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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • they’re just mad because they didn’t think to do what Uber is doing and now they’re dying.

    That and they’re mad because their virtual monopoly status didn’t protect them from market disruption. They just sat back, assuming that there was no way these rogue taxi services were going to evade the law for long. The fact that an entire industry acted on such a bad take suggests, to me, a lot of anti-competitive bullshit behind the scenes.

    Anyway, I agree. All they had to do was either add rideshare-like features to their service, merge with rideshare services, or become one themselves. The investment capital was clearly there, and making a modernization pitch with brand recognition of an established taxi company would have been a slam-dunk.



  • I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

    I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.








  • I’ve been in situations where I wanted to retain credit/ownership of ideas and code, but wanted to be able to use them in the workplace. So building a MIT/BSD licensed library on the weekend and then importing it on Monday was the only game in town. I get the portfolio piece and my job is easier as a result. But I stick to non-novel and non-patentable stuff - “small” work really, as Stallman is quoted here..

    In some work environments, GPL or “GPL with an exception” would never get the kind of traction it should. Lots of places I’ve worked lack the legal and logistical framework for wrangling licenses and exceptions. It’s hard to handle such cases if there’s literally nobody to talk to about it, while you have automated systems that flag GPL license landmines anyway. The framing is a kind of security problem, not a license problem, so you never really get to start.



  • The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of “free” software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I’ll add that in no way do I support Intel’s shenanigans here.

    The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

    But don’t take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

    commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

    This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I’d love to see a citation here because that’s the first I’ve heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.


  • spam del or f2 keys

    Also, sometimes it’s ins, F1, or F10.

    If you find yourself doing this a lot, and are okay with attending every reboot, some BIOS’ can be configured to just always boot to the BIOS menu. Also, there’s sometimes a configurable time-frame for when it listens for keystrokes.

    Disclaimer: I have 30 years of doing battle with PC’s that I’m sifting through here, so some of that’s bound to be old advice.


  • I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.

    Edit: as a software developer I can say that I’ve never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I’ve also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.