It really is.

In that case, woosh me. Just wanted to make sure nobody takes that as an actual advice.

That’s what you got emoji for.

Terrible idea for a few reasons.

• The example in the OP does not need anything but the country. GPS coordinates are less efficient than ISO codes
• GPS coordinates don’t map 1:1 to countries or even street addresses. There are infinite different coordinates for each address, and it’s very non-trivial to match one to another. Comparing whether two records with country codes are in the same country is trivial. Doing the same with two GPS coordinates is very difficult.
• GPS coordinates might be more exact than accurate. This is a surprisingly common issue: you start out only needing a country, so you put some arvitrary GPS position (e.g. the center of the country) into the GPS coordinates. Later a new requirement arises that means you now need street addresses. Now all old entries point so some random house in the middle of the country, and there’s no easy way to differentiate these false locations from real ones.

I guess you meant that as a joke, but people are really doing this and it leads to actual problems.

I saw a news report a while ago about something like that being done in a database for people with outstanding debt. If the address of the debtor wasn’t known, they just put “US” in the form, and the program automatically entered the centre of the US as the coordinates.

Sucks for the family that lives there because they constantly get threatening mail and even house visits from angry lenders who want their money back. People even vandalized their house and car because they believed that their debtors lived in that house.

This. My print properties change with ambient humidity, temperature, and with how long ago I last dried my filament.

Being from Vienna, my word is naturally an insult.

“Meine Allerwerterste/Mein Allerwerterster” (female and male version)

On the one hand, it’s a formal and very polite address to someone (meaning something like “my dearest”), but at the same time the word means “my ass”.

So with that word you can sound extremely polite and nice while at the same time calling them an ass.

You mean like other drugs that you have to burn and then inhale the fumes, which stink and make you cough, especially when you start out using them?

Well, tobacco exists.

Beware, things are not that easy with Linux. If you use Windows, you use Windows. There are different versions but they are just differently old versions of the same thing. Same company, same people, same stuff. So you can say things like “Windows shares your data with Microsoft”, because there’s only 1-2 current versions of Windows at a time.

Since Linux is so open, there are thousands of different distributions created by thousands of different companies or even hobbyists doing that on their own time. And since it’s so open, it can be configured any which way.

For example, ChromeOS and Android are two Linux distributions created by Google, and both of them collect and share your data like crazy.

Some of the more classical Linux distributions (like e.g. Ubuntu) also ask you if you want to share data with them, but most of them allow you do decline and many of them really don’t share data at all (unless you run programs that do share data again).

So what you can say about data protection in regards to Linux is:

• It’s not Windows/Microsoft, which shares a lot
• Depending on the distro, it can share just as much as Windows, or nothing at all, or a configurable amount
• There are Linux distros that are very privacy focussed and share little to no data

But no, using any Linux doesn’t necessarily mean your data is protected in any special way.

There’s pretty much three core OSes out there:

• Windows
• Linux
• BSD

Amost everything else is just a variation of these.

Android, ChromeOS, PS3 OS, tons of embedded systems like car entertainment systems, and of course all the traditional Linux distros like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, Fedora, and so on are Linux.

MacOS, iOS, Switch OS, pfSense and tons of embedded systems like routers, and of course all the traditional BSD distros like FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD and so on are BSD based. (Though Switch OS, to be fair, is mostly it’s own thing, only borrowing significant portions from BSD.)

Per se, it’s actually not. There are thousands and thousands of hobby-level kernels floating around. Many university courses actually include making your own simple kernel.

The big issue is that the kernel is the core of the whole ecosystem. Everything builds upon it. So if you build a new kernel, you pretty much need to rebuild everything built on top of it.

As a bad comparison, imagine you came up with a genious new shape for a car fuel hose nozzle. You know, the thing you plug into your car to refuel it. Designing a new nozzle is easy. Getting it made isn’t much harder either. Retrofitting billions of cars to work with that new shape is an almost impossible amount of work. So while making a new nozzle is no problem at all, actually implementing it is almost impossible.

The same holds true for the kernel. Making “a kernel” isn’t a big issue. Getting it to work with all PCs with all their diverse hardware and software is close to impossible.

The Linux kernel and the drivers running in it easily have billions of work hours invested into it, and still it doesn’t work perfectly with every piece of hardware you might have in your PC.

It does explain why Amazon (and every other company and by extension large parts of society) entirely focusses on “buy X for your mother/father right now” instead of even acknowledging hardships and difficult situations (abusive parents, dead parents, parents with dead children/miscarriages, people who want to have children but can’t, parents with difficult relationships with their children, …).

There’s no room for subtlety and compassion when money can be made.

In an ideal world, these holidays would be divorced from making money, and if not that, shops would at least allow you to select what holidays you want to appear in their marketing material.

I really like that showerthoughts is apparently far less harshly moderated than r/showerthoughts. Posting over there feels like a mine field where the chances of getting your post deleted over a trivial mistake seem to be much higher than the chances of being able successfully post there.

I’m sure this post wouldn’t have survived at r/showerthoughts and I would have missed out on it.

The game has been released 4 years ago. An average worker in the US works 1770 hours a year.

10 developers working full time over 4 years (and this doesn’t even include the time they spent building the initial release) would work a total of ~70 000 hours, not “hundreds or thousands” of hours.

In fact, even thousands of hours would be only a single man year.

They’ve released 23 content updates so far, bugfix patches are probably much more. Even just building, superficially testing and deploying a release easily takes 4-5h. And this game is not just a plain and simple flat screen game, but one that supports SteamVR, something that’s not remotely trivial on Linux.

Even a single non-trivial bug can cost 20h of total work time from support handling the report, a dev reproducing it, the bug going trough refinement, bugfixing, code review, testing, deployment and so on.

I guess you haven’t worked in a real company before and don’t know how project management and processes work. Stuff takes a lot of time.

And believing that Unity just magically abstracts all OS-specific bugs away is very naive.

And it’s ridiculous to claim that they are dropping Linux support after 4(!) years because they are too incompetent to figure out how to support Linux. Obviously they could support Linux just fine from a technological standpoint.

Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers? This is a business decision, nothing else. Most likely, some MBA looked over the numbers, saw a few hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux, and decided that Proton was good enough. Most likely, no programmer was even asked whether Linux support should be dropped.

And yes, even if you know what you are doing, every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested, and that costs time and thus money, which is something every experienced cross platform developer should know.

My Ender 5 has a modified E3D Toolchanger and MGN rails. Not very original either.