A significant portion of it is also literally about making friends with the NPCs.

Stardew Valley

Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.

No it isn’t; that’s what databases are.

I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 from a Hamfest and never managed to get it installed correctly. A few years later, I did succeed in running Debian and Gentoo in college.

Stop pretending that “get rid of the bot” doesn’t count as a suggestion. That’s dishonest.

I don’t even care about the bot itself, but at this point I’m just getting pissed off by all the constant distracting bickering about it.

You don’t know. Webkit is the older brother of Blink (the engine in Chrome). They’re not different enough to count as separate.

"Sure, we can also listen to:

• The Living Tombstone - Spooky Scary Skeletons (Remix) - Extended Mix
• Andrew Gold - Spooky, Scary Skeletons (Undead Tombstone Remix)
• Dave Wave - Spooky Scary (Swingin’) Skeletons - Extended Club Version ← my favorite
• etc."

Paid proprietary software will too; the likes of Adobe and VMWare prove that.

my main job

I’m also a farmer

Never has Japan felt so foreign to me as while reading this comment. Being a farmer (as a job, not just gardening as a hobby) and having another career at the same time? What is this sorcery?

The trick is designing the thing in such a way as to resist infiltration by astroturfing marketers.

You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally…

First of all, that’s a Clean Air Act thing with limited purpose and scope, not a blanket restriction on owners’ right to modify their property. Moreover, it is certainly not a restriction imposed and enforced by manufacturers that somehow justifies making the software closed-source and DRM’d. I want to make it clear here that, by supporting closed-source vehicle software, what you are really supporting is private enforcement of laws instead of government enforcement of laws, which is incredibly fucked up.

Second, it is not true that the act of messing with the emissions system is itself illegal. What’s illegal is the act of using the vehicle on public roads afterwards. You can use your emissions-system-modified car off-road or on private property (e.g. farms or racetracks) all you want.

Third, the way that law is implemented is, frankly, bad and wrong anyway. Instead of saying that parts need to be EPA-certified (or, in practice, CARB-certified) to be legal to use and that the ECU has to report “ready,” what it should do is say you can modify it however you want but that it has to pass a real “stick-a-probe-in-the-tailpipe-and-actually-fucking-measure” emissions test instead of a bullshit “visually inspect and plug a computer into the OBD2 port” test.

…nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc).

No, that’s a lie. It is perfectly legal to swap your factory seat belts for a DOT-approved and properly-installed four-point racing harness, for instance.

I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.

That sort of thing could already happen for decades due to people fucking up their mechanical modification of the brakes, yet that’s always been allowed. In practice, it isn’t actually a widespread problem because people aren’t actually as suicidally moronic as you seem to think they are, and that isn’t going to magically change just because a computer is involved. Your argument is nothing but exactly the kind of fearmongering that I’m calling bullshit on.

As someone who’s been a fan of Free Software since I first heard of it in the late '90s, I used and recommended Macs in the early 2000s because (at time, at least) Apple was leaning into the Unix-nature and BSD underpinnings of the thing and coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator.

Not so much these days, though. Apple’s pivot in ideology towards locked-down consumer crap like iOS and the App Store – even going so far as to ditch bash for zsh just because they hated GPLv3 – ruined it.

Not gonna lie, the extent to which the motor, controller, etc. are proprietary is an important consideration for me when buying an e-bike. For example, I would rather have one that can’t connect to my phone etc. at all than one that can but requires a proprietary app.

(I also care about things like weird proprietary headset and bottom bracket hardware, on e-bikes and regular bikes alike.)

for the eight years I owned it

I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles

Whether it was <17,000 miles or <27,000 miles, if you put that little mileage on a car in eight years IMO you should reconsider whether you need to own one at all.

Yeah, just like how DIYing car repairs and modifications has been illegal for decades now.

…oh wait.

Back in reality, yet again “X but on a computer” is not somehow magically different from “X”, and pretending it is as an excuse to curtail property rights is nothing but authoritarian fearmongering.

Linux is not a real-time OS*. For a car ECU, something like Speeduino would be a more appropriate choice.

(* Or wasn’t until a week or so ago, at least. https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-years-later-real-time-linux-makes-it-to-the-kernel-really/)

Ironically, my cars don’t run Linux for the same reason my computers do: I’m militant about protecting my property rights and privacy, so I refuse to have any car new enough to have “infotainment” because it’s all closed-source and Tivoized. It’s effectively hostile, despite the Linux kernel at the bottom of it.

I’ll buy a car made after the mid-2000s when I can re-flash the whole thing with non-DRM’d community-supported software, and not a minute before.

I was playing D&D (for the first time) and my party were a group of exterminators killing giant spiders on city rooftops. The first thing I did when we got up there was tie myself off to a chimney. Later, we were fighting a really big spider that was right at the edge of the roof:

Me: “I hurl myself at the spider.”

DM: “You mean you try to hit the spider, or try to grapple the spider…?”

Me: “IDK, I just throw all my body weight at it.”

The spider ended up splatted dead on the ground (traumatizing some unfortunate passerby), I ended up dangling off the side of the building, and one of my party members had to make a saving throw to dodge the rope as it swung through his square, LOL!

Last time I went to Costco, my the second most expensive thing on the receipt was tax.

That just means you bought a whole bunch of cheap things.

Don’t mind me; I was just going for linguistic flourish rather than exact verisimilitude.