I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
LLMs don't understand things. They repeatedly predict the next token given previous tokens.
I don't think something without predictable patterns is likely to work as a language. A very complex grammar probably means the LLM will make grammatical errors more often, but that's probably the most that can be done to make a language hard for LLMs. Other comments mention languages without much training data, but I don't think that's what you're asking.
I haven't checked numbers lately, but my impression is that the shift is complete. The primacy of phones is clear, but most households in the EU have a PC, and people who own PCs aren't going to further decrease their PC use over the next five years.
According to Eurostat, a majority of people in most EU countries used a laptop or desktop computer to access the internet in 2025.
you now do literally anything on a mobile OS with more convenience
I disagree with this claim. Some things are more convenient on mobile operating systems than desktop operating systems, but small screens and the lack of physical keyboards are significant limitations.
Microsoft tried to make Windows Server popular. Apple sold a server OS and even its own rack-mount servers for a while.
The people using servers, and often the people making the decisions about what to use have a high degree of technical knowledge and skill. The things that drive popularity in consumer operating systems such as being preloaded on devices and having a polished GUI don't have as big an influence on experts.
Customizability, reliability, and performance do have a big influence on what experts choose, and Linux wins on those points. There's also the history of proprietary Unix being big in the server/supercomputer market, and Linux is an obvious successor.
He got mad at me for texting him an anti-CCP joke (both US Phone Numbers)
He's right to be concerned. You should be using Signal far any communication you don't want sucked into a mass-surveillance system (i.e. most communication). He might not want to have Signal installed when he enters China though.
When I can't use the old one anymore. Every time so far, that's been because of a hardware failure.
I'm currently on a Pixel 4A. It's running Android 16 (LineageOS), and I limit battery charge with AccA so that it doesn't wear out. It's currently showing 92% capacity, which seems pretty good for five years. I don't think I'd actually like a new phone; it would be faster and have a better camera, but my current phone isn't a bottleneck, and a new phone's camera will still be worse than my Olympus. It would have 5G, but why should I care? Most new phones are bigger, and as an adult, my hands are not growing.
I love that answers like this are popular here. There was a time when phone tech was improving fast enough that frequent upgrades made a lot of sense, but now is not that time.
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn't want to accept middle-click to paste text where that's an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome's is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I'd support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I'd also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
I am not a doctor and I am definitely not your doctor, but this sounds like an eating disorder to me. Are you in a position to talk to a doctor about it?
My dad has cast his own lead bullets. The equipment to do it is inexpensive and commercially available, and it's easy to come by scrap lead. It's common for hobbyists to add tin and antimony to adjust the hardness.
Copper has a much higher melting point than lead, so it would be more difficult and dangerous to attempt to cast it with hobbyist-grade equipment. I'm not sure if casting copper would produce good bullets; a quick web search suggests copper bullets are made by machining or cold swaging. It would certainly be possible to make bullets from round ropper rods by machining them with a hobbyist-grade lathe, but it would be time-consuming.
I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.