Alright, I had me a giggle. You got me.

TIL GNU Affero General Public License is a flavor that closes loopholes that were used to extend open software without actually open sourcing your contributions.

In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.

Is it not already a propaganda mill by convention? I assumed that was part of the deal to continue operating.

A strong message at sentencing only goes so far. People have to also believe they have a reasonable risk of getting caught. Otherwise, they don’t care how harsh the sentence is when they don’t believe it will happen to them.

Russia has received a truly outstanding return on investment with their American influence campaigns.

This sounds to me more like they had a gripe with a WordPress plug-in and that was about the extent of the issue.

Don’t they have a bunch of kernel changes that they can’t merge upstream?

Ah, it appears that it’s indeed a work in progress. If I was going to try it, this is definitely the distribution I would use. But I don’t think a whole lot of people are able to run Ubuntu for example. It’s going to be a more limited selection because of the hardware.

I did this over a year ago. Man, I love that my computing is boring again. No distractions. The machine does what I tell it to do. It’s lovely! Boring is lovely.

Yes. However, it’s not super difficult to get a signed image to meet the requirements. To my knowledge they aren’t actively trying to prevent the installation of other operating systems. The bigger issue is the software supporting their unique hardware.

I understand there’s quite a few missing drivers on the latest Macs. It’s possible to run Linux but I don’t think it’s especially user friendly at the moment. Apple does a lot of custom stuff and not all of their hardware has open source drivers available.

What a disgrace.

I think it has its place as a spam reduction measure as long as it’s used judiciously. The problem is that Reddit never properly handled the problem and didn’t have much incentive to implement a good solution.

I would really like to learn more about this reputation concept. This is the first I’ve heard of it here.

Absolutely. I once wrote a server for a factory machine that spawned child processes to work each job item. Intentionally we did not free any memory in the child process because it serves only one request and then exits anyway. It’s much more efficient to have the OS just clean up everything and provides strong guarantees that nothing can be left behind accidentally for a system where up time was money. Any code to manage memory was pointless line noise and extra developer effort.

In fact I think in the linker we specifically replaced free with a function that does nothing.

I don’t blame you. I have to use a professionally sometimes and I am not a fan. It’s an absolute behemoth of the language filled with warts and cruft.

Sometimes it is the best choice for a project, but I prefer languages with simple, orthogonal concepts.

Pfft compilers. Just use assembler.

You call the destructor. It’s simply not automatically done for you with the concept of going out of scope.

Back when C++ was simply a text pre-processor for C, you could see these normal function calls. You can still see them in the un-optimized disassembly. There’s nothing magical about a destructor other than it being inserted automatically.

Also goes for mobile. You use more memory and apps get killed.

A middle ground is a memory pool or an object pool where you reuse the memory rather than free it. Instead, you free it all in one operation when that phase of your application is complete. I’ve seen this done for particle systems to reduce overhead.

I’m the tech lead on a three-year-old project that’s entirely in C. It is my full time job to write C89.