I tried booting various Illumos distros through USB sticks on two different AM5 computers, and it got stuck very early on. I assume due to some incompatibility with USB 3.0. Meanwhile, a friend of mine booted on a Thinkpad just fine from a DVD.

I still think the ideal solution for Desktop GUIs would be the Qt company developing first class Qt bindings for Node.js (or some other runtime), and allow people to build UIs using web tech with Qt components.

Link: https://www.qt.io/development/qt-framework/qt-bridges

Not sure why you want to build desktop GUIs using web tech though.

Assuming copyright gets dismantled is a good-faith way, Netflix/Amazon remaining as gatekeepers sounds unlikely, IMO. Free software clients like Popcorn Time provide a better experience and would be able to exist without threats from copyright trolls.

It's also much more robust regarding cultural preservation (as users and organizations can keep DRM-free local copies) and censorship (being torrent-based makes it much harder to delete a movie from existence).

Though, it probably wouldn't work if user code modified the Array prototype.

That's an interesting take at ECS, seems to do lots of optimizations under the hood too.

I'm surprised to not have heard of those libraries until now.

Wouldn't that be true for humans as well? If you have documentation explaining a rule and you read it, you may not need to reach out to coworkers.

Otherwise I think the author's concerns are 100% valid.

I've personally never found Ray Tracing to be worth the performance impact. I have a 3090 and a 7900 XT at home, on different computers. When opening a new game, I just keep everything on Medium, turn RT off if possible, and enjoy good fps at 4K in most games.

Doom The Dark Ages was the only one that didn't perform as well as I'd like. Still, perfectly playable at 1080p, Medium settings, targeting 120+ fps.

I don't think I've met anyone who fits that description. The ones deeply interested in the subject would likely skip college anyway if not for future economic prospects.

Spoken like a true software engineer ;), there are jobs where you have to have a degree to get the job. "Real" engineers with sign-off responsibilities, Medical Doctors, etc.

There exist a lot of things that are much "easier" or even (currently) only possible to learn by attending a university because, for example,

- for the access to various devices and experts,

- you walk a much more "established" and "time-tested" hike for getting good in the subject,

etc.

Does college even work for future economic prospects, by the way?

Sure. (?)

> Does college even work for future economic prospects, by the way?

Where I live, a college degree is a legal requirement for a lot of professions that pay more than entry level jobs (although not all of them). So, people go to college to get a better paying job in a few years than they could get by immediately entering the workforce.

Most of the universities I've been in have had well above the occasional one. I'm certainly not saying that has to be true everywhere, but for academic level studies it's pretty sad if the fraction is zero.

> Where I live, a college degree is a legal requirement for a lot of professions that pay more than entry level jobs (although not all of them). So, people go to college to get a better paying job in a few years than they could get by immediately entering the workforce.

Fair enough, and I guess we have that here too, with a hard requirement for certain jobs as a proper lawyer or psychotherapist, and soft but compelling requirement for stuff like real estate agent or investment banker. Most college degrees are a dead loss economically compared to starting work immediately in a craft profession with high demand, such as plumber or welder, which is the reason I question the motivation. But not everyone has the capacity for learning skills like that I guess, and it's nice if there are still places that are still willing to pay well for academics.

I think then the core difference could be in the places we live. Here, it's common for government jobs to require a college degree. Some of those do not require a specific degree, as the position itself doesn't need it, but you still need a degree to apply.

It's also common for pay grades to be tied to how far one went academically (graduate, masters, doctors, etc.). Again, speaking strictly about government jobs, which are a non-trivial part of the economy here.

> Most of the universities I've been in have had well above the occasional one. I'm certainly not saying that has to be true everywhere, but for academic level studies it's pretty sad if the fraction is zero.

That's fair and I believe you. I worded my post in the first person to make it clear I was talking about people I met, and others' experiences may be different.

I'd say there are a fair bit of elements of that sort of gating for government jobs here as well actually, but here that's not so important for earning prospects since they're mostly not all that well paid (exception for C-suite and equivalents, but my impression is those are almosts always awarded more on the basis of contacts and CV achievements).

Sorry if my objection came across as overly antagonistic, but what I was trying get across is precisely that while your experiences are unassailable as your experience, it may not be very representative of what's out there.

I wonder whether the guy who botted the profitability question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428763) could do genuine interest too, or is that inaccessible for examination over the Internet...

Apologies accepted, no worries.

> while your experiences are unassailable as your experience, it may not be very representative of what's out there.

Of course. I try to speak in the first person when talking about my experiences, as a way to make that point (that they may not be representative of what's out there) more explicit.

That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing.

The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other programs as well. This essay explain what those problems are in a very accessible manner: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

The word deserve is interesting here.

There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).

In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.

It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.

I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)

Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.

> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files. Freedom 2 ensures that the community has the legal right to share the server software

In most online games, only the developer has the "server files". You'd need access to them first to even share them. Freedom 2 should be access to server files, if anything.

and so it begins...