In the medieval period, there was the common idea that if something is too perfect, it must have been made by the Devil. To forestall accusations of having done a deal with the Devil, craftsmen would often deliberately introduce flaws in their design.

That’s why there are always gaps in my dovetails.

I made some panels like this this summer, to block the sun coming into our apartment, without blocking the light completely.

The canvas was more expensive than the wood, I must say. I just made squares, not divided panels, because I wasn’t sure how we would arrange them. I used lap joints for the corners and I just wrapped the canvas over the frame and stapled it at the back. I put a couple of feet on each one so that the canvas wouldn’t be touching the ground and get dirty.

So, nothing fancy at all, but they’re actually very pleasing to look at - the sunlight coming through them, especially. I can really recommend this as a project!

They are going to spend those 4 years doing everything they can to fix the next election as well. Gerrymandering, voter intimidation, you name it. By all means hide in bed to get over the shock but, if you stay there, you’ll need to stay there more than 4 years.

So an EU-backed distro could be the same. Yes, they would fund maintainers, but their own maintainers, not maintainers of upstream distros.

How much of Ubuntu’s funding goes to supporting debian? I actually don’t know.

I don’t, for example, see Ubuntu listed here: https://www.debian.org/partners/

Well, what better way to embrace FOSS than dismissing the efforts of all the existing distro maintainers? Welcome to the community, guys. Good luck building your cathedral next to the bazaar!

How about they instead work together with the distros and create a way of certifying a distro as gov-ready?

Exactly, and this is assuming that that detail was even in the photograph; I am only guessing - OP didn’t say so.

I don’t even know how widely it would be known to Brits, although Stonehenge has been in the news recently, on account of people throwing paint on it and bothering the lichen, so it might have been mentioned in those news reports.

I wrongly said that the Stonehenge photo was a test - OP said it was a training course.

If there were people in the photo conducting a celebration, that would let you know that it was the solstice, because people aren’t allowed near the stones at other times.

I doubt, though, that that is common knowledge to anyone from outside of the UK, so whoever designed that test has an unconscious bias.

They don’t only say static types. They add classes, inheritance, subtyping, and virtual calls. Mind you, the difference between the last 3 is quite subtle.

So, since I’ve started nit-picking, Self is also OO and has prototype-based inheritance (as does javascript, but I’m not sure I’d want to defend the claim that javascript is an OO language).

In this post I use the word “OOP” to mean programming in statically-typed language

So Smalltalk is not object-oriented. Someone tell Alan Kay.

PieDock

The author mentions that some of the changes broke things, but it’s a long way into the article before the word “test” appears. It’s only point 6/7 of his recommendations.

Making changes with no test coverage is not refactoring. It’s just rewriting. Start there.

AI developers: your copyrighted work is such a small contributor to the AI’s output that copyright doesn’t apply. Also AI developers: but our AI won’t work without it.

PieDock

Formula 1 switched to semi-automatic in the 1980s. The technology has only improved over the last 40 years. If fast is what you want, driving a manual is insanity.

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

It isn’t a big deal, but we do need the language to evolve a little bit. The problem with they/them is that it implies that you don’t know the person, or that it doesn’t matter who they are (like you say, you can’t or don’t want to use a more specific pronoun). It can feel quite rude to apply it to somebody that you do know.