The main differentiator of fish over everything else is it prioritizes intuitive behavior over backwards compatibility.

Zsh is to bash as c++ is to c. Most bash scripts and habits will work in zsh, but zsh is just more convenient and has more options. Fish is intentionally different.

Do I wish fish had existed instead of bash so we had a nicer terminal experience? On the whole, yes. But I also couldn’t be bothered to learn another shell where most of the instructions online won’t be able to help you, and I ended up sticking with zsh.

It’s also the font on the pop-ups, and the AI logo.

There’s a very generic style of Facebook cartoon that these things absolutely nail.

Bragging rights and improved sleeping ability from the knowledge that the devs are being supported.

The serious answer is it’s often easier for people in a company to buy a license key than it is for them to arrange a donation to the devs. So this is an easy way to make small donations.

It’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the “read the manual” ethos.

Back in the day when you couldn’t just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.

So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.

Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what’s going on.

Depends.

You can argue that it’s basically art/political speech. You’ve done it to draw attention to flaws in the approach and to highlight how ineffectual the current system is, and that if you actually wanted to do make fake IDs you’d take a much less high-profile approach. As such, there’s no actual criminal intent required.

Don’t know if a judge would buy it though.

Ok, but one of the most important use cases is non-local access.

If I’m at home I can just go to the door.

Go on, drop a rocket on Zuck’s Bond villain hideout.

Let’s see what happens.

Commercial versions of these systems exist in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-facewatch-watchlist-39p-paracetamol-london

The Gdpr makes these things harder to do, but not automatically illegal.

Surely you have noticed that there is a lot of criticism of the GDPR and EU tech regulation.

Yeah, and some of it is even true.

You know open-source doesn’t mean publicly available. It means the person, or in this case the US government, that brought the software should have free access to the source code to edit and distribute it as they like.

So yes, the military should use something functional equivalent to open source to prevent vender lock in and to allow for external audits. They probably shouldn’t give it to Russia or make it freely available online though.

If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”

Oh this is why my two monitor dongle only works on Linux.

I thought it was weird that I couldn’t get the second monitor to work without plugging it directly into a Mac, but I put it down to being a cheap dongle.

Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.

So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.

Accelerated Firefox timeline.

That used to have a picture of an actual Phoenix and then a red panda before it got streamlined.

If ladybird keep going at this rate, everyone will be trying to cancel them by the middle of next week

You’re in a car. There’s probably a charging port there. Sucks if you don’t have a phone, but it sucked before when you didn’t have change.

Parking has always been a privilege not a right, and if you’re not prepared you’re going to get a ticket.

I get that it’s annoying but if my phone broke and I suddenly had to pay for parking with coins, I don’t know what I’d do either. Everything is cashless now, where would I get coins from?

I mean if everything is ephemeral and the users are anonymous and don’t log in, the federation wouldn’t actually do anything.

Yeah but parking has always been bad.

You had to carry change. Meters were always out of order or would just eat your change without issuing a ticket, and the people checking never gave a shit and would give you a fine anyway.

My only complaint is the app, everyone should offer a website or an app, but if you’re going to park there a few times an app does make sense.

Because they’re fucking stupid.

I can pick up a phone in either hand and type on it using only that hand, and I can play games using both hands at once. If I’m using a bracer, it means I can’t do anything else with either hand or use my off hand to interact with it.

The only problem a bracer solves is not having pockets, but even then you still need to wear a bracer.

Then you wouldn’t need to tell people to work more hours.

This is the most famous example, but it’s for phones rather than desktops.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67911517

Same with OneDrive.

It’s just a folder of markdown files, basically anything should work.