I don’t see people “forming a cult”.

• Apple does a walled garden that I don’t want but some people are fine with. If you give them a bunch of money and these days entrust them with a bunch of your data, they will give you a pre-set-up environment that works well. That’s fine for a lot of people.

• Valve does a successful electronic storefront that has synergized well with the Linux world. God forbid Microsoft were in their position. They aren’t DRM-free, but you can use GOG if you want that, and the commercial game world was not going to go DRM-free.

• Kagi takes money, provides privacy for a search engine and some perks; they let their customer be a customer rather than the product. I use it myself, am happy with it. That’s a tradeoff that I’d wanted for a while, and would like Google to provide with YouTube.

• GitHub wouldn’t be my own choice for source hosting in the Microsoft era, but so far they seem to be getting along reasonably well. They provide functionality that’s needed, source hosting plus issue tracking, and their system is pretty usable.

• Mozilla does Firefox, which is much more customizable than Chrome. I use it!

• I don’t know what 404 Media does. Some sort of tech reporting, looks like. Okay, fine.

If you don’t want to use any of those, you can probably avoid all of them, other than maybe GitHub if projects you use are hosted there.

I decided in the late '90s, when Apple killed the Mac clone market and took things towards a single-vendor platform, that it wasn’t where I wanted to be, but for some people, it’s fine. Other than 404 Media, which I don’t know about, I don’t have any problem with the others here, and some are companies that I’m fairly happy with.

I’d guess that they mean that they reliably show up in an assortment but aren’t many people’s favorite.

Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons license.

I’d probably be a softie here and just pick something obscure that would cause a minimal ripple. There are songs out there that I don’t like, but if they get much play, it’s because there are people who do like them, and they should be able to listen to their favored music.

I haven’t used a dumbphone in many years.

However, it looks like there is a subreddit devoted to this, which may be of interest:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/

No, but if they’re going to assert that cleaning involves liquid, they would be counterexamples to such an assertion.

Or, taking a different perspective:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1433409/

Management of trauma and emergency surgery in space

As on Earth, the major determinant of emergency surgical care in spaceflight may be the presence or absence of a well-trained surgeon.

Sounds like they need a rocket surgeon!

Cambridge lists ‘dry cleaning’ as an example, a process that involves liquid and is thus antithetical.

Ehhh…man, I dunno about that example, Cambridge. Like, wouldn’t sweeping involve cleaning something? Vacuuming?

See also as related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

A mondegreen (/ˈmɒndɪˌɡriːn/ ⓘ) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning.[1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.[2][3] The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray”, and mishearing the words “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”.

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism

A malapropism (/ˈmæləprɒpɪzəm/; also called a malaprop, acyrologia, or Dogberryism) is the incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, regarding switch hitters, “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious”,[1] with the accidental use of amphibious rather than the intended ambidextrous. Malapropisms often occur as errors in natural speech and are sometimes the subject of media attention, especially when made by politicians or other prominent individuals.

My refrigerator is annoyingly far from my desk chair.

I use it as a modifier chorded with another key in Linux for a number of things, like switching workspaces, opening a terminal or browser window, resizing windows, existing the graphical environment, locking the system, toggling floating windows, starting application launchers, toggling a window’s fullscreen state, or toggling playing music. I think that as a modifier key, it’s fine. I don’t have tapping it alone do anything, and in general, don’t like single-key operations like that; ditto for F-key operations.

It sounds like one can disable the tap-Windows-key-alone behavior on Windows via the autohotkey macro software package:

https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=101812

I liked how things were some time back, before TLDs were generally opened up.

Aside from a very few TLDs, I don’t think that the newer TLDs have added a lot. And they’ve created a number of problems, like companies going out and registering a million TLDs, because there’s no clear place for one to live and they don’t want people spoofing their domain. That’s great for domain name registrars, but bad for everyone else.

Some have slightly shortened domain names, but the gain is pretty small, and most people don’t use domain names anyway, but search engines. What actual utility is provided by having a “.diamonds” TLD? Were diamond vendors having a problem presenting themselves as diamond vendors? Many relate to specific businesses (“.dental”), and while maybe possession of a particular domain could be useful to indicate that someone has passed some kind of licensing standards, that’s useless at a TLD level, because there’s no global licensing authority for dentists.

Honestly, the only TLD I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve really seen what I’d call reasonable use made of is .int, for international organizations. I think that that’s legitimately-different-enough from .org, which was used as something of a catch-all for non-company uses, that it’s helpful to identify official sites.

Some TLDs were just abysmal. I was pretty thoroughly disappointed that “.biz” went through – that is a prime example of registrars just trying to get additional registrations from .com registrants to avoid people exploiting confusion. There’s just no justifiable reason for it. Nobody is going to want to operate a .biz alongside an identical .com; it just generates duplicate registrations and fees for registrars.

I think that introducing a new catch-all domain of some form was a good idea – “.org” or sometimes “.com” used to be used for that. I think that .info is probably the most-successful example.

I think that the idea of a TLD with an entry reserved for each person is maybe interesting, but it’d require giving humans some kind of globally-unique identifier. We don’t have that in 2024.

By-and-large, I would have not opened the doors to the flood of TLDs. I don’t think that they’ve solved many problems, and I do think that they’ve created a number of issues.

EDIT: Actually, what I think would buy a lot more is a standardized structure for some domain names below country code domain names. For things like businesses, I think that that’d be kinda preferable. Countries generally do have extensive mechanisms for determining “who owns a name” that DNS could have simply used, but what we have today being used is mostly one global namespace and the collisions that that entails. My preferred route would be to have, instead of “.com” and various owners of names around the world smashing into each other, “.co.uk” like the UK has, and let the UK figure out who gets to own a business registration there. I think that some of the problem is that we in the US started out kind of with our “own” American TLDs, like .mil, .edu, and .gov, since we built the system. We could have put them under the US country-code TLD, like .mil.us, .gov.us, and .edu.us, but didn’t, and so most other countries followed suit over time (not with those TLDs, since we kept those for ourselves, but with TLD use in general). Obviously, there’s still a need for a lot of things at the international level, but a lot of what lives directly under TLDs is really stuff that’s clearly not and will not be global, and it’s produced collisions that don’t need to happen.

Neat!

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_record_messaging

Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.

The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]

I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.

https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/

I don’t know of a Linux equivalent, though I’d swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author’s young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.

I just posted it myself as the first thing that came to mind with something small and cute and noise-making. Hadn’t read other comments at that point.

We’ve genetically engineered other colored foods before, like golden rice.

We’ve genetically-engineered many bioluminescent plants and animals.

kagis

We’ve genetically-engineered blue flowers:

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-genetically-engineer-world-s-first-blue-chrysanthemum

We all think we’ve seen blue flowers before. And in some cases, it’s true. But according to the Royal Horticultural Society’s color scale—the gold standard for flowers—most “blues” are really violet or purple. Florists and gardeners are forever on the lookout for new colors and varieties of plants, however, but making popular ornamental and cut flowers, like roses, vibrant blue has proved quite difficult. “We’ve all been trying to do this for a long time and it’s never worked perfectly,” says Thomas Colquhoun, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the work.

True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins—pigment molecules in the petals, stem, and fruit—consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple, or blue, depending on what sugars or other groups of atoms are attached. Conditions inside the plant cell also matter. So just transplanting an anthocyanin from a blue flower like a delphinium didn’t really work.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, tackled this problem by first putting a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom appear purple instead of reddish. To get closer to blue, Noda and his colleagues then added a second gene, this one from the blue-flowering butterfly pea. This gene’s protein adds a sugar molecule to the anthocyanin. The scientists thought they would need to add a third gene, but the chrysanthemum flowers were blue with just the two genes, they report today in Science Advances.

“That allowed them to get the best blue they could obtain,” says Neil Anderson, a horticultural scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who was not involved with the work.

Chemical analyses showed that the blue color came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colorless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue color. “It was a stroke of luck,” Colquhoun says. Until now, researchers had thought it would take many more genes to make a flower blue, Nakayama adds.

The next step for Noda and his colleagues is to make blue chrysanthemums that can’t reproduce and spread into the environment, making it possible to commercialize the transgenic flower. But that approach could spell trouble in some parts of the world. “As long as GMO [genetically modified organism] continues to be a problem in Europe, blue [flowers] face a difficult economic future,” predicts Ronald Koes, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work. But others think this new blue flower will prevail. “It’s certainly an advance for the retail florist,” Anderson says. “It would have a lot of market value worldwide.”

I imagine that it’s quite possibly within the realm of what we could do.

For me, it’s corn on the cob.

Man, I dunno if I really want to explore this rabbit hole, but I’m sure that there’s much-less-tolerable stuff out there. Say, live mice or something.