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.

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.

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.

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

I’m not sure about the SSD. Has QLC substantially improved since hitting the market? If not I’d recommend going with something TLC-based.

I just use the Europass CV Builder. Works fine for me, has been for well over a decade now.

Definitely one of the more subtle benefits of the EU: They made a perfectly serviceable resume builder.

(But yeah, a LaTeX template would also just work forever. This stuff is what TeX and its derivatives are great at.)

They did, about three times, each time abandoning it before the ecosystem could stabilize.

Admittedly, the last time nobody even wanted to buy in because everyone expected them to drop the OS within two years. Which they promptly did.

When I debugged my crackling sound I followed various advice that said to enable 44100 in addition to 48000 and it fixed nothing. Then I disabled 48000 and it worked because the auto-switching refused to work. (And of course the other computer runs the same games just fine on 48000 because things can’t ever be simple.)

That’s why I mentioned it.

Try setting the rate to 44100 and only that, no double rate support; most games try to output at that rate and don’t deal well with being upsampled to 48000.