returns are only from miscalculations by the federal system,

Well, not really. More like incomplete calculations, erring on the side of overpayment because people are generally extra upset if they have to pay in at the end of the year, even if they technically made more money as a result. People are used to and kind of ignore the tax portion of the paycheck they never get, but they feel the taxation of actually making an active payment. So people get happy about the zero interest loan they give to the government because in the moment it feels like "free money"

My employer has to do withholding without knowledge of other potential household income, credits, or deductions, though that last is pretty much given for everyone given how high the standard deduction is now.

Yeah, I read that. New leadership felt that the eternal sales stuff was bad and changed to "everyday low prices" sort of thing thinking the customers would appreciate the transparency. Nope, the fake "on sale" works.

It's all over the place in sales across every industry. I think it is dumb but I am surprised someone actually got a lawsuit against it.

Beware the person who actually thinks they know what they are doing.

Hup is frequently just "hey, reread your configuration files and keep going"

Of all things to aspire to, our ability to do marathons is pretty terrible. Machines already far far outperform us, and if you want more flexibility than wheels, we still are pretty rubbish among legged movement animals.

Note that this in theory speaks to performance of a non volatile memory. It does not speak to cost.

We already have a faster than NAND non volatile storage in phase change memory . It failed due to expense.

If this thing is significantly more expensive even than RAM, then it may fail even if it is everything it says it is. If it is at least as cheap as ram, it'll be huge since it is faster than RAM and non volatile.

Swap is indicated by cost, not by non volatile characteristics.

Seems to also be very brazen contempt of the supreme court.

it undermines their already blatant lie about "facilitating" his return.

Ivanna, not Ivanka.

Well obviously the tariffs will make all that equipment he would need cheaper. That's how tariffs work, right? I am assured that Trump is playing 4D chess, so that has to be the way...

Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389

And DHowett's reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.

But this anecdote is a good 'corp' versus 'open source' anecdote. There's simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.

Meanwhile, open source someone says "screw it, this is crap, I can fix it".

How silly, it's obvious that would be an odormeter. An odometer is about something else entirely.

I don't know, I mean I've seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it's best I haven't seen it as comprehensive as what I've seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don't apply very well anyway, so it's moot for me and I'm happy with Kate with LSP.

I think this speaks to the potential strengths and weaknesses of open versus commercial.

It boils down to amount of resources and how they are invested.

In terms of amount of resources, open source has a rather organic pool of software developers. So if you have a use case that impacts every software developer in the world, well the open source has a lot of free labor that can produce impressive results that a commercial player would have a hard time out-spending. Conversely, if the use case is relatively more niche and the users are either not programmers or too busy using the software to do other things they couldn't spend any on software, a commercial player can force the issue by paying some developers to work on it. Now the quality of that work may be reduced by the developers doing it for the pay without necessarily an inherent passion for the task at hand, but it can be pretty compelling and people can tend to get invested in their work even if they don't care to start with. Incidentally it's why at my company when they lucked into someone with actual passion for the work comes along I advocate strongly for retention, but those folks tend to be neglected and leave while some passionless sycophant gets the retention and promotion.

Then there's how that resource is invested. Here we have professional software versus the more prolific general consumer software. In the general consumer case, the commercial interest takes the user as a given, and goes straight into how to gouge that customer relationship as hard as possible without regard for a good user experience. Stuff them with ads. Implement telemetry with rights to sell it off for marketing data. Nag them at every corner to buy some other offering at increased price. Have a confusing set of tiers and actively screw with the bottom tier. Actually making the software fit for purpose is so far below those others. With software for business, well, you still get the 'must subscribe and confusing portfolio', but some of the other stuff tones down. The target market is smaller, and the potential for marketing data and advertising revenue isn't as attractive. The target market is frequently companies that take their confidentiality seriously and will readily get a lawyer to pursue issues, so the telemetry is both less valuable and a bit of a grenade waiting to go off if something screws up. So OSS tends to cover the 'general consumer' cases surprisingly well because the commercial interests are so much more invested in making things worse, while business to business can actually have a chance still.

Eh, I prefer KDE. It's fairly uncluttered unless you actively mess with it and want it, whole Gnome is pretty ruthlessly "our way is the right way".

Once upon a time they only allowed virtual desktops to be in a column. Someone decided that columns weren't for everyone so obviously make it only be in a row. Despite ages of most implementations supporting a grid layout.

Window title search. This is fantastic for managing a lot of windows. I wish KDE could get better by using screen reader facilities to let you search window contents as well, but having the facility in show windows view at all is great.

Their window tiling is less capable even than Microsoft windows.

Any attempt to customize means extensions, and they seem to break the interfaces the extensions need constantly, and I had to face the reality that every update had me searching for a replacement extension because they broke one that want maintained anymore.

But either way, the open desktop shells are better than the proprietary ones.

It's also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.

Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.

All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that's the way to take away user control. They won't work with the device you want because that vendor didn't pay up to work with that.

Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.

And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.

Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn't as good as a lot of other terminals.

So you are walking down the street, being a super careful to always have your passport. Then a van pulls up and stuffs you in it. You declare you have a passport and are a citizen, but they don't care. You didn't get due process to show your documentation because they "mistakenly" put you down the "no due process" path.

It isn't really possible to assure due process for only select people, either everyone must have it or else anyone could have due process denied under a claim that they belong to the "no due process" class.

Due process does not necessarily mean leniency, it just means a reasonable process and a chance to be heard and present your documentation and such. Without that guarantee, there's no accountability of the enforcers and no guarantee you even can present your documentation.

If you aren't allowed to even provide your documentation because there's no due process, then that documentation does no good.

Christianity is pretty much not about Christ at all, it's about leveraging him to confer authority over the words of certain people.

One day boss comes in and sees my colleague. Remarks how early he came in. He said he never left the previous day and planned to just keep working (salaried guy). Boss said he needed to take the day off, wouldn't have him drive, and he drove his car and had me follow to take the boss back to work after dropping colleague and his car at home.

He consistently tried to break that guy's incessant overworking. Had a lot of respect for him.

Unfortunately he got canned when he kept some stuff from upper management in writing that got upper management in trouble. Not enough trouble to remove their ability to retaliate, but enough to save a few other jobs of folks they were trying to throw under the bus for their mistake.