Supervised Full Self-Driving seems like a euphemism for driving with a driving instructor. You fully drive yourself but someone supervises you while you do it.

I was one of those people too and the academic environment was honestly depressing. Almost none of the professors actually cared about the topics they taught, only about the ones that were their research subjects, on the topics they taught many were stuck at the state the introductory topics were at when they first graduated themselves (in IT where everything changes much more quickly than that). Many university wide decisions were nonsensical (e.g. teach memory management in OS classes in Java because Java was the language they standardized on for everything due to industry pressure). For Bachelor topics they only wanted to accept topics where you could tell you would basically spend months to write something that would end up in the round filing cabinet once it had served its grading purpose. Questions in larger classes were highly discouraged, even pointing out mistakes in the lecture materials (obvious indisputable ones that shouldn’t hurt anyone’s ego like some typo in the order of digits) got responses that discouraged doing that again.

The term bulimia learning has been used for well over a decade now to describe that cramming before an exam only to immediately forget all of it afterwards too. Testing in education is fundamentally broken and has been for a long time.

Not just Americans, the British political class has similar issues.

Then you probably won’t like the thought that an even smaller percentage of people who think they need to get ever richer and control ever more aspects of ever more people’s lives are basically ruining our offline world.

The main issue is that testing if someone knows and has the skills to do a job well (or at all) is a hard problem, whether you outsource that to people who write a piece of paper or try to do it in-house in the employing company. Hell, half the companies do not know if the employees they have had for years are any good at their job.

Pretty much all their other projects are not really worth it, e.g. that mobile OS, Firefox Send, their VPN, all those AI projects recently, Pocket,… and usually just lead to dead ends. Thunderbird might be an exception if I needed an email client but I do not.

And the ones that do seem useful and good bang for the buck, like Mozilla Observatory, get abandoned.

Oh, I thought you had some specific project in mind.

problem remains that there is no consistent design distro to distro

You might have had a point if you wrote that back in the days before phone UIs and Windows versions and websites all completely redesigning their UIs every 5 minutes but this is clearly nonsense at this point.

Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don’t know what distro they’re on? Nightmare.

No, actually the actual nightmare is them using Windows and asking me about it on the phone and me having to talk them through mouse clicks in an unfamiliar GUI instead of just telling them which command to enter in the terminal like I would on a sane OS like Linux.

True but not quite for the reason you probably quoted it. The computer is merely a force multiplier for the human stupidity.

The real problem with the search bar is that Microsoft chose to make it language dependent, so you will need to know entirely different search terms to navigate e.g. a German Windows install’s settings that way than an English one.

You are looking at this the wrong way. Nobody needs to compete with Windows and Mac, particularly volunteers do not want to be free support for people too lazy to learn the slightest thing for themselves and asking all the questions already covered prominently in the documentation again and again. Why would anyone optimize to get those people to Linux in their projects?

Not to mention that the terminal is just so much more efficient for a tutorial than that whole 20 screenshots with circles where to click nonsense. 20 screenshots you will have to redo when the GUI designer inevitably decides to do a “redesign” because they are bored and want to justify their existence.

cfw?

It feels like Microsoft is really going all in on this AI trend. Probably because they are well aware that they missed/were late to every major trend since the 90s (e.g. the Internet, music players, smart phones, gaming consoles,…) and they don’t have that much to lose any more with Windows’ inferiority becoming more and more apparent. So they are probably going for the high risk, high reward strategy where they will either lose the desktop OS market completely (in the likely case AI turns out to be just a regular hype cycle) or win big by being early (in the unlikely case that AI turns out to be much better than it looks like right now AND having expertise with this will help with better versions of this once they show up).

Mozilla stubbornly refuses to allow people to donate to Firefox specifically (as opposed to Firefox and their other random projects they pull out of the hat every other quarter or so to be used for any of them at their discretion). I would have set up a monthly donation to Firefox long ago if only they allowed donations just to Firefox. I have read many others complain about the same issue over the years.

Yeah, but in many, many more words than necessary to be honest.

Originally there also wasn’t any name-based virtual hosting, especially in SSL/TLS-based services like HTTPS so you needed one IP per name if you wanted to host multiple websites.

And part of the disappearance of www. now is probably that strange decision by Chrome to hide it.

Ideally you want to do one or the other unless you really like the redirect loop error page in your browser.

Originally the idea was that you would have a domain and then have a host under that domain for each service (e.g. mail.example.net, ftp.example.net, www.example.net,…). Of course eventually the web was used by a lot more people this directly than any other service so the main domain was also configured to point at the web server and then people added a redirect either in one direction (add www.) or the other (remove www.) on the first request.