xia

I recall Linus saying that x86 won the position it is in not because it was technically superior, but because "that's what everyone had at home" and is even now still gradually pushing out the entrenched mainframes without really trying or any kind of focused or concerted effort.

TrueNAS is probably the newest OS I have introduced into my "home lab", and by using it for my personal infrastructure I have come to know it well from a functional perspective. Not only its value, but also it's limitations.

While I can't say that I would ever be in such a position, I know that I could unreservedly recommend TrueNAS to a small business for their onsite infrastructure, which (depending on their size and risk tolerance) would likely come with a complete purchase of official hardware, software, and support... but I guess my point is that the skills and trust directly translate from the "community version" to the corporate which just lags a bit behind.

I think that might be a good model for corporate-backed open source software. IntelliJ follows the same pattern... nothing really hindered, broken, or missing... but 'more' or 'with support' is available.

In contrast (though, not in sharp contrast) is Red Hat's RHEL operating system. I used to see this pattern everywhere, where all the devs used CentOS but the production machines were RHEL for the production, support, etc.

Then RHEL ate CentOS, so now everyone is using Rocky Linux on their workstations, often even building binaries on Rocky to deploy on the RHEL servers (bad form), but Red Hat continues to be a antagonistic against Rocky and friends with legal maneuvers... even if it is the feet that they are unknowingly standing upon.

For example, RHEL might have a CLI tool to list the contents of a repo (assuming your subscription is up to date), and I've looked it up before so I could do it again and I suppose I could learn it if necessary, but... I could get the same information by pointing my web browser at any Rocky mirror for a far easier way to discover what packages and versions are in a rhel release.

Tiny things like this bit of frictionless service (for which Rocky and the community is paying) and newcomers playing with Rocky Linux, are a direct benefit the position of Red Hat & RHEL (just not a monetized one)... which they actively fight against.

Context, then answer... instead of having everything ride on the first character (e.g. we make it pick "Y" or "N" first in response to a yes-or-no question, it usually picks "Y" even if it later talks itself out of it).

...it's just a database entry, after all.

Assuming that LLMs hamper gaining true experience and mastery of a language, and further assuming that LLMs will play a significant part in development (especially for juniors)... it seems to me that new programming languages and frameworks will have a significantly greater hurdle to overcome going forward, compared to what they faced in the past.

Generated by: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana)

What first struck me was that I could not turn off my phone the way I am accustomed to doing so.

Then I stopped to appreciate the loss of discoverability (however small). You see, a GUI with multiple (hopefully related) options can be passively scanned without interaction to see what options are available. You can learn (and passively be reminded) of available features, and new features can be added without too much nuisance as another option. You might even change your mind mid task and decide that a different option is better, whereas a "say something" prompt requires that you know in advance what the options are, and gives the feeling of not being undo-able once uttered.

Contrawise, it seems like the modern pattern tends towards adding new features hidden behind an opaque AI prompt, and having you 'learn' about the feature at the most inopportune time via a "got it, now go away" click-thru pop-up that [thankfully] only appears once.

Ok, so they somewhat covered the power options, but what about the other options (emergency call & medical info), which are presented as safety items. Are they no longer important? Are emergencies where you can push a button but not recall an AI command (or have an internet connection to converse live with an AI helper) no longer worthy of help?

I'm glad that they made it easy to change back, but it's a bit surprising that someone approved this to become the new default. And even more so, that they approved this functionality to be usurped by default (it changes it for you, and you have to change it back).

...and it's interesting that the sank effort into "teaching" the user the new way to turn off the phone when I tried to switch it back

...but not the other 'lost' features.

...and it's interesting that they sank effort into extending the "OLD" power screen to easily switch BACK to the new AI assistant mode (in case you "accidentally" switched it back).

...and it's interesting that there is no complementary option from the new AI modal to change it back to a power button.

Curious.

Android seems to be taking the path of Windows in that it is slowly accumulating a bunch of bad defaults, and one must accumulate a growing list of things you have to change to get back to a 'normal' experience.

Scammers and spammers can DoS you by calling hundreds of times per day, each time from a different number, and all your service provider will do is shrug... saying there is no way to trace a number back to the provider, and the only "solution" they have to offer is a "new" phone number, which in fact is someone else's old number that THEY abandoned due to spam calls.