Jajcus

Also not a fan of #16 since it sounds to me like forced labour for the poor

That is how actually that worked in some (if not all) communist countries. No unemployment, but people (mostly those ‘undesirable’ for various reasons) would be sent to hard work in bad conditions, which would often cost their health or life. The other side of the coin was: everybody had a job and little fear of losing it, so people rarely treated the work seriously enough. There were factories full of workers, but so inefficient, that nothing was produced in sufficient demand. People had money, but little to buy with it.

It would be like click-baiting, bur worse, as the titles / leads would be crafted even before there is any article.

…and if you are interested in the sound of static rather than the image, then the Polish word is: „szumi”. This can be approximated in English as: ‘shoomy’. The ‘sz’ sound does sound like static.

The funny thing is that our ‘sz’ (in „szumi”) and ‘ś’ (in „śnieży”) usually sound exactly the same to English or French speakers, while for us they are quite distinct sounds.

I am not even able to write it phonetically in English. Ask Google Translate - its pronunciation is close-enough.

In IPA it is: /ɕɲɛʑɨ/

In Poland it was „śnieży” (snowing).

As long as we are not paying for the services the service providers will do what they can to show us ads and frankly… rightly so.

The problem is there is no other established way for paying for services. One that would be widely use and fair. Current state of things is ‘we say it is free, but we will get the money from advertisers or by selling your data’. Yes, some people are often able to avoid some of the ads and privacy loss, but that means the service gets no money from those people, so the service is built and being run for the rest of users – those who cannot install ad-blockers or who don’t care or don’t know how to care about their privacy. This is one of the reasons of enshitification – any ‘free’ service needs to be only as good as required to keep the users who watch ads and give away their data. Catering any more conscious user is just a cost.

When enough of people will be using ad-block then the ad-block will stop working on many sites or the sites will disappear or become paid service. No one will provide commercial services for free and not everything can be a public service founded by a government or a community. I am not even talking about ‘corporate profits’ – even in the worst corporations there are normal people working and they should be paid for their work. Whether they are paid fairly and whether the corporate profits aren’t too big is another topic…

Well behaving programs give control back to the kernel as soon as they are done with what they are doing. If they don’t the control is forcefully taken away after some assigned time.

It looks something like this:

Something happens – e.g. a key is pressed – a process waiting for this event is woken up and gets e.g. 100ms to do it stuff. If it can handle the key press in 50ms, kernel notes it used 50 ms of CPU time and can give control to another process waiting for an event or busy with other work. If the key press triggered long computation the process won’t be done in 100ms, the kernel notes it used 100ms of CPU time and gives control to other processes with pending events or busy with other work.
After one second the kernel may have noted:

Process A: used 50ms, then nothing, then 100ms, another 100ms and another 100ms
Process B: was constantly busy doing something, so it got allocated 6 * 100ms in that one second
Process C: just got one event and handled it in 50ms
Process D: was not waken at all

So total of 1000ms was used – the CPU was 100% busy
Of that 60% was process B, 35% process A and 5% process C.

And then that information is read from the kernel by top and displayed.

How does the OS even yank the CPU away from the currently running process?

Interrupts. CPU has means triggering and interrupt at a specific time. Interrupt means that CPU stops what it is doing and runs selected piece of kernel code. This piece of kernel code can save the current state of user process execution and do something else or restore saved execution of another process.

I joined a local maker space and met great people, sharing similar interests. Surprisingly (to me when I joined) most seem to be over 40, like me, and there are as many women as men here.

Yeah ‘make a better tea by making it taste less like a tea’. I have seen a lot of that from people who just don’t like tea.

Though, for me that also include Brits, who spoil a good tea by adding milk ;-)

This would only give more power to the remaining billionaires, who won’t disperse money on their own. This is why it must be a systemic change and not a volunteer action.

URLs are definitely encrypted. What can be sent unencrypted are domain names and IP addresses. Which is not a problem when the host name is ‘youtube.com’, but is a bigger problem if it is ‘the-terrorists.com’.

They do and make reliability even worse.

Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.

Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.

The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller ‘phone jacks’ is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.

What is more interesting, Google came as a more friendly alternative, with drastically less ads than Alta Vista and other search engines of that time had. Today’s Google is only just approaching now the amount of ads on the search results page that those had. It is just a bit smarter about mixing ads with actual search results and the ads are more targeted (which is not necessarily a good thing).

The loans are not just a symptom. Is probably the main cause of current college prices. Prices would not be so high if students would not be given money to pay them.

That is not true. Not fully true, and the true part is blown out of proportion by various populists (especially right-wing, who would like to replace what we have with USA model or worse).

Most basic health care is organized by the government and paid through taxes and social insurance (which is obligatory). Unfortunately it is not financed enough and it shows, more in some areas and less in others. GP access is quite good, especially in larger cities, unless someone didn’t care to choose his ‘first contact clinic’ right. Those clinics are mostly private, but working on government contract. One can usually get a GP appointment within a week, often same day. Urgent GP appointments are available 24/7 through special ‘holiday and night health care points’.

Things became worse when popular specialist help is needed. One needs a referral from his GP and may need to wait months for appointment. There is the point were people who can afford that, would often go private. That and dentists / orthodontist.

Big problems are in children psychiatry, mostly due to lack of funding.

Medicines are much cheaper that in USA. When prescribed by a doctor they are usually partially or even, in some specific cases, fully paid by government. That is not make it affordable for everyone that needs it, but it is not very bad.

When something very bad happens – serious accident, cancer, etc. then the public health care gives the most. Public hospitals will do what they can (with limited funding and overworked personnel) for free. People are not sent away because they are poor and won’t have huge debt to pay just because they got sick.

There are private insurances, or rather subscriptions services. They used to give better access to basic health care that the public services, but recently they don’t offer much more. And you must pay for the public service anyway. They usually totally fail in more serious case (chronic illness, cancer, serious accident) – one would get to and be treated by a public hospital too.

In short:

Pros:

• health care is basically free for everybody by principle
• GP access is good, and serious cases are handled quite well
• medicines are available and prices are not horrendous

Cons:

• not all the free health care is practically available, sometimes available appointments are months or years in the future
• dentists, orthodontists – not really available via public health care and private options are expensive
• doctors, nurses are other personnel are underpaid and overworked
• there is a lot of bad PR around health car here – this doesn’t help improving things

Not that easily and cheaply as they used to be.

Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.

The idea is you package the software once and it works forever, because all dependencies for it are provided in the exact right version. And the dependencies may include things that would not be included in the base system (like super new versions of some important libraries).

That is true, but that is also the problem: both the package and all its dependencies may be left never updated.

In traditional Linux distribution, like Debian, every package must be compiled within the same system, which usually means specific version of all key libraries. And when the key libraries are upgraded some packages compiled for older versions won’t work, the package might not even compile with newer version of the libraries. And it is often not possible/practical to provide multiple different version of libraries (or other shared system components). The result is distribution developers have a lot of hard work updating all the packages. When there is no one to fix a package for the next version of the package, the package will be removed from the distribution. That happens when package is not maintained upstream and/or no one cares enough to maintain it in the distribution. In that case – is it worth to keep it?

Snap makes packaging applications much easier, and more decoupled from the operating system ‘core’. Less maintenance is needed… but that also means less maintenance will be done, which is not necessarily good.

On the other hand, Snap allows application to be maintained more rapidly than the distro core – in that case it can make things safer – fix in applications and their dependencies can be fixed that it could be done in the normal Debian release process. But that depends on maintainers of the specific snap and its dependencies.

Android is hardly open source these days.