The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!
Readit Newsnycticorax commented on The window chrome of our discontent pxlnv.com/blog/window-chr... · Posted by u/zdw
They're just moving to abolish something that should have been abolished decades ago, but wasn't for XKCD 1172 reasons.
Middle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard behavior on Linux since the 1990s. This just seems to me like more of GNOME's "simplicity at all costs" run amok. I'm a power user. I want poser user features. So I use KDE, a project run by people who care about power users and their needs. I'm happy for you if GNOME meets your needs.
I'm not surprised that GNOME would contemplate this: it seems like a very GNOME-y thing to do. (And maybe this is a good thing for GNOME users. But this kind of thing is also why I use KDE.) But why would Firefox feel the need to touch this? Surely this is a DE-level setting, and Firefox should simply go along with the DE behavior so that its behavior is consistent with the rest of the apps running in the desktop session.
Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode code points?
nycticorax commented on Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows healthisotherpeople.subst... · Posted by u/brandonb
"A Fairytale Map of Every Dollar of America's $5T Healthcare System" is the complete, accurate title.
Is this funded by an insurance company?
It would help if you would say what exactly you think is wrong with it.
nycticorax commented on Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE jriddell.org/2025/09/14/a... · Posted by u/thangqt
So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.
But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.
Am I missing something? Being unfair to someone?
nycticorax commented on This is my brain on leeches todaythings.substack.com/... · Posted by u/aebtebeten
My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they were in, say, the 1970s, but still. They're also a good system for neurophysiology education, because they are cheap and easy to obtain, have large-ish neurons that are identifiable from animal to animal, and their nervous system has a relatively simple organization.
nycticorax commented on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/... · Posted by u/tobr
For what it's worth I think Go's MVS somewhat meets the desire here. It does not require lockfiles, but also doesn't allow use of multiple different minor/patch versions of a library: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs
I believe Zig is also considering adopting it.
If there are any dependencies with the same major version the algorithm simply picks the newest one of them all (but not the newest in the package registry), so you don't need a lockfile to track version decisions.
Go's go.sum contains checksums to validate content, but is not required for version selection decisions.
Strongly endorse. That paper is really wonderful. It seems to me that MVS is the solution to the version selection problem, and now we just have to wait for awareness of this to fully percolate through the developer community.
The post title implies that all French villages have no more drinking water, which is not the case. Sounds like it's 16 villages, all near each other. Still a big deal, but not nearly as bad as if it was all of France.
DOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012