Windows 7, first released in 2009, now well out of the most extended of support. Glad to see security of medical records is a top priority.

I wasn’t able to get a good read on it either. I didn’t spot anything obviously wrong from a technical standpoint, but I’m not a systems developer. It just doesn’t have much that distinguishes it on a non-technical level. The design is neat, but other OS projects like Redox have shot past it in a shorter period of time. That tells me something’s broken, whether it’s technical or social.

I tried Debian/Herd on a spare box. I think that lasted for what, a week? It was a less than complete experience, so I moved on to more fruitful experiments.

In my previous job, I was asked to break focus every 15 minutes to check my email and see if one of my coworkers was falling behind on dealing with a queue of tasks, then pitch in if he was. I hated the job in general, but that in particular just ruined any possibility of productivity. Hard for anyone, near impossible for someone with ADHD. Then I got blamed for falling behind on my work. And for being disorganized (we didn’t have a ticket tracker, hmmm).

Yeah, I’ve been learning some nushell. If you’re dealing with data, it’s just a great tool. So many sharp edges in the POSIX shell come from it being stringly typed, so having a strongly typed shell is extremely helpful.

Replace the Pop! Shop with the COSMIC Store.

sudo apt install cosmic-store cosmic-icons
sudo apt remove pop-shop

Pop Shop is kinda slow. COSMIC Store is part of Pop OS’s new COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE). Everything is just a lot faster. It’s an alpha so there are a couple of rough edges, but it’s great overall.

Speaking of, get hyped for COSMIC. It’s a DE written in Rust. It’s not quite as complete as GNOME, but hopefully it will have better performance than the current GNOME mod that forms Pop’s UI.

Tiling is especially great for working with multiple monitors. It is far easier to move windows between monitors and workspaces, split screens between two windows, and so on with tiling.

I can, but the history is a little gorey.

Mandrake (2004) -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu (I think?) -> Arch -> Ubuntu -> NixOS -> Pop!_OS

I liked fiddling with the base system more when I was younger, but now I want at least the base system to just work. It gets old hunting through wikis to get basic functionality fixed.

Bold words to describe a user friendly metaphor.

Some GUI package applications use the store metaphor. Pop! OS uses Pop Shop currently and will use COSMIC Store in 24.04 without transactions being involved.

The Grim Perl Reaper?

I’m curious where COSMIC will land. It takes the previous iteration of Pop!, which used a lot of extensions on top of GNOME, and instead uses Rust as its main implementation language. So far, its applications have seemed very snappy, but that of course doesn’t mean that they are light on the RAM usage when it comes to a 2GB computer.

Along those same lines, the Lapce IDE is fairly lightweight. It’s no vim, but it is a very good GUI. I am running it on my 10 year old laptop, 8 GB, and it is noticeably more performant than VS Code on a new computer.

I was at PyCon 2024 a few days ago where the founder of Black Python Developers gave a keynote talk. He talked about going to one gathering after another and being one of just a handful of Black attendees. Or how the few Black leaders are often asked to fill an impossible number of posts because there just aren’t enough of them to fulfill the demand. So yes, having an organization to help foster inclusion of people who are largely frozen out of the community is necessary. Someday this won’t be necessary, but for now it is.

Yes, yes we do.

I’ve been part of moderating a subreddit that has a loose conflict of interest policy, so I’ll throw in my two cents. Our policy is to avoid commenting and moderating in the same thread. There are some exceptions, like with particularly egregious violations. But even then, replying to the comment, deleting it, then banning the user would be considered an abuse of power. Instead, the common practice is to just report it for other moderators without a CoI to deal with.

I consider a conflict of interest policy to be as much about protecting the community itself as anything. Many online communities have run into trouble when someone with elevated permissions like a moderator is even perceived as having abused their powers. Community splits or failures have happened over even just one moderator “power tripping.” That’s why it’s necessary for moderators to put some restraints on themselves to maintain community trust.

The post that inspired this one had upward of 15 people given a site ban in a post with 80 comments. Several of those had a reply from the banning admin. The bans themselves may have been justified, but the optics are terrible. That’s exactly the sort of thing that has a history of eroding community trust. Even for people who have the aim of an instance for Marxist-Leninist thought, there are going to be schisms. Setting boundaries is necessary to preempt problems.

How is that shown in the mod logs?

Yeah, I bought my first laptop, a Thinkpad T43, in 2005. It had something like 512MB-1GB of RAM, a Pentium M processor, and 156 GB of HDD (not SDD). Very good for the time, but there are Raspberry Pi’s with better specs these days.

I tried the hybrid that works under UEFI and legacy BIOS. It didn’t work on at least one system. Did you try UEFI only?

Python does allow this with NewType. Type checkers see two different types, but it is the same class at runtime.