Do we have to bring this up again? It's just boring.

systemd is here and it isn't going anywhere soon. It's an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?

I'm a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.

Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.

Ansible also has a place, particularly if you're deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn't use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.

Sure. I'm sure Trinidad and Tobago, and Albania, are definitely Nazis. And those anarchists with their black and red flags, they're definitely Nazis too, right?

Seriously though, in this case, it's the unofficial war flag of Ukraine.

It was originally associated with the WWII nationalist Banderite movement, which has some dubious history but is important in the 20th century story of Ukrainian nationalism. However its usage has evolved and is used widely, albeit unofficially, in modern Ukraine, by lots of military-associated groups who have nothing to do with Nazis or fascism.

One of the main selling points of it is that it trolls people who uncritically believe that Ukraine is run by Nazis.

Way too obvious. They could have left it standing for at least a few weeks before an uhhh... "electrical fire".

Of course, no-one is going to get prosecuted for this.

I can only imagine they're shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I'm sure they'd love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.

If we hypothetically assume this is true for a moment, then consider:

1. No SAMs would have been fired if there were no Russian missiles attacking Odesa, and thus indirectly it's still Russia's fault.

2. The Russian-designed and manufactured S-300 (and presumably the closely-related S-400) are dangerous to use over populated areas if they have no working safe abort or engagement minimums safety features, therefore they are even more dogshit than we thought they were. So, Russia is still at fault here for supplying unsafe SAMs, and no-one should buy any Russian SAMs in future if they care at all about their civilian population. If we assume that the anonymous Twitter source is indeed correct, then this is probably why Russia isn't saying anything about it.

I'm sure once the war is over we'll get some proper analysis from people with actual warhead ballistics knowledge though, and not just some anonymous propaganda.

Nice to see Google doing the responsible thing here, because Apple certainly didn't when AirTags were launched.

I still think having cheap, socially acceptable, easily-accessible, highly effective tracking devices with months or more of battery life is something out of dystopian fiction though. It's not good for society in the long run.

This is the end of official updates for them, they're not bricked.

Older Chromebooks do have a shitty support lifecycle, it can't be denied. Newer (post 2020 launch) Chromebooks come with at least 8 years of updates, although that's from product launch, not from when you buy them. That is comparable to Apple's support lifecycle.

It is possible to install ChromeOS Flex on out-of-support Chromebooks, though likely you will lose some features. You can also install generic Linux on them, but it's got to be said it's a slightly annoying experience.

Apple users have been sending text messages interchangeably between their phones and computers/tablets for years.

As have Android users. Microsoft Phone Link/My Phone Companion and KDE Connect have supported this for years on their relevant PC platforms. The Phone Link Android app is even preinstalled on Samsung devices. There's a teensy bit of setup but nothing complicated. KDE Connect even supports stuff like using the phone as a touchpad, remote keyboard, or media/presentation controller.

If your PC is a Chromebook then you don't even need these. If you sign into the phone and Chromebook with the same Google account, the integration just works, much as it does on Apple devices.

Most of your arguments can be boiled down to "everything is really slick if you use an all-Apple ecosystem". Which is fine, but the same can be said about Android - if you use an all-Google ecosystem with Pixels, Chromebooks and Google Workspace then most, if not all of your complaints about Android go away. Pixel Android is more consistent and less buggy than most vendor versions of Android. Integration with Chromebooks works out of the box. Google Workspace MDM is simple and straightforward, and you don't really need to buy a separate MDM solution.

The difference is that Android at least makes a decent effort to cater for a heterogeneous ecosystem. With Apple, if you're not entirely onboard with an all-Apple ecosystem then it starts getting messy quickly.

Ungulates. Because who doesn't like a hoofed animal?

My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I'm typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don't use it any more but hey, it's a router).

Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.

The real meat shields in the war in Ukraine are Russian conscripts. At least Ukrainian conscripts have the conviction that they are defending their country's internationally recognised borders.

The US (and the rest of NATO) is being cautious for a reason, and it's not because they're using Ukrainians as "meat shields."

NATO stocks of war materiel were at historically low levels before February 2022, and it's difficult for the US to commit fully when China is sabre-rattling over Taiwan. That's Xi's (and Kim Jong-Un's, to a lesser extent) gift to Putin. Sabre-rattling keeps the US from engaging fully in Ukraine, even though China won't be ready to invade Taiwan for several years yet.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, it'll be several years before NATO materiel stocks start to grow above 2022 levels, but they will grow.

The question is, will they grow fast enough?

Personally I'm predicting world war in 2027-28 unless the West pulls its finger out.