cagey

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I had a PR closed because of this, one that fixes something that, had it not been fixed (by Claude, based on me noticing and clarifying the failure mode and verifying the fix), would have led me to abandon at least COSMIC, if not the distro. But this has me wondering how COSMIC, which had reached 1.x before I started using it, can mature, and whether I'll remain. I started on Pop!_OS with its COSMIC-less 22.04 version; I chose it as a fairly popular distro having Ubuntu stability while offering a leading-edge kernel. Point being, COSMIC was never the draw for me, and I held off upgrading to 24.04 for a LONG time out of concerns about bugs & stability; eventually 22.04 started experiencing ibus-related problems that forced my hand. Since I am (a) not knowledgeable in Rust, nor (b) conversant in the protocol at the core of this bug, I would never have had the gumption or time to understand and fix the bug. And since the PR is closed, it seems unlikely to even serve as a bug report.

In the meantime, others have experienced this bug and are waiting for the maintainers to notice and fix it. I'll just continue to run my fork (so far it has been no burden at all) while I (slowly) decide what direction to take.

And I loved "Norton Commander" and to this day use GUI'fied (and TUI: Midnight Commander) incarnations of it.

[Speaking as a US citizen]

> ... BS like "high yield savings account" there is no such thing as long as I am alive ...

HYSA are in 2026 readily available.

> ... well "money market accounts" seem better and kind of like of HYSA, but the hell those are not really that easily available.

Likewise readily available: open a free brokerage (or "cash management") account at Fidelity.com online (it is easy and acts similar to a bank account: your paycheck can be direct deposited there, it offers a billpay service, you can use it for electronic transfers, and outgoing wire transfers are free; no minimum balance and no monthly fees), cash by default goes into their SPAXX money market account (its 0.42% ER (Expense Ratio) is higher than some, but its 3.33% yield beats most savings/credit union savings rates; EX: Ally bank is yielding 3.00% these days). If you want more of the yield to go into your pocket you can buy (with no transaction fee) a ETF like Vanguard's VBIL which invests only in short duration US Treasury bills (now yielding 3.63% w/ER 0.06%). And if you're up for slightly higher effort, you can buy T-Bills directly at Fidelity with auto reinvestment, at no extra cost.

The preceding (including HYSA) are all near-zero risk, and as a consequence, do NOT pay truly "high" yields (which I think was your real point), they just pay yields that are at the upper end of 'near-zero risk'. These are NOT where you invest for long-term gain/appreciation. For the latter, conventional wisdom says: invest in the stock market, where the risk is much higher, but the historical long-term return is too. ETF's make this easy and efficient. One candidate for "fire and forget": VTI, Vanguard's Total [US] Stock Market Index ETF (as before, with an easy to open account at Fidelity, you can trade these for almost no cost; Fidelity has many competitors, I am merely a happy customer of theirs).

I found this[0] to be an interesting perspective:

"Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome.

Pray that Bluesky doesn't die entirely — we need it so the worst liberal posts are kept in a place where the broader public won't ever see them."

[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...

That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damaged. I AM doing business with a Verizon MVNO (Visible, just because they provide the best deal for me, and don't really even HAVE customer service), but I will NEVER directly do business with Verizon again.

(Sorry; off-topic, but I needed to rant)

> 25 thousandths would be sloppy, a nominal clearance hole for a 1/4x20 bolt is about that much.

Isn't that 0.250 which would be 250 thousandths?

As an example: Claude Desktop (containing Claude CoWork) is not officially available on Linux, only Windows and macOS.

Obligatory: Rush - The Trees (Live From The Montreal Forum / 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H0lwRqNF5I

The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.

My experience is the same. It was agonizing directing Claude Code (Opus 4.7 at that time) to create a (non-mathematical) preso using LaTex. After banging my head against that wall for too long, I asked why this process (placing entities on the output PDF page according to specific requirements) was so error prone, and received the answer "LaTex is really the wrong tool for this job". I chose Typst from among the offered alternatives, and it has been a MUCH better experience. I switched my resume to Typst too.

Well that's not how I heard the fable, and not how the authoritative reference recalls it either[0]. If "every time the boy cried wolf, there actually was a wolf and it ate some people", then it would hardly be a fable about giving a false alarm, would it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf

You're right, I won't, and I'm probably not alone. So what's the endgame? A world government that enforces all of those "give-ups" at gunpoint?

> So we're re-creating the Apollo 8 Mission 60 years later.

Not even: Apollo 8[0] went into orbit around the moon (orbited 10 times), then left lunar orbit to return to Earth. This required mission-critical rocket burns both to enter (LOI) and exit (TEI) lunar orbit. Artemis II[1] is merely doing a "fly-by"; it'll never enter lunar orbit, a much less challenging/risky mission.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8#Lunar_orbit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II#Lunar_flyby

me too; Inoreader was my first/only stop after Google Reader, and is one of the only paid subscriptions I maintain.

Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.

Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).

Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.

I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.

Yes

> There's only one way this country can be saved and, regardless of the process to get there, it would culminate in a new constitution.

NYT op-ed from 8/14 agreeing: "Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court. Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/trump-democracy-t... https://archive.is/uNIPL

From a more informative article[1] linked from TFA:

"The expiration of the enhanced [premium] tax credits is expected to cause ACA enrollees’ out-of-pocket premium payments to increase by over 75% on average, with people in some states seeing their payments more than double on average."

"The enhanced premium tax credits were originally passed by Congress in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and extended under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but they are set to expire at the end of 2025."

[1] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-re...

Ditto. I installed CrunchBang++ Linux[1] on a couple of out-of-support 4GB-RAM Chromebooks about 6 months ago, and they (with Firefox (w/shared account) and uBlock Origin) basically continue to fill the Chromebook role (my morning before-work lazy web-surfing guided by Inoreader) with aplomb: occasionally I go a little too tab-crazy (or open one too many YouTube tabs) and it freezes, but simply restarting (holding the power button down until it reboots) gets me going again. I save+close excess tabs to OneTab and life goes on. Extremely utilitarian.

[1] https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/

> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).

Ebooks and Internet sources of all forms of media have rendered public libraries moot as book providers: every person alive (in the US) has a cell phone, and most have laptops, and can with a modicum of bootstrapping access these sources, without having to travel to a special building (partially) filled with paper books, to obtain a copy of almost any book in existence.

> Today’s dangerous librarians are much more. They are part educator, part tech wizard, part data analyst, and part myth-slayer.

> They host storytimes, teach kids about misinformation, explain how to 3D print a prosthetic hand, and calmly help a grown man named Todd recover his Gmail password for the seventh time. All before lunch.

> [Librarians] are dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Outdated printer settings, Small thinking, apathy, loneliness

Who asked them to play these roles? If the public school system has failed to the extent that people are incapable of using online methods to find books or other resources, or login to their Google account, why is it the role of a librarian to backfill these gaps (and for taxpayers to be forced to fund such a peculiar backfilling approach)?

And some of the touted roles ("dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Small thinking, apathy") are clearly social activist in nature; the meaning of all of these is in the eye of the beholder. So why are taxpayers obligated to (unquestioningly) fund people who clearly perceive their role, at least in part, as activist in nature? IMO you are welcome to engage in activist activities on your own dime, not mine.

So I certainly wonder where the value is in "libraries" since, say, 2010 (and yes, I read the article). If not for "book banning" stories, I doubt librarians would be a topic of conversation. Libraries and librarians are like some weird 20th century anachronism which persists into the 21st century largely because it's part of a (by definition well-established) bureaucracy (and lobby/union).

Interesting and useful information. We've been on an Ambetter ACA plan for the past 1.5 years and have generally been pleased; this info suggests why, and informs our decision to continue with them in 2025 despite receiving random positive anecdata about BCBS.

Among over 1 million men aged 40 or older diagnosed with lower urinary tract symptoms, those treated with tadalafil showed marked reductions in mortality (56%), heart attack (37%), stroke (35%), venous thromboembolism (32%), and dementia (55%) compared to patients who did not receive these medications for lower urinary tract symptoms.

One feature I found rather unique at Fidelity (I too have recently migrated there as my "one stop shop") was free outgoing domestic wires ($100 minimum). Being able to "teleport" money within an hour to another pre-registered account (before 3PM ET on biz days, in my experience) facilitated switching to Fidelity while still keeping old bank/CU accounts minimally active without having to engage in a lot of thinking ahead about balances (and worrying about EFT/ACH hold times) at those now peripheral accounts.

I'm a happy (albeit) infrequent user of https://mataroa.blog/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30896661

A few decades ago I refactored a different way:

   // this may be a mistake!  English language is unorthogonal in the extreme!
   const char * Add_es( int count ) { return 1 == count ?  "" : "es"; }
   const char * Add_s(  int count ) { return 1 == count ?  "" : "s" ; }

(some English words pluralize with "es" suffix, most with "s"). It has proven surprisingly useful:

   Msg( "%d file%s updated when you switched back", updates, Add_s( updates ) );

Only difference vs example is mine prints "0" vs "no".

My favorite source for current MVNO options: https://prepaidcompare.net/

My household of 4 adults independently chooses Visible (cheapest tier, $25/mon which offers unlimited data (and and unlimited hotspot, though capped at 5Mbps)). Due to the slow hotspot speeds I might migrate DW & I to US Mobile which offers high priority high speed hotspot (up to 30GB/month at about the same price when shared across 2 lines) which could be valuable when we're traveling.

> The tracks discussed in the article are BNSF.

No. The unique trackage to be used between SFBA and LA is the "Coast Line" which is owned by Union Pacific.

FTA: "Dreamstar signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Union Pacific Railroad, [...] that would allow Dreamstar to operate its trains on the tracks owned by Union Pacific."

Ctrl+F "BNSF" finds no matches in the article.

"The term Axis of Resistance [...] is a label used by pro-Iranian commentators to refer to an informal anti-Israeli and anti-Western political and military coalition led by the Iranian government. It includes the Syrian Arab Republic, Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah and various militant groups in Palestine. Pro-Ba'athist Syrian militias, some of the pro-Iran militias that are a part of the Iraqi PMF, the Houthi movement in Yemen, Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, Bolivia as well as Maduro's Venezuela are also considered part of the alliance."

"Despite the alliance's differing ideologies, such as secular Ba'athism, Communism, Shia Khomeinism (a type of Islamist Qutbism), Chavismo, Sandinismo, etc., they are unified by their declared objectives of opposing the activities of pro-Western parties, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Sunni Jihadists and the MEK in the region."

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

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