There was literally a commit only a few hours ago and there doesn’t seem to be any announcement about it being archived or abandoned. I feel like this has to be either a mistake or some disgruntled ownership drama but I think it’s pretty fair to assume it’s not abandoned, however this shakes out there will still be people working on it or some fork of it.

For simple “apps” it is fine, but my computer is not a phone and I don’t use it like one. I mostly don’t want simple apps that have their own little sandbox to play in.

I want full-scale applications that are so big they have to use system libraries to keep their disk size down. I also don’t want them in a sandbox. I want them to have full access to the system to do everything they need to do, I want them to integrate with far-flung parts of the system and other applications too. I only use applications I trust and don’t want them constantly pestering me about configuring permissions and access in just the right ways and opening all the right doors and ports and directories to make them work, I trust them by installing them, they have permission, and the easier they make it to access everything I will inevitably be asking them to access, the happier I am.

My practical concern with distribution methods like AppImage and Flatpak is that now I have to do a lot of extra thinking every time I’m installing anything. To pick how I’m going to install something, I have to solve the matrix of “what kind of distribution method do I prefer for this type of software” combined with “what distribution methods are available for this software” and “what versions are the available distribution methods for this software” and “what distribution method provides the best way for this software to get updates”.

In the olden days, when the distro’s package manager was the only choice, all I had to care about was “is it available in my distro” and the decision tree was complete. I appreciate all the availability of choice that things like AppImage provide, but it doesn’t actually make it easier for me, it just makes it easier for the packager of the software. They’re doing less, but making more work for me, as a user. Distro packages are a lot of work for the maintainer precisely because they at least make an effort to solve many of these issues for the user. The value-add that maintainers provide is real.

Florida is basically the unofficial US Capitol now, so it would be confusing and ambiguous to have it associated with the traditional forms of unexpected insanity. Now it’s going to be an entirely new kind of unexpected insanity, so Ohio has been selected to represent the old kind of unexpected insanity that Florida used to represent.

Clearly Russia has no idea how to censor different things in different ways to create a specific narrative for people to buy into. They’ve never done anything like that before, they aren’t masters of the craft of disinformation or anything.

Totally unrelated joke, how do you know if a Russian is lying? You don’t, sometimes he could be telling the truth just to trick you.

And I’ll throw in one of my favourite exchanges between two characters:

“Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?” “My dear Doctor, they’re all true.” “Even the lies?” “Especially the lies.”

Trusting something coming out of Russia to be true is foolish, just as foolish is trusting it to be false. Nothing that say is reliable in the slightest or should be used to make any useful conclusion about the real world.

It’s the difference between your friend making you a cup of tea, and Putin making you a cup of tea.

Nuclear weapons in the current era of mutually assured destruction are strictly a deterrent, only useful in a hypothetical retaliatory strike but not as a realistic offensive weapon. The hypothetical situation where this would hypothetically be used would be after Seoul has fallen to the enemy and defeat is inevitable. By having such an ability, this makes it very unattractive for any enemy to try to conquer and fortify Seoul or put any existential pressure on South Korea by any means, since doing so enables the use of a retaliatory nuclear strike, since in such a hypothetical situation there is no chance of regaining Seoul left for South Korea to worry about. Therefore, as a consequence, Seoul is protected in a very material sense by a weapon that will never have to be used in any actual strike ever.

They may only be a deterrent but they continue to be an extremely convincing and effective one.

It’s adorable that they think this is “the west’s best efforts”. This is more like the west throwing some speculative bids at a penny auction to see if they can score some easy wins and if not then at least they piss off the other guy who’s bidding. If they think this is all the west’s got to offer they’re in for a real big fucking surprise.