As a recovering physicist, the jargon we come up with is absolutely terrible. In lieu of that we name things after people, or multiple people, or sometimes a composite name of jargon and people, which seems to me worst of all.

Trusted computing was never about security, it’s a way to take ownership of computers away from users and give it to computer manufacturers and Microsoft. It’s also not a good security model.

The usefulness of alphafold had been grossly overstated by science media. The structures it generates are mostly nonsense, they typically can’t generate molecular dynamics simulation trajectories with the correct physical properties, which makes them not useful for drug discovery. in computational biology today you’ll most often find them in use as a starting point for structure refinement or as one of many sources of data for some integrative method. Again, not useless, and an improvement over previous structure prediction algorithms, but they didn’t ‘solve protein folding’ or anything, like Google might have you believe. I don’t put much stock in Nobel prizes, I mean, they gave one to Henry Kissinger.

Google also released alphafold 3 under a strict non commercial license, which severely limited its usefulness for both commercial and academic work, the latter of which all but requires using more permissive licenses. I assume Google wanted to monetize a commercial version of it at some point.

I’ve been using Openfold 3 in some work I’ve been doing recently, and while the software is a bit undercooked, it does produce structures similar to alphafold 3 without any of Google’s bullshit. So I wouldn’t worry too much about this announcement. The protein folding will continue with or without them

has Mozilla considered spending their limited resources working on their web browser

I had to discontinue Linux builds of my game on Steam because the game engine I’m using has a very buggy and unfinished Linux runtime. I’m not happy about it because I wanted native support, but ironically proton is a better user expertise

I think the top500 is harmful to the hpc community because it encourages people to build huge, mostly homogenous hpc facilities instead of a network of smaller, heterogenous hpc facilities

I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.

Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy

When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:

• Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
• Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
• Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
• Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside

The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.

I learned this from a teaching company course named ‘Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon’

The French revolutionary government had moderate and radical factions that coexisted peacefully for many years. The terror wasn’t something that happened arbitrarily, it was an escalating conflict between radicals and (mostly) counter-revolutionaries acting in the interests the French burgeroise. During the course of the revolution, the government abolished an extremely oppressive system of feudalism, established universal rights for French citizens, established voting rights that would eventually lead to universal suffrage in France, and abolished slavery in the French colonies. That’s not to say it was all good (terror, wars, economic hardship, etc) but it completely transformed the entire country in a matter of years, from feudalism to a limited form of democracy, which resembles our modern democratic states much more closely than the system that had been created during the American Revolution.

If your take on the French Revolution is ‘they didn’t have a common enemy so they turned on eachother’ then I would say that it’s you who doesn’t know their history very well.

I love the lotr movies but even the extended editions can’t fit in the nuances of all the supporting characters. this gets worse the later you get in the trilogy, the biggest victims probably being the ents, faramir, denethor and pippin.

my own personal pick is probably one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, where they change McMurphy’s crime from battery and gambling to statutory rape. that did not engender sympathy

spotify pays me half a cent per stream, the profit margins for them must be fucking insane. and the music sounds like shit. I’d much rather people pirate it than support these leeches

if you want to support artists you like, buy the music, ideally on bandcamp. if you do have to steam it, Deezer at the very least won’t vandalize the audio

About 10 years ago I worked at a company that had broken ground on a solar factory in the UK. The government cancelled subsidies for solar and they pulled out.

PewDiePie is the most basic kind of cryptofascist hiding behind a veil of edgy humour and he should not be welcome in the open source community

the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever

in my opinion the market is too segmented. Facebook took Oculus and refocused them onto standalone vr instead of pcvr, and secluded away a bunch of releases as Oculus exclusives. psvr is in a similar state. there isn’t enough vr software being made to support two separate walled gardens plus steamvr. in their rush to establish a vr monopoly, Facebook killed it. that’s my opinion

I’ll be hanging onto my vive cosmos for occasional games of beat saber but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty

pisses me off that they call it an image editor

Kath & Kim is one of Australia’s finest cultural exports

just a few years away bro just a few more years just give us £500k for a new quantum computer bro just a few more years