First — stop giving them ideas! 🤣

Second, a small rock and some tape would likely defeat that.

EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.

So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?

As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.

Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.

You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!

It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.

It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.

Summary for those who don’t get the references:

• In Futurama (a show about a young man who gets accidentally cryogenically frozen until the year 3000), Fry finds the fossilized remains of his pet dog from the year 2000. Ultimately he assumes his dog had a good and full life after his disapperance, but in the epilogue we see that his dog waited for him in front of his workplace (Panucci’s Pizza) throughout the seasons, regardless of the weather, until he aged and died.

• In Full Metal Alchimist: Brotherhood, the Elric brothers visit an alchemist (Shou Tucker) who is known for having created a chimera capable of understanding human speech. While they study under him, they also spent time playing with his 4 year old daughter Nina and her dog Alexander. Upon returning one day they find Shou has created a new chimera capable of understanding human speech in order to satisfy his yearly alchemist assessment requirements; when the chimera indicates it knows who the Elric brothers are and wants to go out and play it becomes obvious that the chimera was made by combining Shou’s own daughter with the family dog. The resulting being is very sad and confused and doesn’t really understand what has happened to it, and just wants to be back to normal, but there is no way to undo . This chimera is the creature pictured here.

Ultimately, these are two of the most heart-wrenching scenes in animation.

(PS: Fuck Shou Tucker!)

Arbitrarily and suddenly destroying all apps built with a certain tech stack…

Except they aren’t. Sure, PWAs may be slightly more disadvantaged on iOS/iPadOS than they are now, but they haven’t been “destroyed”. And they continue to work exactly as they did with the prior iOS/iPadOS release in all the rest of the world.

Everyone seems to think Apple is playing some sort of 4D Chess to kill off PWAs — but if Apple wanted to kill off PWAs they could just disable the functionality completely globally tomorrow, and they’d likely face no repercussions for doing so. They don’t even need an excuse to do so.

I’m not claiming that Apple is acting honourably here; merely that if they actually wanted to kill PWAs it wouldn’t require some sort of Rube Goldberg machine-style planning to do it. There is no conspiracy here.

The title appears to be quite the reach. If Apple wanted to kill PWA’s, they would have done so worldwide. There is absolutely nothing preventing them from disabling them in the US and Canada (and much of the rest of the world) today, but they haven’t — they’re only disabling them in the EU.