From Kyiv, in Kyiv.
Rather than a facsimile, I’d just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they’re both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It’d be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.
Chinese investment in renewables so far means they grow renewables while also growing coal. Between 80 and 100 gigawatts of coal production were added in 2025. Unfortunately, coal and gas production is steadily increasing worldwide. Contrast G7 trying to improve own living standard by reducing fossil usage locally, with G20 trying to fast-forward economic growth by any means available. Wind and solar grow fast, but they add to total production, rather than phase out fossils, almost everywhere outside EU. Source is the same, just a different page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source
Global North can’t pretend to be green itself while still externalizing harmful production and growing trade with countries ruled by people who don’t care about resource depletion and the planet remaining livable. I think there’s no alternative to focusing on producing locally (adhering to own democratic regulations, labor union negotiations etc) while implementing degrowth policies, both helping other countries do likewise and putting pressure on them to do so through trade measures.
So it’s like Google Drive/Docs, but feels like normal files, without a heavy web app tab overhead for every document, thus working faster on cheap office computers?
I understood quickly increasing hardware requirements when 95 replaced 3.1, 98 replaced 95, 2000/XP replaced 98, or 7 replaced XP, because those new versions brought noticeable usability and quality updates, as well as lots of new media- and game-related features. I’m still unsure in what visible ways 11 is an improvement over 7, and 12 seems to not offer anything interesting compared to 11? Basically a statement of, “we can no longer code efficient software and pull new requirements out of thin air”.
What are the ways in which MS Office is closely integrated with Windows compared to its Mac port? I often hear user complaints that alternatives to Office on Windows have less intuitive UI and not good enough internationalization support (spell and grammar checking, hyphenation), but they never told me about integration differences.
A true AGI also might simply not want to be a programmer or engineer, or might want to work on niche, single-developer projects interesting for them but not of use to wider humanity, like many actual developers do once their $dayjob is over. I can imagine they’ll also be annoyed by slop machine users creating extra boring work for them to shovel through and AI bros getting creepy with them or trying to subordinate them to own wishes.
Have you tried adding Tor hidden services? It was the easiest solution for me to expose ports from behind the provider’s NAT to my phone when not at home.
Gateshead council use heat from water in flooded mines to heat hundreds of homes. It is estimated that a quarter of homes sit above abandoned coal mines which could be used in the same way.
This makes me think, can geothermal energy be a viable way to revitalize Donbas after the war?
Corollary from the article: if every major distro uses Red Hat tech, it’s a sign that there’s a lack of funding from other sources for the core OS development. The goal of an “EU OS” project should be to identify and push forward the yet-unexplored or resource-lacking areas of such development, with EU funds. To be a friendly competitor and collaborator to Red Hat. Not to rebrand whatever distro for local usage.
Many thanks for such a detailed answer. I agree that blocs and federations are a good thing, and hope to see Asian, South-Eastern Asian, African, and South-American alliances similar to EU form around democratic values. I also hope that they don’t turn into rival fortresses with armed borders and migration restrictions between them. As someone from former USSR (Ukraine), I’m quite sure that Russia on its own, without Chinese government assistance, especially technologic, wouldn’t at their current economic state be able to wage war and suppress internal movements to democratize and/or truly federalize (in the North, particularly); but I read, admittedly not extensively, about Chinese history and recognize how dangerous it is not to have strong allies when empires are nearby - without strong allies, it’s a must to have mostly autarkic production and strength in numbers.
Plushies rock.
Excellent to hear! Schools, prisons, hospitals, army - anywhere people who don’t eat animals might end up, we mustn’t be discriminated against.
Since you’re Chinese American, I have a question that’s doubly offensive but I’m actually interested in hearing your opinion. Should borders the size of China and the U.S. continue to exist at all? IMO one president or central government can’t legitimately represent hundreds of millions of people.
That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, and that’s the opposite of what introducing age verification (i.e. banning kids) achieves.
At school, on the block, at work, everywhere out there, yes, girls and women were constantly dealing with this type of shit. Many still are. In cases of harassment, banning the harassed one is never the solution. We should rebuild our places differently instead, turn communities for all of us into fora where boys, girls and enbies feel equal participants, and adults help them kick the hell out of anyone who threatens, harasses or isolates them.
Most positive things about my teenager years, especially when it comes to forming critical thinking by trial and error, was by actively using the Internet using a pseudonym and accounts with providers who didn’t require me to prove my identity. Learning English and programming skills, for example, and talking to people outside the local political bubble. Banning young people from the Internet will also make them more vulnerable, withholding access to the main public forum of nowadays. There was a popular saying in parts of the Runet, “ban kids from the Internet - they make it stupid”; these parts have since become openly fascist. We should fight fascists not kids.
Was a bit embarrassed when showing a prototype using Temporal last month and the provided computer’s Chrome turned out not recent enough to support it, so for this one API I’ll wait for one more year before considering it ready.
If a data breach in one company can expose “sensitive data on more than 190 million people”, the main vulnerabilities is that antitrust isn’t working is intended and that the means testing for things like medicine requires massive centralization. Who puts into law the awful policy of one big stash of sensitive data on everybody in the country, should be held responsible when the stash inevitably gets cracked. No “offensive military” cyber responses have been invented that would fix own bad policy yet.
There are a few websites dedicated to translating free software: Hosted Weblate (by Weblate developers), Codeberg Translate (independent), GNOME’s Damned Lies, KDE Localization, and GNU Translation Project, each hosting many apps and components that publish translatable sources in a standard way (such as Gettext PO files) and have continuous integration pulling back the work of translators. Weblate instances are somewhat of a wiki-like wild West, with enthusiasts translating many projects at once; they could use help with proofreading - if you notice a mistake in the software you use and it happens to be on Weblate, it’s easy to sign in and fix it.
The article itself seems written by AI? Maybe I’m missing something when reading, but when I packaged a Preact application and sent it to F-Droid, I needed to code a few hundred lines of Java and Gradle boilerplate: https://codeberg.org/nykula/sapfir/src/commit/fce6fcd34e/android - the article doesn’t seem to mention many necessary steps in building a web-based hello world for Android? The choice of web-based technology (React) and F-Droid as a distribution channel is also a very weird combination in the context of postmarketOS, which targets many legacy, slow devices and thus its FAQ recommends using native Linux alternatives to Android and web apps whenever possible.