there were once Romans there

If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

At least orcas don’t do to whales what they do to sharks - eat their liver and leave them to die in agony.

It boggles the mind that any language - let alone a systems programming language that most of the world’s infrastructure is built upon - wouldn’t adjust their specification to eliminate undefined behavior wherever possible. And C++'s all seem to be in the worst possible places, too.

Google started work on Carbon due to the difficulty of getting the C++ standards committee to accept any real, fundamental changes to the language. If Google, a grandmaster at manipulating standards committees, couldn’t get something passed, I don’t foresee this proposal getting anywhere.

Null safety is orders of magnitude simpler than memory safety. Kotlin is a null safe language by default. Java is infamously not. Anyone who has worked on a mixed-language Kotlin project can tell you how quickly null safety becomes a pain once guarantees break down - and that’s in a language where these issues are flagged instantly and you can “fix” the problem in a couple of characters! Mixed memory safe/unsafe codebases would be a nightmare in comparison.

Also, C++'s ecosystem consists of deeply entrenched libraries with ancient codebases. Safe C++ might be useful in a decade or two if library maintainers could be pushed to make the switch (good luck with that, if it’s half as much of a paradigm shift as Rust), but by then there will probably be multiple competing language features that claim to solve the same problem. It’s the C++ Way™.

Right, I should have specified isolated VM. WSL and Windows are interconnected (even if some things, like accessing Windows files within WSL2, are horribly slow). Google’s solution probably won’t have anything like that, given their reluctance to allow users access to Android’s underlying systems.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

18/f/California.

Jokes aside, this appears to be a full virtual machine rather than something like WSL that can interact with and manipulate the host OS. You probably won’t be able to do anything interesting with your Android files using it, just mess around in a sandboxed distro. So it’s still good for developers who want a portable Linux environment to run things in, but not nearly as useful as a properly integrated terminal would be.

Yes. Some (not all species) female mosquitoes drink blood for the protein, which they need for egg production. Their actual diet is nectar from flowers.

Now I kind of want a Flintstones RPG.

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

In the early days it was an abortion-adjacent topic, which made it an easy target to vilify to rile up support from single-issue voters. Now a large portion of society will hate anything involving stem cells forever, regardless of facts. Once the culture war starts, it’s hard to get it to stop.

Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:

Hey, I see you’re having problems with <copy-paste key words from OP>. Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.

Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".

I hope this helps!

(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)

It’s a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.