I have no expertise in this field and this is what I got just from reading the article without doing any further research.

It seems that a consortium of giant tech companies got together to make a royalty-free video codec called AV1. This included getting legal agreements from a bunch of relevant patent holders that they wouldn’t pursue legal action against anyone implementing AV1.

However, due to the U.S. patent office’s current policy of issuing patents left and right and letting applicants sort out whether or not their patents are actually unique in court later, lawyers representing Dolby and a couple of other companies that hold some separate video-related patents have smelled money in the water and are trying to sort out whether or not their patents are unique in court.

Drum memory predates the Sinclair by quite a while. But there is an often repeated story involving an impossibly-optimised Blackjack program for a drum memory computer called “The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer”.

A friendly heads-up: I think you mean “Liberation Serif”. Serif and sans-serif (“without serif”) are common categories for fonts.

I sympathize with the point of the article, but if someone’s seriously citing Flash, which had widespread success for a run of about 15 years before being overtaken by later developments (driven in part by a billionaire with an axe to grind), as a short-lived “dead end” that was best avoided, then how long do they think is a sensible amount of time to wait to see if something’s worth spending time and effort? Nothing remains on top forever.

Man pages are the only reference material I know that has more information-free circular definition chains than Wikipedia. And I imagine that it’s for much the same reason; they’re primarily written and fought over by experts who only need terse reminder notes for themselves, and who can’t remember what it was like not spending every day up to their elbows in the subject.

I think that the big, highlighted quote a few paragraphs down–which I believe is also by the author of the article, even though they refer to themselves in the third person–seems somewhat at odds with what they say in the rest of the article. I would guess that they started writing it to make an emotional argument, then tried to back it up with logic, but along the way they lost their emotional momentum and forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing.

There’s an interesting section further down, though:

What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn’t let it, anyway.

There’s no need to get it back in the barn; the thing is lame, and only being kept propped up by a lot of (cash) injections and diversions. The facade will fall before they actually get it to work the way they pretend it works.

It’s the first law that I’m aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.

For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.

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You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.

It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.

I use Linux on hardware older and less capable than yours, and usually the only real show-stopper I find is a lack of Vulkan support. I don’t use any nVidia hardware, but my understanding is that older chips are supported decently by current Linux drivers. So I’d say you’ll probably be fine.

As for ten years from now, it’s uncommon for Linux software to remove features, and even if it happens, there’s virtually always a way for you stay on an old version if you really need to, because there are no forced updates. If you’re careful you can sometimes even keep the old versions of things for old software that needs it, while still having the latest version for software that can use it.

Frieren (Sousou no Furiren, "Frieren and the Funeral). It’s about what happens after the quest is finished. The elven mage Frieren was part of a band of adventurers that defeated the big bad many years ago. Before the party splits up and she goes off to travel the world studying magic, the group all agree to meet again in the future, after many years.

This is where the main story starts. Due to her elven heritage, Frieren has hardly aged at all. When she comes back, she’s just in time to see the human leader of the old party one last time before he dies, and she attends his funeral. She goes searching for the other old party members, and along the way she accidentally picks up some new friends and becomes the leader of a new party, having various adventures and run-ins with new bad guys.

The Mikado Method, eh?

(All together) Three junior devs at work are we,
Busy and harried as devs can be,
Compiler warnings flowing freely,
Three junior devs at work!

(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)

(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)

(Carlos) Don’t touch our “World’s Best Coder” mugs! (Laughter)

(All together) Three junior devs at work!

My apologies; I misunderstood your concept. I thought that you were talking about setting up some kind of central clearing house for funds, but now I see that you’re suggesting more of an automated report which is compiled for each user, locally, for them to act on manually at periodic intervals. That does seem to sidestep most of the legal issues.

Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?

From what I’ve seen, efforts to develop microtransaction/microdonation systems generally seem to have trouble with regulatory compliance, either through legitimate legal requirements that force them to do things that seem nonsensical to their users (My guess is that the registered servers issue OP mentioned with Flattr came down to this), or due to greedy intermediaries stalling and witholding under false pretences while they hold out for a bigger share of the money, without appreciating the already extremely thin margins involved.

SDL is written in C, but bindings are available for multiple languages, including C++ and C#. As it happens I was actually using it with C++. And there are other libraries you could use instead, like GLFW or Allegro.

I’ve never thought of C as being that much lower-level than C++, but I guess everything’s relative.

• You want to make a technically simple game, and want it actually to be able to run on a potato instead of just looking like it should, and you already have the skills or aren’t afraid to take the time to learn.

the cross platform is a pain.

It doesn’t have to be with libraries like SDL. Years ago I got stuck fighting all-in-one game engines that didn’t fit my design choices, precisely because I thought it would be worth it for platform independence. Then I found out about SDL, which was what I actually wanted.

If someone thinks that not using a pre-rolled engine with a full editing suite included is a waste of time, I can respect that. But there are options if you’d rather make your own but still don’t want to have to learn the ins and outs of multiple hardware architectures and operating systems.

Only if what you are printing onto is regular paper. My contention is that since printing itself has become a somewhat niche act for individuals printing at home, they’re more likely to be printing for specific reasons, which means that they’re more likely to want to print things like transfers or other specialized substrates that may not work well with laser printing.

Yes, I believe that laser printer toner lasts longer than fluid ink, although ink can last for years when stored in a properly sealed bottle rather than in a cartridge inside the printer, which is possible with a user-fillable cartridge.

Thanks to the proliferation of portable devices, a lot of people no longer need a printer for “regular” printing at all in 2026, and some of the more interesting printing substrates either don’t accept toner well or won’t survive the heat of a laser printer’s toner setting stage.

Also, while the technology is theoretically simpler, it may be harder for an individual to source or make the physical components like rotating drums and high-res LED arrays.

Anyone who is already familiar with HSR, imagine seeing this video and having it be the first time you’ve even heard of Homestar Runner.

You’d probably feel like some kind of tapeleg.