The recommendation changed from car lengths to seconds decades ago, but wasn’t well communicated fwict. I learned car lengths from my dad and then seconds when I got my motorcycle endorsement.

If everyone were leaving 2 seconds of space, it also reduces stop and go traffic that is caused, or at least exacerbated, by the traffic wave phenomenon. But that’s even less well socialized.

It looks like the png is getting word wrapped. Line spacing is so large that the png on the second line is getting pushed into the space of the icon below, and the icon below is given a higher Z value, so it goes over it. The different font has a different letter width and can influence the line spacing by being taller than the original font.

See if you can find an option to reduce line spacing or an option to increase icon spacing (vertical or horizontal). I would expect these to be advanced settings though. Iirc, most Linux desktops don’t use ellipses on long names, like some other operating systems (macOS iirc).

Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-nearly-all-new-us-power-plants-built-in-2024-will-be-clean-energy

As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.

“May you live in interesting times.”

Apple locks old devices out of updates

Dropping support for older platforms happens for a number of reasons, including hardware-level security problems and lack of interest for ongoing maintenance. Linux distributions even drop support for older hardware. Even the Linux kernel itself has dropped support. A decision to not keep supporting a piece of hardware is not the same as preventing updates.

The thing to focus on isn’t that Apple halts maintaining its own OSes on older hardware. Rather, we should press hardware makers and regulators on the boot loader locks and other obstacles that prevent end users from installing alternate OSes, especially once hardware makers end OS support for hardware. E.g., older iPads that can’t run modern iPadOS but could easily run a lightweight Linux distribution. This applies to more than just Apple, like some Android devices. “Internet of Things” devices are similarly affected – Belkin halted support for a generation of Wemo smart plugs when a vulnerability came out – they told consumers to buy new Wemos and provided no alternate path for the older, still functional plugs.