It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
Win 11 has some niceties, however many of those could have been provided on Windows 10 as well, for example the security stuff like VBS and secured kernel were already available, even if disabled by default.
> because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows
As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.
The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.
It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?
eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
the gpu simply has buffers that it compsits, the cpu can do that as well. with the benefit of less complexity leading to not needing to worry about driver crashes.
on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
> eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
True, but which is more efficient?
> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
It's worth asking "if AI is so great for software development, won't that make it dramatically easier for people to maintain their own forks of software?"
(I suspect the answer ends up being no, but the reasons could be interesting)
I'm curious why you think the answer would be no. I've had some success with resolving complex merges with GPT 5.4, and it seems obvious enough that AI is a good solution for maintainers who don't have anyone they can trust to take over the project whilst also needing to boost throughput.
I've been using 5.4 recently, and even on "extra high" some of the tests it wrote were opening the source code and doing a regex to confirm the presence (or in some cases the absence) of specific substrings. It wasn't running the code to confirm behaviour, and the regexes didn't even do a basic check to confirm the text wasn't commented out (not that it would've been sufficient if they had, this is just to illustrate how bad it was).
So, yeah. I'd guesstimate this model was fine 75% of the time, mediocre 15-20%, and actively bad 5-10% of the time. How valuable it is depends on how much energy you can spare as a human on spotting the bad.
(There could be a long discussion here about expectations placed on unpaid maintainers, and what the real purpose of Open Source / Free Software is beyond merely being zero cost at the point of use, but those tend to just go round forever. There's even a paid alternative to Jellyfin: Plex.)
We can have a business model. I can pay the developer to prioritize my PR if I consider it worthy enough that it solves my pain point. Companies do that as I have heard. There could be a Groupon like model where multiple people facing the issue can pool the money for prioritization.
> We asked AI to find the conflict's biggest boosters in Washington
I suppose it's a substitute for doing your own reading. The answer turns out to be exactly the organizations you'd expect. "Think tank" is an odd euphemism for "private propaganda organization"; they don't do a great deal of thinking, mostly marketing bad ideas to gullible politicians.
The other such case establishing global financial jurisdiction, often cited by cryptocurrency adopters, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg - "Pokerstars".
It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
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