You’d need to fork if you decided that you don’t like the direction an engine is moving towards. Other than that there’s no real reason.

You could technically fork Blink but the question is whether you have the resources to keep up with web standards. The Web is effectively the universal UI toolkit these days and the pace of development reflects that.

Hurd?

Modern ANC is impressive.

When I’m on my bike I actually have less wind noise with my earbuds in than with my bare ears, which was a pretty odd feeling at first.

I also have a pair of over-ears, Sony XM5s, which have even better ANC. Used those while vacuuming and didn’t hear the motor of the vacuum cleaner. I heard its wheels, though. Freaky.

Of course all of this is tied to the usual Bluetooth headphone drawbacks so YMMV.

On the other hand Bluetooth can crackle if the airwaves are too noisy, you have to spend more for the same audio quality (and it’s still going to take a nosedive when calling someone because A2DP codecs like AAC or AptX aren’t available in HSP mode), and the buds have limited batteries which makes them unreliable for long-term wear.

It’s all about trade-offs and individual requirements. Of course these days you’re pushed to get wireless ones because most phone manufacturers are too cheap to include a headphone jack.

Eh. I went for TWSes for my latest purchase because I wanted anti-wind ANC. I still have a wired pair (and one of those silly USB adapters) for long-term operation, though.

The TWS equivalent to that is one of the buds no longer turning on. I just had to RMA a pair because of that.

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

Depends. On Linux or older macOS where light mode typically means a comfortable light gray? Light mode is the way to go. On Windows where light mode means an eye-searing onslaught of #FFFFFF? Dark mode is the only sensible choice.

Honestly, it’s still the F310 for me. I have mine since the early 2010s and it’s still working perfectly. Those things are built like tanks and between XInput and DirectInput are compatible with just about any PC game of the last forty years, no extra software required. Also, they’re dirt cheap.

Honorable mention to the F710, the wireless version. While Windows 10’s USB stack unfortunately broke compatibility with it (causing randomly dropped inputs), Linux does not have that problem.

New poll shows whether Harris or Trump is leading in favorability rating

A recently-released poll purports to contain information about the current relative popularity of presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump with voters. We heard reports that the poll’s findings are “informative”, yet “probably outdated in two weeks”. The intended target audience is people with an interest in American politics who can read and compare numbers, although sources informed us that one or more graphical representation (or “graph”) is provided for less mathematically-inclined people.

At press time, the Democrats have confirmed that the poll indeed shows relative popularity numbers while Donald Trump merely remarked that “we have the best polls, tremendous polls, everyone tells me about the numbers, it’s great”.

Pundits suggest that this kind of poll is commonly associated with the election season and that further polls are likely. We will keep you informed as the situation develops.

And that’s why copyright infringement is a crime, just not the same crime as theft.

Most of our plants were already fairly old and major overhauls would’ve been necessary.

In 2000 we had plans for a nuclear exit already, intending to phase them out until 2015. In 2010 the government decided to keep some running. IIRC they did that in part so they could shut down coal plants instead.

Then Fukushima happened and we went full panic mode, deciding to shut all of them down ASAP. Then the Ukraine war got reignited and the timeline got slightly stretched out a little again for practical reasons.

The last three reactors got shut down last April, about eight years later than the 2000 plan intended.

It’s a bit more complicated. We were already planning to get out of nuclear because our plants were aging and new ones weren’t economical. Then the government decided to freeze those plans for the time being. (IIRC one reason was that they wanted to close some of our terrible coal power plants first.) Then Fukushima happened and the Greens got everyone to panic.

We could’ve gone with a measured response but a combination of the Greens believing that nuclear power is infinitely bad and plenty of old people still having vivid memories of fallout-related health warnings from Chernobyl was enough to drive most of the country into an antinuclear frenzy. It’s almost a miracle they didn’t force all of the plants to scram immediately.

Why not 2.022k?

In my experience rear-mounted sensors are the most accurate, closely followed by under-screen sensors. Side-mounted sensors are utter garbage.

Accuracy isn’t even that much of an issue, it’s that the side-mounted ones are far too easy to accidentally trigger just by handling the phone. I can’t count the number of times my last two phones told me I had three incorrect fingerprint attempts after I had just pulled them out of my pocket.

Then I got a Pixel and I have no more such issues and virtually perfect accuracy. Same on a Samsung tablet. Same on an old phone I had where the power button was on the rear and had a full-size sensor.

Basically, I’m perfectly happy with any front- or rear-mounted full-size sensor. Those tiny side-mounted ones suck.

“Well, excuuuuuse me, princess!”

gets shot twice, just to make sure

It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.

Tina actually is the most emotionally vulnerable major character in Borderlands 2, as Assault on Dragon Keep shows. However, she’s also a deeply disturbed demolitionist who tortures someone to death on-screen.

Trying to turn her into an innocent little girl feels utterly bizarre.