R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

Is at once hopeful and terrifying. A company that doubles in three months usually loses its culture. Hopefully won't happen here.

@atomicpoet @jeffjarvis #Microsoft is much more profitable now than when it owned 98% of the desktop OS market.

Microsoft is arguably the biggest Linux distributor on the desktop via WSL2.

Microsoft owns GitHub and therefore the namespaces of most of the world's open-source projects.

Booting Linux on your new laptop depends on Microsoft's goodwill in giving you the signing keys for Secure Boot, and on some new laptops booting Linux isn't permitted.

The vast majority of Linux users run Android, where they don't have root and aren't permitted to recompile their kernel.

This isn't what free and open-source Linux winning would look like. It's better than a Windows monoculture would have been, but it's a much, much less free world than 25 years ago.

@kashhill Power corrupts. The Meta bribery terror blacklist scandal was a darker version of this.

@BE This is what it felt like in 1996 and 1997 when the masses got on the internet. In a sense it's what looks like when you succeed in changing the world: the changed world still has the same people in it.

@kate To me this looks like "WebKit is the new Internet Explorer", except this time it's getting buyin from the W3C *before* adding new features the other browser doesn't support, instead of afterward. I don't know if you remember document.layers.

@lcamtuf YouTube search provides better search results than Google search. If search for "foo" tutorials on Google, if "foo" is something you could conceivably buy, you often get the Wikipedia article on "foo" and dozens of foo merchants. Search on YouTube and you get actual tutorials (and, often, product reviews by shill channels, but still reviews that show a foo in real use). The HTML pages are often still out there but don't show up in the search results.

Also, videos are objectively better for learning about woodworking, where things like visual texture, motion, and three-dimensional relationships are important; but not, I think, quantum physics. For software it can be helpful to see how an expert user uses the software, especially if it has a GUI, but often a manual would be better.

@lxo Probably, but maybe it'll still be crashing. More likely a much smaller Twitter will have more or less stabilized by that point. Hopefully it won't elect another Trump.

@harudagondi I find it helps to write some clients for the API first. Even unit tests can be good.

@lxo No, I still think it'll be very interesting to see what looks like six months from now!

@atomicpoet @mmasnick If Twitter collapses like Digg did, maybe it will prevent the Unitedstatesans from re-electing Trump? Is hard to imagine the necessary degree of insane polarization being sustainable on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook alone. Maybe the alt-right will collapse too.

@jwz Also can these ghosts do Reed-Solomon coding?

"[Lossless Convexification of Nonconvex Control Bound and Pointing Constraints of the Soft Landing Optimal Control Problem](http://larsblackmore.com/iee_tcst13.pdf)", #controltheory paper by Behçet Açıkmese, John M. Carson III, and Lars Blackmore, the guy who got the #SpaceX rockets to land on their tails like CGI special effects.

Abstract: "*Planetary soft landing is one of the benchmark problems of optimal control theory and is gaining renewed interest due to the increased focus on the exploration of planets in the solar system, such as Mars. The soft landing problem with all relevant constraints can be posed as a finite-horizon optimal control problem with state and control constraints. The real-time generation of fuel-optimal paths to a prescribed location on a planet’s surface is a challenging problem due to the constraints on the fuel, the control inputs, and the states. The main difficulty in solving this constrained problem is the existence of nonconvex constraints on the control input, which are due to a nonzero lower bound on the control input magnitude and a nonconvex constraint on its direction. This paper introduces a convexification of the control constraints that is proven to be lossless; i.e., an optimal solution of the soft landing problem can be obtained via solution of the proposed convex relaxation of the problem. The lossless convexification enables the use of interior point methods of convex optimization to obtain optimal solutions of the original nonconvex optimal control problem.*"

@ilpincy @abde I think a lot of the programming language design space remains unexplored. In large part is because many of the big wins at the language level happened early (named variables, automatic jump address calculation, infix expressions, conditionals, functions, garbage collection, dynamic typing) and, except for experimentation, reuse commonly trumps potential linguistic advantages.

To be concrete, is better to use OpenCV than to reimplement it in a better language.

@AccordionGuy I see, thanks!

@AccordionGuy Hmm, will 5000 hurried people make that much of an impact on the healthcare system of a city of 750k? And I think the whole SFBA is almost ten million.