It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).
Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.
> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:
> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows
> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard
> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]
> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same
> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing
> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection
There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.
They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:
- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)
- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"
- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"
- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback
- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so
- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release
- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"
- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker
And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.
This is like, the least bad thing GNOME have ever done. Middle-click pasting makes no logical sense and only exists as a holdover from before copy-paste conventions were established. Nobody would design it this way today.
I would say the issue itself is almost irrelevant... I think it's mainly your dogmatism. Speaking in absolutes as if you always know everything, that there can seemingly only be one right answer and there can be no other valid perspectives or opinions. To me it just screams low emotional intelligence and a lack of critical thinking, humility and empathy.
Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
We have those maggots (BSFL) sometimes in our compost naturally and I would never eat anything made with them.
The problem is not even the animal/maggot itself but the fact that it consumes ANYTHING. Old apples, coffee grounds, house plants, dead rats, everything.
The incentives to produce them more cheaply by feeding them trash (actual trash not mango peelings) is obvious and just too risky.
When cost is the only reason they matter anyways, why waste money on quality ingredients or good QA?
That number isn't very useful either, it really depends on the hardware. Most virtualized server CPUs where e.g. Django will run on in the end are nowhere near the author's M4 Pro.
Last time I benchmarked a VPS it was about the performance of an Ivy Bridge generation laptop.
> Last time I benchmarked a VPS it was about the performance of an Ivy Bridge generation laptop.
I have a number of Intel N95 systems around the house for various things. I've found them to be a pretty accurate analog for small instances VPSes. The N95 are Intel E-cores which are effectively Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge cores.
Stuff can fly on my MacBook but than drag on a small VPS instance but validating against an N95 (I already have) is helpful. YMMV.
After spending many hours optimizing some routines I now think performance optimization is a great benchmark for identifiying how generally smart an AI is at helping with some specific piece of code.
Solutions are quite easy to verify with differential testing and produce a number for direct comparison.
Less code is usually better and you generally can't "cheat" by adding more cruft so it nullifies the additive bias. Good optimization requires significant understanding of the underlying structures. Everything has performance tradeoffs so it requires systemic thinking and not just stringing independent pieces together.
So far I've found that Gemini Pro 3 was the best at reasoning about tricky SIMD code but the results with most models were pretty underwhelming.
I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.
If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even rational about it.
Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?
The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody has a problem with people doing that. The reason people object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear escalation in the culture war, not because they have strong opinions about gay marriage.
It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions.
It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means.
If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?
In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for being a symbol of a union between two people. But all rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are hence not always respected outside of religion.
You could argue that there are laws that only apply to married couples, and that THAT brings meaning to marriage. But:
Firstly, generally speaking, even the most important features of a marriage are not protected by law, most notably: fidelity. So the law is disjoint from what's traditionally considered to be obligations within marriage. That leaves the legal definition at the whims of contemporary polititians. Therefore, law cannot assign the word "marriage" any consistent meaning throughout time.
Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a married couple and two people living together is increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have lived together for long enough. It suggests that law-makers do not consider a ceremony and a "marriage" announcement to be what should really activate these laws, but rather other factors. Although, they seem to acknowledge that an announcement of a marriage implies the factors needed to activate these laws. If that makes sense...
So marriage is inherently a religious institution that in a religious context comes with rules, obligations and rights. Hence why people who take religion seriously will find it offensive that somebody that completely disregards these rules calls themselves married.
For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.
I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.
Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.
If you think for a moment, you'll realise that it's irrelevant whether marriage is important to you - it's important to many.
So when a person wishes to deny this important institution to a minority, they are creating an out-group and discriminating against them.
By that logic, we can put those discriminators themselves in an out-group and discriminate against them. We can deny them institutions such as directorships. Fair's fair.
It's more than fair - despite what conversion camps want to sell, being queer is an intransigent characteristic. Being a bully is just a choice. Discriminating against bullies is as morally just as discriminating against the incompetent.
The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable and wouldn't be of value to single people.
The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied to dependents in your household, not marriage.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
> Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
> Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
Fight slop with slop. Use an AI to review it in excruciating detail and write a lenghty justification for the rejection. Make sure to really hit a couple thousand words.
Maybe getting their own time wasted will teach the submitter about the value of clarity and how it feels to be on the receiving end of a communication with highly asymmetric effort.
Nice, but I suspect the PR submitter will simply reply with their own AI-generated counterpoints. They'll probably come to an agreement to turn both of you into paperclips.
If they resubmit you at least have proof that the conversation is completely braindead and the other side is happy to engage in uprofessional behavior and generally wasting time and resources.
This should be convincing enough even for a non-technical team lead while for the initial PR it might be hard to explain objectively why it's bad.
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