The directive gives quite wide exemptions for reverse engineering, but as there's no reverse engineering here, just documenting public APIs, codifying and interfacing with them, it seems it is more than OK for the compatibility layer to exist.

Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.

There are a multitude other trivial ways this could be accomplished, but they chose the "lets squeeze the market" and "fuck the modders" option.

The company is a part of the society, and has the responsibility of providing support for their devices. Society provides the customers and money, and the company has the obligation of providing support.

They could just burn the serial to the silicon and when someone needs support, they need to provide the serial and they cross-reference the data tied to the serial number. Too much ram? "Yeah, sorry, we can't guarantee the operation of your device. Here's a 5% off coupon for our store to get one with our genuine hardware"

THIS WAS SUCH AN EASY MARKETING WIN :(

Requiring code to be explicit about its invariants by default is just plain good design and makes things more robust. And when being more exact about invariants, you can reap the algorithmic benefits.

[1] Aha, now I see why language models use this so frequently and why it might be overrepresented in the data. This is a perfect way to move the blame from the person you're responding to, if they're mistaken. They probably have a super, super overtuned "politeness" gym using sentiment analysis that tries to reword answers to not blame the misunderstandings of the person. Then this blame shifting unfortunately gets re-used as this super, super common phrase.

Nokia had a "means to an end" type of perspective to software, it was all made to be basically disposable and they didn't have great "steward of the platform" type of effort.

Also, if we take a gander at the timelines, unfortunately QT and Maemo were happening in parallel, and of course Maemo was based on GTK. (But QT was still a Nokia proprietary tech back then.) Right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing etc.

Not that any of this means anything, just felt that this was all relevant.

Starting a lot of the components as greenfield projects will fortunately help a ton with shedding years and years of legacy cludge, hacks and desktop first design. Without mentioning the colossal amount of friction they would've faced if they tried to upstream any of the code they would've produced by the end. "We don't care about that issue. Closing."

Because of the above, they still would've needed to have their own fork regardless and still would've eventually diverged further and further -- so why bother? With a greenfield project, you can just optimize to your specific constraints. If the maintenance becomes too burdensome, just pick up the best of your design and reimplement them onto the non-greenfield project, everyone wins :D

  By the time you have an out-of-order core

Doing the deliberate choice of leaving flags out of the core and then using them in the fp ops ext will nudge designers towards "this is probably the point you should think about out-of-order execution"

I do work purely because of idealistic reasons. I'm not actually owed anything, I'm working because of us, humanity. Yeah, people are going to slack, and that's just life. It's just statistics, optimize society to such a configuration that people acts have a place and get the support they need. Most of the "slackers" who represent the people just living on the UBI type system you described, probably don't do it as a direct choice. Most likely they feel like they can't contribute to society, but that's something that's solvable. It's a matter of education and culture.

About your quote:

  "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

Of course, the good times also had their downsides, lots of complacency in politics and not feeling the need to fight for better, because things were already better than they've ever been!

FWIW, I feel like the press in Finland doesn't try to "win" points by pointing out the humiliation and the utter failure of the current state of affairs in the US, because that point is plainly obvious, but the reporting more closely reflects the forces and agenda going on under the surface.

The embarrassment stuff is more for the coffee-table chitchat and having a collective sigh of relief with your co-workers that we're not so intimately close to the whole mess there.

So cool that the mut_or_default now actually correctly borrow checks. I'll be watching for cool new patterns that this'll allow in the future!