nycticorax

Kind of you to engage! Ahh, ok, I misunderstood. Very cool! I think maybe it would have helped me if you had given a one-or-two-sentence description of the "representative change" in the main text, to make it a bit more concrete up-front? But possibly just a 'me' issue...

This is interesting, but I think it would be even more interesting to see a comparison of the token cost of adding a new feature, in the original codebase vs the refactored one. You'd think/hope that the cost of adding the new feature would be lower when starting from the refactored codebase, indicating that refactoring makes economic sense in the long run by lowering the cost of adding new features.

This is only somewhat related, but: Has there ever been a language that adopted IEEE-754-like semantics for integer types? (Yes, I know this would be slow without hardware support.) By this I mean adding valid values for (signed) ints to represent positive infinity, negative infinity, and not-a-number; then use these values as the results of overflow, underflow, and division by zero in the natural way. It just seems like if these sort of values are useful in floating-point arithmetic, they might well be useful for integer arithmetic as well, for many of the same reasons.

The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!

Middle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard behavior on Linux since the 1990s. This just seems to me like more of GNOME's "simplicity at all costs" run amok. I'm a power user. I want poser user features. So I use KDE, a project run by people who care about power users and their needs. I'm happy for you if GNOME meets your needs.

I'm not surprised that GNOME would contemplate this: it seems like a very GNOME-y thing to do. (And maybe this is a good thing for GNOME users. But this kind of thing is also why I use KDE.) But why would Firefox feel the need to touch this? Surely this is a DE-level setting, and Firefox should simply go along with the DE behavior so that its behavior is consistent with the rest of the apps running in the desktop session.

Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?

It would help if you would say what exactly you think is wrong with it.

So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.

But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.

Am I missing something? Being unfair to someone?

My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they were in, say, the 1970s, but still. They're also a good system for neurophysiology education, because they are cheap and easy to obtain, have large-ish neurons that are identifiable from animal to animal, and their nervous system has a relatively simple organization.

Strongly endorse. That paper is really wonderful. It seems to me that MVS is the solution to the version selection problem, and now we just have to wait for awareness of this to fully percolate through the developer community.

The post title implies that all French villages have no more drinking water, which is not the case. Sounds like it's 16 villages, all near each other. Still a big deal, but not nearly as bad as if it was all of France.