It looks like it paid off, since the screenshot in the article, the channel has more than doubled in subscribers (now 70k), and it seems to still be climbing.

LFS is not OS development. You build a distribution by assembling all the components. If you want to develop an OS from scratch, perhaps you're looking for osdev.org.

One supports the other, they aren't laid in opposition, but they are different, well-defined disciplines

Ubuntu started out with a slogan claiming "linux for human beings", and it kept that reputation for well over a decade, with a heavy focus on the desktop.

You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.

What does that mean?

WoW released a steady stream of expansions from 2004 to present day. At some point players wanted the old game, so Blizzard released WoW 2004, known as classic, in 2018, and reran the stream of expansions, stopping before any mass enshittification. You can draw the same parallels with C and C++, where C began picking the best from C++ in 1999, 2011, 2023, and soon to be 2029, and carving its own "classic" path.

We even have our Herb Sutter: Jens Gustedt

Except people aren't leaving C++ for C, if they're leaving it at all they're likely leaving it for Rust or some other memory safe language.

Well, I was leaving C++ for C. I found this unburdened my mind from quite a lot of distracting complexity. For this reason, I am also not really tempted by Rust.

I understand you were acting in good faith, but are you sure these antics didn't contribute to it?

I remember instances in my own childhood where my parents would e.g. turn off the wifi router when they were angry at me, and I'd instead figure out how to hack the neighbor's and use that. The dopamine hit from that was crazy, and I didn't even end up using it for much. It was more about showing them I could, and they had no control over me.

I suspect the things you described above might've contributed to the thrill of it. I find it hard to imagine downloading videos in advance being very similar to how the recommendations algorithm keeps you going (I imagine only longform videos would be practical). I can't know how "bad" the situation was, but installing cameras and alarms crosses several boundaries in trust and respect, that I can't imagine being good for a growing child, coming from their own parents...

At the end of the day, you can only help an addict that wants to be helped...

I appreciate looking at it from another point of view, but no. We worked with a child therapist and checked in fairly regularly on progress and goals. We considered that aspect of it, but there were a few signs that this wasn't the case.

He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.

This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.

The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).

As long as copyright exists, we need copyleft licenses to ensure that covered software can't be copyrighted.

That is to say, being against copyright doesn't mean you want to allow others to abuse it against you.

To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying". It doesn't matter if you like or dislike what other people do with their copies. The act of copying simply does not harm you.

The only way people can "abuse copyright against you" is if someone claims you violated their copyright, and invokes a DMCA takedown request, or sues you. You using the GPL will not protect you from this in any situation I can imagine. In fact, what Drew is doing here (claiming violation of copyright) is literally the only way to abuse copyright.

> To be against copyright is to not believe the idea of "adversarial copying".

Not believing the (or an) idea of copyright is one form of being "against" "copyright". One can oppose copyright law while still desiring a form of social enforcement for copyright-law-like ideas. Just as there are many forms of emotional abuse that are not illegal or could not be enforced if made illegal, and just as there is such thing as "abusing one's trust", there are forms of copying behavior that deserve the label of "abuse" regardless of whether the law gives a label.

LLMs aid people in abusing copyright by stripping copyleft software of its freedoms and then making derivatives which the author then copyrights restrictively. It's simply not a level playing field when one party is allowed to restrictively copyright their work, it creates a competitive advantage. This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.

> This is why copyleft exists, to prevent people enacting restrictive copyrights over their derivatives of copyleft works.

But, even in that case, you have lost nothing. Other people doing anything with the code you released, including making restrictively licensed derivative works, does not harm you, cost you anything, or deprive you of anything you already had.

Unless I have to interact with their software in which case I've lost the right to repair it.

That's the gnome dialer, yeah.

Is the source code published anywhere?

They have a github organization[0] but without explicit source code for the browser.

[0] https://github.com/OrionBrowser

Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.

Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff.

Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general purpose stuff; compare that to a few seconds for an LLM its a no brainer.

Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO...

Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it might have worked... But can't remove power from those who had it for years...

You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.

The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.

That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.

Indeed, decline appears to accelerate significantly in 2023 so seems likely that's AI helping things along.

I don't really need a tag saying how to reach the place, but better public transport support would go a long way. I also have this issue with places marked as parkings, to determine whether they're public, open or even reachable.