Keep us updated as you get more working.

Probably a coincidence and/or got some scoop from Meta specifically.

I think you got the wrong link. It goes to an article about chip tariffs.

Hasn’t done sieg heil in public yet. 😂

Thank you.

Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.

Still sounds like it could get quite messy if Google adds a feature

Of course it can, the point is how difficult it is to get out of the mess. Patching upstream source directly is magnitudes worse. Unfortunately, when you want to add one button to SystemUI somewhere, going straight to the layout and adding it in is most tempting.

In practice, an upstream merge would typically be completed in a few days to several weeks at worst with little to no breakage. These days that’s even easier because a lot of pieces got modularised and separated as part of the work done in Project Treble.

It depends on the problem, language, framework and what the options are. If at all possible, write stuff without touching upstream code. If you’re working in a modular, pluggable system, there’s a lot you can do this way. In Android specifically, you can do a lot by writing components that plug into the Intent framework. When it comes to modifying upstream code, you use whatever facilities the programming language offers to minimize the lines of code changes. Ideally only modify upstream code by adding a single line in a module. E.g. write a separate Java module, import it into the upstream code and call it in a single new line in the appropriate block. Then do your work in your module, import and call additional things as needed. Surround the added line with consistent labels in comments. Enforce this in code review and ideally automation. When a code drop comes, git can often automerge such additions. When it can’t, the merge tools make it very clear where your changes are as they aren’t intermixed all over the upstream code, making the merge work easier. There were some clever tricks with branching that I don’t recall. You could even write your own tooling to help with any of this. There’s clever things you can do with the build systems too. None of this is too complicated that a competent software team can’t figure out if given the direction and time to do it.

There’s also difference in how much work the maintenance of forks is depending on how they implement new features. There are many ways and the easiest ones are typically the least maintainable. Designing those features in order to minimize maintenance work when new code drops from upstream can dramatically change the equation and therefore the fork viability. I’ve worked at an Android mobile OEM and dealt with code drops from Google and Qualcomm. Every OEM essentially maintains a fork of Android and deals with a massive set of changes with every Android release. Implementing stuff by straight modifying Android source files lead to huge maintenance workload. After going through a few code drop cycles we devised a set of strategies that drastically decreased the effort needed.

Absolutely true.

Users often have no idea what they actually want.

This is really important and often underemphasized. People don’t reflect on why they feel they want X or Y. We don’t know if it’s some objective reason or a product of an arbitrary decision some other software maker taught us. Famous example for this is pinch-to-zoom. The first people who tried it on the iPhone found it seriously unintuitive and even difficult. Apple spent a lot of effort teaching people to pinch-to-zoom. Then you have the case where we don’t even know what we might like if we haven’t experienced it. The do-what-people-want mantra runs into these and other rrlated problems and projects that live by it often aren’t the best things out there. Good projects typically do a mix of both. Human-computer interaction / UX are legitimate research disciplines for a reason and they’ve yielded very useful heuristics to produce better software.

And they’re likely to do so given how much of it depends on how much capital and energy you dump into it.

I think so. There’s nothing telling your finger when a linear switch is active. That’s why you end up bottoming out, which means you’re using more force and incurring more impact in the finger. One can learn to like anything but typing without bottoming out on linear is playing on hard because you like it. The problem is that if you don’t learn to not bottom out, this does damage to your fingers and it’ll start complaining long term. With that said, typing using the 10-finger system might be more important for avoiding repetitive injury. I imagine overloading several fingers with all keystrokes would be worse than bottoming out. If you type a lot that is. So I’d learn to do that before changing the switches. In any case being able to reliably type without looking is magical. Releases the brain to fully focus on what’s on screen. Or off screen.

• Lemmy (developers and home instance)
• Mastodon
• OpenWrt
• Syncthing
• Immich
• Lawnchair
• F-Droid
• Signal
• Internet Archive
• Wikipedia

Switched to monthly to most, especially the ones that have running costs or are in active development, like Lemmy, Mastodon and Internet Archive.

Good point.

Sounds a bit copyright infringey, but I imagine their lawyers have cleared it. Not that I’m a fan of copyright.

The US has plenty of political prisoners

Yes.

Again, it’s not clear to me what basis there to suggest that USSR or China ratio being higher.

I don’t know if it’s higher I just think it’s not zero.

Originally I replied to this:

Imagine having a Government that uses political prisoners as forced laborers.

It was about political prisoners not general incarcerated population. The aforementioned regimes did hold political prisoners for obvious reasons.

Yes crime skyrocketed after the fall of those regimes.

I’m talking about other one-party communist regimes like the ones in the USSR, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, East Germany, etc. Yes I’m aware they’re they’re not identical, including in rates of political prisoners. The one I’m from had relatively few.

Sure but I think it probably isn’t as easy to gather evidence for this in China than it is in the US. That’s why I think it’s fair to assume the lack of evidence doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. There’s evidence this occurred in collapsed regimes of similar stripes. It’s plausible that China isn’t an exception. I’m not at all suggesting whether this is widespread or not. I have no clue. It could be extremely rare.

No question about the incarceration rates.