GitHub project mach2 that's linked to in the article supposedly supports many of the same features as StagingTool, I guess kind of an open source clone.

Edit: to add more detail. If you look in the project for some files that have been updated recently, such as this one, the feature list includes some numeric codes at the top, which are the same ones StagingTool uses. The ones without any symbolic name at all, I believe, are ones that have not been determined yet what they do.

When I saw the title, I was like "oh, someone's linking to this old thing again". I'm surprised he keeps it current! I mean, current-ish.

Glad he found something that works for him.

I would like to hear his thoughts on Forth. His love of Lisp seems to be from the god-programmer perspective. Lisp gives you about as much power as you can ask for, for better or worse. I think Forth goes even a step further, though, letting you redefine constants and things.