I honestly do not get why “touch grass” became a common phrase/meme around a decade after many people got mobile Internet access (through smartphones).

Before that, it would have made sense because you’d usually only be posting on the Internet when you’re somewhere inside where there’s a computer; but now that we can literally be posting online while lying on grass?! How did this happen?

Me too (whether Linux is an OS depends on how you define the term) and that’s why it’s such a silly post to make. If there weren’t anyone who thought KDE was better than GNOME, why would KDE still exist?

Because there’s no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel…

which is however not a fork, either hard or soft, of anything

Pretty sure that compared to NetBSD, Linux still runs on relatively few architectures. 😝

I do use it, but you are quite right I don’t tend to mention it unless asked.

On the terminal yes.

On GUIs I generally use an IDE or VSCodium with vim keybindings.

If we’re going to wildly speculate, hey, isn’t this what we have AI for nowadays?

I asked ChatGPT: “give me ideas what the abbreviation WLBR might stand for if that is the name of a piece of image editing software”. Here’s the result:

🧠 Professional / technical-sounding

• Wide Layer Blending & Rendering
• Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher
• Weighted Light Balance Renderer
• Wavelet-Based Light & Blur Reconstruction
• White-Level Balance & Retouch

🎨 Creative / artistic branding

• We Love Better Retouching
• Wild Light & Bold Retouch
• Wavelength Brush
• Wonder Lens: Blur & Refine
• Whitelight Brush

⚡ Modern / software-product style

• WizLayer Build & Render
• WarpLab: Blend & Refine
• Web-Level Bitmap Renderer
• Workflow Lens & Brush Renderer
• WLB Renderer (treat WLBR as a stylized acronym)

🧩 Slightly abstract (like many real apps)

• Wavelength-Based Rasterizer
• Layered Bitmask Refinement
• Light Balance Reconstruction Engine
• Wideband Luminosity Brush & Retouch

🧠 If you want it to feel like real software naming

Most image tools (like Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) don’t strictly spell out acronyms anymore—they use:

• suggestive tech words (Layer, Light, Render, Brush)
• or abstract brand terms

So something like:

WLBR = “WaveLight Brush & Render”

feels believable without being overly literal.

(end of ChatGPT response)

Out of these, I think “Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher” works best. But interesting that ChatGPT thinks “GIMP” doesn’t “strictly spell out” an acronym anymore, or that “Photoshop” ever did?!

Is WLBR supposed to be an abbreviation for something? I realize it is a reference to the mascot Wilber, but apart from that?

OSM is just a geographical database. It by itself doesn’t have any user-facing features at all. If there are such features somewhere, they are features of a specific frontend to that database.

I don’t think there’s a way to do what you want directly on openstreetmap.org but you can achieve your goal with https://overpass-turbo.eu/ for example.

Why would you expect routing software to route somewhere that no path is mapped?

As for public transport routing, I explained this here https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/50719308/22594280 a while ago.

As long as Google is doing a better job maintaining AOSP than a nonprofit would, what’s the point?

If they ever stop doing so, then this might be an option.

It’s a fairly widespread Internet meme, I think in order to make fun of France, though I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

Oh come on. I dislike copyright law as much as anyone, but this just makes the case against it look stupid.

The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.

With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

• voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
• mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.

Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.

Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

Yes, I think it’s realistic if we look at how things in computing have changed even just within the last few decades.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, IE was at ~65%, Chrome at <2%, we’ve gone from that to “IE does not exist” and Chrome in the same spot IE was then

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, Windows was at ~94%, now it is at ~26% with Android having taken the top spot, even that is just at ~37%, so there is now no dominant operating system overall

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide#monthly-200901-202603 even disregarding mobile devices, Windows has fallen from ~95% to ~61% in that time frame

and maybe I’m just old but early 2009 doesn’t seem an enormously long time ago somehow

that has already happened tbh