Why can’t I just write this up as a PR to Firefox and stand a snowball’s chance of getting it merged, though? Everything’s somehow simultaneously extremely stodgy and completely beholden to whatever Google decides to ship this week.

Why don’t browsers know how to render a Markdown content-type yet, all by themselves? It’s ubiquitous now and it’s not like it’s hard to parse, but every site has to translate it into HTML itself for the browser.

Power efficiency is extremely important for an off-grid network, because it translates more or less directly into battery and especially solar panel area requirements. You need the final node design to be hoistable up the tree.

Meshtastic’s not really a company exactly. MeshCore exists if you don’t like it.

Semtech does IIRC have patents on and make all the LoRA chips. But the patents will expire eventually, and the LoRA chips they make are well-behaved modules that do what you tell them and not locked-down bits of nonsense that are a pain to work with. The data sheets for the modules are easy to find, and you’re not stuck messing around with firmware blobs you need to load into things. You can get boards with the Semtech radios on them from a whole bunch of manufacturers. You’d be hard-pressed to find a competing radio tech with modems available at a similar price point that we “should” be using instead.

And while the ability to use any link for e.g. Reticulum is nice, it also means that without coordination you have no idea what link you should use, and so you can never see anyone because you have no idea what technology or even what LoRA channel to look for peers on.

And Meshtastic now can go over UDP anyway.

It sounds like this is the free service charging to access data you already gave them with the expectation it would always be available later. And which might not exist elsewhere.

That’s not fremium, that’s ransomware.

What it is is my attempt to avoid the nonsense biannual massive Ubuntu upgrades.

Really I’ve got “Siduction”, an ostensible distro “based on” Debian Unstable. This is accomplished by just having the Debian Unstable package sources in there, plus a couple others that give you pretty themes.

I expect Debian Unstable to occasionally ship me broken packages, but I’m surprised to have it just generally not have functional migration solutions when the setup goes through major changes. Not because there’s a bug in something, as far as I can tell, but because nobody engineered anything.

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn’t have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like “oh hey there’s a new release, you’re available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don’t have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn’t, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?”

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

I saw NTSYNC and was obligated to reply with the complementary 90s boy band.

How the Backstreet Boys Taught me to Code

Why do you think people got so into T posing?

Still waiting on the improvements to BACKSTREET_BOYS to get merged.

Often to a fault. Sometimes building the packages that make up the distro requires software that is only available and packaged for that distro.

If you grew up to be a man, it might make sense to describe your younger self as a boy. My understanding of gender is that often the one you end up with as an adult is the one you really have had the whole time, or at least since you started having one at all.

But my other understanding of gender is that being in gender trouble is a fake idea, so you can and should describe your younger self as whatever feels right to you, no matter what you think of yourself as now.

Sounds more like the pirate queen.

Pihole or other network-based ad blockers might be able to do a lot of the same things. Or an ad-blocking DNS set in the phone’s settings. But I don’t know of anything else that has the same on-device VPN implementation as the DDG tool.

I’ve had pretty good results with Wings3D actually, as opposed to Blender. For proper CAD you can try Solvespace, which also sucks but at least has so little to it that you can learn to use it if you remember the idea of solving systems of equations at all.

It could probably change the language selector.

If I’m an elite hacker spy who works for the hacker spy division of the Chinese army, am I going to change the system language of the thing I am hacking to Chinese and forget to change it back?

Mostly so they could say they did.

You don’t do the development on the board.

It would definitely reduce the attack surface. And even though Windows has “security” issues patched all the time, rarely are they ones so severe that you can just roll up to a machine and send it a weird HTTP reply and get admin access. Usually it’s stuff like if you have a shortcut file on disk it gets to run code when you look in the folder, or something. Not great for working with downloads, but hard to exploit unless at least one other thing happens (like visiting a malicious page, which then starts a download that the browser accepts).

But the browser calls out to the OS to do a lot of stuff (render images, render fonts, play sounds, etc.). It mostly assumes the OS can do those things without popping open a remote shell because too many emojis were rendered in a row or something. That is not always true, and when it isn’t you want an OS patch to fix it before you go on a site where someone can post the Magic Emoji That Hacks You.

But you are right that you can browse around trustworthy websites on an unpatched system behind a decent firewall for quite a while before you notice something bad happening. But also, a lot of bad things can have been happening for quite a while before you notice.