If you don't let web developers manage history/state like this, we'd be going back to the inefficient world of, "every forward/back movement loads a whole page." (With lots of unnecessary round trip messages between the client and server while the user waits for everything to load).

Basically, the ability to manage history is a user-centric feature. It makes the experience better for them.

Managing lots of configuration files/scripts across many thousands of servers, desktops, devices, etc is a long-solved problem. Most enterprises use Ansible or similar.

In almost every way, managing many thousands of Linux desktops is much simpler and more straightforward than Windows. If you're using Ansible playbooks, you can keep everything nice and tidy in a single place and everything you'd ever want to customize is managed via a plaintext file you can modify with your editor of choice.

You can organize them however you want or even use a GUI to change stuff (if you pay for Ansible Enterprise or whatever it's called... Or use one of the FOSS alternatives).

Managing Linux desktops at scale really isn't much different than managing Linux servers at scale.

There's a bazillion tools that let you manage files like that across thousands of servers/desktops but the hot one right now in enterprises is Ansible (which would make it trivial to push out an update to such a configuration).

Chrome has a similar file: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/lockdown.json

"Ah yes, but what stops the user from downloading the portable version of a browser and using that?"

You can mount all user directories with +noexec. Also, Apparmor lets you control which applications can make network connections if you want to get really fine-grained.

Other applications have similar policy files. For example, Visual Studio Code has /etc/code/policy.json which—for example—would let your company lock down which extensions are allowed to be used/installed.

The most popular way to control user desktops that I've seen is to have your user login via LDAP (just like AD), optionally with Kerberos and then have their permissions to various things controlled via those groups. For example, if you were building a "desktop policy" for Linux users across your organization, you'd probably make a .deb or .rpm that installs some udev rules that grant or deny access to various things based on which groups the users are in.

Of course, you can also control things down at the user level. You could put a script in /etc/profile.d/ that does whatever you want when the user logs in. You can even make it dependent on how they login (detect remote SSH session or local login).

There's also dconf and KDE's Kiosk mode if you really want to lock shit down to annoy TF out of your users (haha).

Once you've got your Linux desktops setup the way you want (which is usually just a matter of making your_company_desktop.deb or .rpm) to customize things/permissions, you have so much power to do things you can't do on Windows. The fine-grain control in Linux is unreal: You can give a specific user access to run and do very, very specific things as root (Windows Administrator equivalent) without much effort at all.

Linux also lets you lock down the hardware in ways Windows doesn't support. For example, you can chattr +i to make certain devices/files immutable. You could compile a custom kernel that doesn't even have USB mass storage support. What's more secure than that? Haha.

BTW: You can also make all USB mass storage devices read-only with a simple udev rule. You can even add exceptions for special things!

The FTC wasn't doing their job between 1980-2020 because of their ridiculous standard of, "if it doesn't raise consumer prices, it must be allowed." This lead to massive consolidation in many industries which of course ended up raising prices and hurting consumers anyway.

Recently they've had some wins but overall they're still failing to do their job.

They've since moved on to the SSS strategy: Ship, Slip, Slop.

China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.

In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.

I think it's a very, very bad assumption. After trying GLM-5 and Qwen3 on Ollama Cloud, not only were they faster than OpenAI's offerings (by a huge amount) it was just as good if not better at doing what I asked of it.

Claude Code is still superior to anything else but GLM-5 and Qwen3 are easily just as good as GPT-5.X (for coding).

I'd turn that around and ask, "What makes you think the people would accept the gun nuts rebellion?"

Many would be celebrating in the streets if the military showed up with tanks and started blasting. Furthermore, there's enough people in the military from far, far outside whatever state is being threatened to care that much about the locals.

"Fuckin' Texas gun nuts"

    * Being an AI bot.
    * Using an LLM to generate it.

That "genericness" is what's missing in the router space. Literally every consumer router that comes out has some super proprietary design that's meant to be replaced in its entirety in 3-4 years. Many can run Linux, sure, but how many have a replaceable/upgradable board? How many are like a PC where you can install whatever OS you want?

Sure, you can forcibly flash a new OS (e.g. OpenWRT) but that is a hack. The company lets you do that because they figure they'll get a bit more market share out of their products if they don't lock the firmware so much. They key point remains, however: They're not just hardware—even though they should be!

The world of consumer routers needs a PC-like architecture change. You can buy routers from companies like Banana Pi and Microtik like this but they're not marketed towards every-day consumers. Mostly because they're considered "too premium" and require too much expertise to setup.

I think there's a huge hole in the market for consumer-minded routers that run hardware like the Banana Pi R4 (which I have). When you buy it, you get the board and nothing else. It's up to you to get a case and install an OS on it (with OpenWRT, Debian, and Ubuntu being the normal options).

We need something like the Framework laptop for routers. Not from a, "it has interchangeable parts" perspective but from a marketing perspective. Normal people are buying Framework laptops because geeky friends and colleagues recommend them and they're not that much more expensive/troublesome than say, a cheap Acer/Asus laptop.

The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.

Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.

This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.

A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."

When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.