Good ideas are a decent subset, but you could also have a bit of "Greater Fool Theory" compliant ideas.

In Rust, you have Cargo.toml, in go, it's a rather simple go.mod.

And even in embedded C, you have platformio which manages to make due with a few .ini files.

I would honestly love to see the cpp folks actually standardizing a proper build system and dependency manager.

Today, just building a simple QT app is usually a daunting task, and other compiled ecosystems show us it doesn't have to be.

There are a few interviews of Dave Cutler (NT's architect) around where he explains this far better than I am here.

Overall, you have classic needs and if you don't care about OSS (either for auditability, for customizability or for philosophical choice about open source), it's a workable option with its strength and weaknesses, just like the Linux kernel.

There are already plenty of devices, from old phones to vacuum robots, where we have that or near enough.

Technically, we know how we could maintain/re-flash these devices.

Yet, we don't. Why? lack of standardization, specially the boot process in non-x86 platforms.

Having to maintain per device images is not really practical at scale.

Common mass produced products manufacturers have incentives to not mess-up too badly: recalls or warranties on such scales are a nightmare.

With military contracts, its a paid maintenance opportunity.

I would recommend looking into the chroot based build tools like pbuilder (.deb) and mock (.rpm).

It greatly simplifies the local setup, including targeting different distributions or even architectures (<3 binfmt).

But I tend to agree, these tools are not easy to remember, specially for the occasional use. And packaging a complex software can be a pain if you fall down the dependency rabbit hole while trying to honor distros' rules.

That's why I ended-up spending quite a bit of time tweaking this set of ugly Makefifes: https://kakwa.github.io/pakste/ and why I often relax things allowing network access during build and the bundling of dependencies, specially for Rust, Go or Node projects.

This stuff is a nightmare to manage, and with large code bases/products, you need a dedicated "devops" just to babysit the thing and avoid it becoming a liability for your devs.

I'm actually looking forward our migration to GHEC from on-prem just because Github Actions, as shitty as they are, are far less of an headache than Jenkins.

Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?

With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.

Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.

Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.

But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.

But being the first meant it got some oddities and the abstractions are not quite right imho.

A bit too Shell-esque, specially for arguments passing and the memory abstractions are a bit too leaky regarding memory management (reference management fills too C-esque for an interpreted language, and the whole $ % @ & dance is really confusing for an occasional and bad Perl dev like me). The "10 ways to do it" also hurts it. It lead to a lack of consistency & almost per developer coding coding styles. The meme was Perl is a "write only language".

But I would still be grateful of what it brought and how influential it was (I jock from time to time how Ruby is kind of the "true" Perl 6, it even has flip flops!).

In truth, these days, I feel the whole "interpreted languages" class is on the decline, at least on the server. There are a lot of really great native languages that have come up within the last few years, enabled in large part by LLVM. And this trend doesn't seem over yet.

Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages (lower perf but faster iterations) less compelling by being convenient enough while retaining performance. In short, we can now "have the cake and eat it too".

But the millions of lines in production are also not going awywhere anytime soon. I bet even Perl will still be around somewhere (distro tooling, glue scripts, build infra, etc...) when I retire.

Anyway, thank you Perl, thank you Larry Wall, love your quotes.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.

But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.

Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.

His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).

Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.

For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.

Some architectures are no longer practical with Linux. The kernel might still support it, but distribution support is sketchy.

For a SPARC64 server refurb project, the choices were pretty much OpenBSD or NetBSD in my case.

It's an awesome anti doom-scrolling antidote for Youtube, with a lot of customization possible.

I would definitely recommend it.

At least try it to see how much Youtube's design & recommendations actually trick our brain into passive watching and dooming scrolling.

But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto right.

It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists + independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).

It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".

To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views".

The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos owning the Washington Post to both push his personal views and Amazon's interests.

Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).

Most of French media, specially newspapers, are money sinks only surviving because they are useful to push the rent-seeking business or ideological agenda of their owners (Dassault, Bouygues, Lagardere, Arnault, Bettencourt, Saade, Pinault, Niel).

Also, just for context, Martin Bouygues, Bernard Arnault and Vincent Bollore, the respective owners of TF1 (main French TV channel), Le Parisien (major newspaper) and CNews/Europe1 (major TV channel & radio) are personal friends of Sarkozy (a la "witness at your wedding, god father of your son or let's celebrate your election on my yacht" kind of way).

The Figaro (main right-wing newspaper in France) and its owners, the Dassault family, are also not far away.

Seeing the Figaro website was actually quite funny. Because the evidences are so damming, their main page was textbook "how to propagate fake news with plausible deniability". It was mainly pro-Sarkozy Editorials/Tribunes from non-journalists people, articles titled with quotes from Sarkozy's supporters and the few articles actually on the case were about the side stories.

French press ownership map:

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA#&gid=1&pid=1

There are only two truly independent major media left in France: Mediaparte (the ones we have to thanks for Sarkozy's well deserved condemnations) and Le Canard Enchaine (a bunch of scandals, but lately, the "Affaire Fillion").

The rest is either owned by billionaires, state run, or is far smaller and doesn't have the aura, size & credibility to reveal such scandals.

It's more a question of culture (oversimplifying, sales vs engineering) and this is harder to change most of the time. Apparently, even the Max debacle was not enough.

1) The whole airspace environment is heavily regulated (ATC, rules, etc), cooperative (think transponders or TCAS for example) and usually quite sparse (several miles between planes).

2) Pilots are regularly trained and evaluated for these kind of take over in case of emergency.

3) You have two pilots monitoring each other.

4) The development cycles for these automations are far longer, and the QA a lot stricter.

5) At least in the most critical phases (take-off, landing), the automation is not exactly end-to-end. It's more the case of grouping batch of steps together into bigger actions to reduce the load on the pilots. The pilots are still quite busy during these periods and very much in the loop.