cagey

Gemini 3.7 Flash deprecation: gemini-3.7-flash is deprecated and has been replaced by gemini-3.8-flash. All requests to gemini-3.7-flash are automatically routed to gemini-3.8-flash.

Gemini 3.5 Flash deprecation: gemini-3.5-flash is deprecated and has been replaced by gemini-3.6-flash. All requests to gemini-3.5-flash are automatically routed to gemini-3.6-flash.

I had a PR closed because of this, one that fixes something that, had it not been fixed (by Claude, based on me noticing and clarifying the failure mode and verifying the fix), would have led me to abandon at least COSMIC, if not the distro. But this has me wondering how COSMIC, which had reached 1.x before I started using it, can mature, and whether I'll remain. I started on Pop!_OS with its COSMIC-less 22.04 version; I chose it as a fairly popular distro having Ubuntu stability while offering a leading-edge kernel. Point being, COSMIC was never the draw for me, and I held off upgrading to 24.04 for a LONG time out of concerns about bugs & stability; eventually 22.04 started experiencing ibus-related problems that forced my hand. Since I am (a) not knowledgeable in Rust, nor (b) conversant in the protocol at the core of this bug, I would never have had the gumption or time to understand and fix the bug. And since the PR is closed, it seems unlikely to even serve as a bug report.

In the meantime, others have experienced this bug and are waiting for the maintainers to notice and fix it. I'll just continue to run my fork (so far it has been no burden at all) while I (slowly) decide what direction to take.

And I loved "Norton Commander" and to this day use GUI'fied (and TUI: Midnight Commander) incarnations of it.

[Speaking as a US citizen]

> ... BS like "high yield savings account" there is no such thing as long as I am alive ...

HYSA are in 2026 readily available.

> ... well "money market accounts" seem better and kind of like of HYSA, but the hell those are not really that easily available.

Likewise readily available: open a free brokerage (or "cash management") account at Fidelity.com online (it is easy and acts similar to a bank account: your paycheck can be direct deposited there, it offers a billpay service, you can use it for electronic transfers, and outgoing wire transfers are free; no minimum balance and no monthly fees), cash by default goes into their SPAXX money market account (its 0.42% ER (Expense Ratio) is higher than some, but its 3.33% yield beats most savings/credit union savings rates; EX: Ally bank is yielding 3.00% these days). If you want more of the yield to go into your pocket you can buy (with no transaction fee) a ETF like Vanguard's VBIL which invests only in short duration US Treasury bills (now yielding 3.63% w/ER 0.06%). And if you're up for slightly higher effort, you can buy T-Bills directly at Fidelity with auto reinvestment, at no extra cost.

The preceding (including HYSA) are all near-zero risk, and as a consequence, do NOT pay truly "high" yields (which I think was your real point), they just pay yields that are at the upper end of 'near-zero risk'. These are NOT where you invest for long-term gain/appreciation. For the latter, conventional wisdom says: invest in the stock market, where the risk is much higher, but the historical long-term return is too. ETF's make this easy and efficient. One candidate for "fire and forget": VTI, Vanguard's Total [US] Stock Market Index ETF (as before, with an easy to open account at Fidelity, you can trade these for almost no cost; Fidelity has many competitors, I am merely a happy customer of theirs).

That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damaged. I AM doing business with a Verizon MVNO (Visible, just because they provide the best deal for me, and don't really even HAVE customer service), but I will NEVER directly do business with Verizon again.

(Sorry; off-topic, but I needed to rant)

> 25 thousandths would be sloppy, a nominal clearance hole for a 1/4x20 bolt is about that much.

Isn't that 0.250 which would be 250 thousandths?

As an example: Claude Desktop (containing Claude CoWork) is not officially available on Linux, only Windows and macOS.

The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.

My experience is the same. It was agonizing directing Claude Code (Opus 4.7 at that time) to create a (non-mathematical) preso using LaTex. After banging my head against that wall for too long, I asked why this process (placing entities on the output PDF page according to specific requirements) was so error prone, and received the answer "LaTex is really the wrong tool for this job". I chose Typst from among the offered alternatives, and it has been a MUCH better experience. I switched my resume to Typst too.

You're right, I won't, and I'm probably not alone. So what's the endgame? A world government that enforces all of those "give-ups" at gunpoint?