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France does everything right except produce much software. I'm sure it can copycat things pioneered by the US, and 20 years later, but that's not exactly difficult.

Sounds like a pretty good deal for France to fork US software from 20 years ago, because shit sure hasn't improved much since then.

To me this is the point right? Everything that's spent enough time in the oven and has been commodified should be eventually launched as a public service. If we lived in a reasonable world this would be how things are done instead of installing permanent toll booths on everything and letting it get shittier and more expensive.

Doesn't really matter if copycat or not in this case. I'd argue it's even better to be a copycat in order to move faster.

why does it matter if it is difficult? You are right, these systems should be well understood by now. And public domain.

Obviously you've never seen French software, so why pretend like you have?

Counterpoints: Deezer, Doctolib, Back Market, Tidal, Adopte, Mistral, Dassault Systemes (the company behind the two main CAD softwares out there), Thales, Qonto, Kyutai, Mirakl, BeReal, Klaxoon, ABTasty, etc etc. We can do this all day.

Oh, and there are ton of official government open source projects.

And no, "but they're not as big as a FAAG" does not mean that the software isn't good or innovative.


Zoom isn't buggy I wouldn't say. It's really good.

That's been my personal experience, but colleagues on Linux are continually fighting it.

I gave up on the native Zoom client on Linux right away, it was completely broken. It worked well enough on a browser to get through the project though.

Same with Teams, the video calls work fine on a browser. You just can't use any background pictures or effects.


Teams in Firefox on Linux does work with backgrounds for me, and since a few months you can even upload custom backgrounds.

Actual calling works well enough, I would say it is more stable than the native Windows client ever was.


> You just can't use any background pictures or effects.

Thanksfully it is fairly easy to present a virtual webcam that is a composition of what your real physical webcam is showing and whatever background you want.


Can you give some pointers about this? I thought it's straight to kernel modules territory if I want a virtual webcam.

As one frog said to the other frog: it's only a couple of degrees warmer! What's the problem?

Again, this is a new piece of software. It does not affect existing login managers (eg SDDM) and nor does it affect KDE Plasma itself.

The approach the KDE team took here is 100% the correct approach and, crucially, does not affect Plasma’s cross platform support at all.

This whole thing has been blown out of proportion by armchair critics commenting with made up hypotheticals without any of them reading what the actual change was. It’s ridiculous


It's a minor temperature increase, but I believe that KDE quite explicitly does not intend to boil that frog.

I'm not sure how useful this pricing is for the future, as waymo is currently operating on semi-infinite Google money. If that stops, no doubt the price would change too.

The counterargument would be that the external investors (Sequoia, Andreessen, Fidelity, etc.) presumably priced in this exact risk when they agreed to pay $110B. They're not naive about Alphabet's role as backstop. The question is whether they believe the "semi-infinite money" assumption is durable enough over their investment horizon.

That's really good to know

The time up to and including Covid saw massive developer salary increases. They've dropped (and lots have been laid off) post-Covid, but the last ten years cannot be described as stagnation.

The salaries may be high in absolute terms, but they’re still low in relative terms - compared to what jumping ship would give you when you have a resume full of buzzwords.

> Observability: Tracking a single request across 10 services

I'm not sure if this is a discipline issue in the way that domain driven design, say, is a discipline issue. If you instrument requests with a global ID and point at tool at it then you're basically done from the individual team perspective.


Uh, that's not my experience at all.

Sure you can say e.g "this property wasnt set in this request while being processed by this service managed by this team", but why it wasn't set will inevitably need multiple teams, each doing in-depth analysis how such as state could've been caused because they always inevitably become distributed monoliths - the former is being provided by the instrumentation, but the latter isn't (and even the former is not perfect, as not all frameworks/languages have equal support)


This isn't valid criticism. Treat the article as just its own thing, regardless of who published it.

Here's another recent example:

‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?

(The Atlantic, Nov. 2025)


> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.

Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.


I don't know your friend's situation, but students who've been raised on screens may struggle a lot more to concentrate even on things they like than people who came across screens in adult life.

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