Right. Right. But maybe we should choose democratically - with one vote per dollar not allocated to mere survival…

(Hopefully this sarcasm is obvious.)

I don’t want that machine

Let’s take care not to lose sight of what billionaire nepo-babies want.

and I challenge you to watch it again and defend its virtues.

“Barf” is a half dog played by John Candy. I rest my case, your honor.

My kid watches it continuously, and they and I find it hilarious.

And yes, people do roll their eyes at my Monty Python quotes.

Now I need a “Spaceballs: The Money” duffel bag!

I figure the engine swap business has got to be booming right now.

Was it pre-spyware? I’ll pay extra for pre-spyware vehicles. I work in IT, so I value my privacy.

Five now. It’s good money.

Or one Google employee who is particularly lousy at building social media bots.

Yes. It’s somehow a fucking race to build the Torment Nexus from the classic science fiction novel “Do not build the Torment Nexus”. It’s almost unbelievable.

You just know a bunch of these assholes are going to turn Cube into a reality, and then act surprised when they wake up inside the death trap.

Very strange when they dropped the slogan, like being honest about being evil got them brownie points.

I thought it was strange too, until I realized - I think the slogan change was a deliberate message to court a specific type of investor/customer: Epstein’s billionaire pedophile friends.

I kid you not, I bought a DVD player over this nonsense. Now my kids watch the same few used Disney movie and show DVDs however much they like, and I’m not paying these clowns monthly to be abused by them.

As long as our health is perfect, of course.

Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

But sometimes we get…

Sacrilege!

Not our fault everyone blows past the kind offer of : vimtutor on startup! (I kid. The default editor shouldn’t require a class.)

You’re 100% correct. Nano is a perfectly reasonable default.

That said, it is 2026. It also wouldn’t kill us to default to an interactive one-time prompt that defaults to nano, but offers one or two others, and removes itself after setting the user’s choice.

Like it cannot print invisible characters.

I was looking at an option to display invisible characters in Kate like last week. So it got better, I guess.

haha!

Sometimes I feel like my side of the holy war isn’t engaging in completely good faith.

I might switch sides to emacs if my fingers were long enough to reach the key combinations.

Maybe I’ll go try it, anyway!

…

What was the command to exit vi, again…?

But but but…vimtutor is right there on startup - so it’s an easily obtained diploma…

I’ll see myself out.

kate is fantastic, all around.

Ctrl+Alt+V makes the key bindings tolerable. (Vi mode)

Yes. Lack of :r! is what keeps me from using most editors that aren’t vim.

There’s so many things I don’t remember well enough to type accurately from memory, but I know the command to fetch quickly.