They can pick one of their backpack brands to keep (and eliminate/sell off the rest), or they can tack "VF" onto the front of each brand name, or something like that. A customer shouldn't have to dig into the fine print or do research to know whether two products are from the same manufacturer.

It makes me think of how great chess engines have affected competitive chess over the last few years. Sure, the ceiling for Elo ratings at the top levels has gone up, but it's still a fair game because everyone has access to the new tools. High-level players aren't necessarily spending more time on prep than they were before; they're just getting more value out of the hours they do spend.

The fussiest part of the whole site setup was getting light/dark mode to work in what I thought was the most obvious way. To me, if a website has light and dark modes, it should default the user's device's preferred color scheme, and as an added bonus for users with JS enabled, you might also have a toggle button. But by default, the theme just started in light mode no matter what until you clicked the toggle button, and they also didn't bother to make the button hidden if JS is disabled.

Same with the button for the built-in search feature; it would be visible even if it couldn't work. It's not that it was terribly hard to modify the theme and fix this – add `class="nojs"` to the body HTML, add a JS one-liner to remove nojs, and add a CSS rule to hide the buttons if they're inside `body.nojs`. It was just disheartening to see that this was the theme's default. Anyone making a website these days has to make extra effort to support what should be considered normal browser behavior.

But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.

And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.

Also the claims they make about the success of some of these technologies are very dubious. TypeScript is definitely not used by 80% of JavaScript developers, not even close. I know your average WordPress or Drupal developer is not using a compiled language. Perhaps it is used by 80% of GitHub repositories, but there is a lot of code that is not posted to GitHub.

And P.S. the scroll hijacking is no less annoying on desktop.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.

Ughhhhhh. Looks like they're doing the same nonsense as the last controller, and it won't work without Steam running. Such a disappointment; have to hope someone makes an open-source driver.

Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.

It is barely distinguishable from the first slide featured in the Phoronix article from today: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2026&image=gnu_hurd_1 It seems like there has been progress on other fronts, so I'm not sure why Phoronix ran a headline focused on very old news.

Interestingly, the 2018 version of the slide claims "80% of Debian archive builds"; I wonder what caused the regression. https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/microkernel_h... (page 26)