There’s these “ontological arguments”, which are basically folks trying to prove the existence of a god by reasoning with pure logic, so without relying on evidence. And they all sound like that. 🫠

One of the classics goes roughly like this:

1. There is good and bad. (Which is one hell of an axiom.)
2. A creature can exist which unifies all good properties. (Yet another hell of an axiom.)
3. Because this creature has all these good properties, it would be even gooder, if it did exist.
4. Since this creature unifies all good properties and its existence is itself a good property, it therefore must exist.

These arguments are also always funny, because the same logic can be used to “prove” all kinds of things. For example, a perfect island can exist, therefore it must exist. 🙃
As far as I can tell, the arguments don’t actually get better over time either, but rather just more convoluted, to make it less obvious how silly they are…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

At its core, SystemD coordinates and launches all the services in your operating system. So, it is essential for the boot process, but also does scheduling, meaning you could run a backup script every night with it, for example.

That’s the simple answer. But in truth, SystemD is often criticized for doing too much, so it’s hard to describe what it really does. For example, you can also manage network interfaces via SystemD.

Kind of the goal of SystemD is to provide common plumbing which works the same across distros, so that when you configure your services or network interfaces etc. on Ubuntu, it works the same as on openSUSE or Arch or whatever.

Gotta love Linux newbies talking about their first experiences and they’ve already tried 3 distros that I have barely on my radar. A few months in, I hardly knew what SystemD was and this guy’s already on a distro that explicitly removes it.

If you prepare an installation USB stick, so-called “Live-USB”, and select in the BIOS that it should boot from that, then you can test-drive Linux before you install it.

There is more details involved, like you may need to turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS, but yeah, point is, you don’t have to commit to Linux to try it.

F-Droid blog post on the topic: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

It was posted before Google backpedalled somewhat, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, from what I understand, countries try to regulate the use of antibiotics, so that we don’t blow the most potent ones, a.k.a. new ones, right away. But on some level, we’re reliant on regularly discovering new antibiotics, which isn’t great.

and the superbugs that might breed aren’t viable in humans.

But diseases jump from non-humans to humans all the time?
At least, Wikipedia chooses to spell out the sentence “Most human diseases originated in non-humans” and lists a who’s who of pandemics as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

Or do you mean something different?

Like a banjo?

100
⤷

Yeah, it’s especially funny to me, because the word “AI” has been used in gaming to describe the behavior code for NPCs since forever. And in this case, they actually even happen to refer the same thing in the end. At best, it’s a different strategy for getting to that same end result.

Yeah, the latter is certainly a big part of it. The way to make it compile-safe is to use macros to generate code, so that my users can write e.g. Package::my_frontend.version and that gives them the version of their frontend package.
Writing such macros, i.e. writing code to generate code, is certainly something I haven’t done a ton of yet, because you practically cannot justify doing that in an application codebase, only in a library, so it is new stuff that I learn.

But well, you did already call it a “nice abstraction”, which is another big part where my excitement comes from and where I think, the special nerdery is necessary.
Others might build projects which are visually tangible, like a sexy GUI, or which do something tangible, for example a colleague (who I will absolutely not deny his own special nerdery) is currently building a driver for a motor. If that driver works, you can see a motor moving in the real-world. Even non-nerds can at least tell that something is happening.

But with my project, my success is that you can write Package::my_frontend instead of Package::from_str("my_frontend")?. And that if you rename the package to super_duper_frontend, that the compiler will tell you to fix the code rather than it only breaking once you actually run the build code for the frontend.
No chance of explaining to non-coders why this is exciting or even just when you’re successful.

On Monday, one of our students at $DAYJOB asked me what projects I do in my freetime. After I infodumped on her for half an hour, she asked in disbelief “And you do these in your freetime, without being paid?”.

Like, mate, did you not listen how feckin’ excited I got just then? Of course, I do these in my freetime.

To be fair, though, the last project I told her about is very dry. It’s a library to help automate CI builds. And the thing I’m thrilled to build is a compile-safe API for accessing the packages in your workspaces. Like, yeah, it does take a special kind of nerd to get excited about that…

Pretty sure, people drawing for commissions would typically use a drawing tablet… ^^’

I mean, Rust does have a pretty inclusive community…

I’m guessing, those people are worried that it will be removed. It’s already somewhat on the line since Wayland started replacing X11, because individual desktop environments can now decide to implement it or not.

Genuinely how I feel sometimes. Like, I’ll usually just say yes, so that we can move on, but I have made the joke “How would I know?” quite a lot of times already, because it’s much closer to the truth…

I don’t think there is a way to do that. It does not seem like something they’d make configurable, if it was implemented.

It does seem like something they might want to implement, though. You can vote on it being implemented here (where someone else already submitted the idea): https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/drag-handle-on-firefox-browser-too-limited-add-ability-to-also/idi-p/104103

Side-note: In case you are on Linux, you may prefer the operating-system-wide shortcut to move any window from anywhere on its surface by holding either the Windows-key or Alt-key (varies between desktop environments) and then left-click-dragging on the window. If you do a right-click-drag instead, it resizes the window.

AI slop turned into ASCII art. That’s a new one…

Ah, I thought there would be a male bird involved still, but I guess that example just explains ovulation. Still quite optimistic that everyone shares the same understanding here, though…

Yeah, I virtually only use --force for moving tags around (which one could definitely argue isn’t really a thing you should be doing regularly either)…