I have wondered about the prospect of an aircraft carrier that uses rotary-wing drones to launch and recover the fixed-wing aircraft. That’d give you a lot more flexibility as to the form factor of the ship, since you don’t need to do the deceleration or acceleration on the ship, let you launch and recover directly from stuff like submarines (and not like the I-400 class, which was really a seaplane carrier).

The US has been working on fixed-wing UAVs that are launched and recovered from a fixed-wing airborne aircraft carrier, Gremlins. If you can do that, I’d imagine that it’d also be possible to launch and recover them from a rotary-wing drone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynetics_X-61_Gremlins

Use archive.org’s Wayback Wachine.

https://web.archive.org/

I mean, internal CI and version control systems go down too. Like, if GitHub has substantially worse downtime than an whatever internal system one runs, fair enough.

Git’s distributed, so downtime isn’t usually a huge deal compared to a non-distributed version control system.

I think that the largest issue is actually that GitHub provides a centralized commit review system (and, to be fair, so are many internal systems) that one uses to review pull requests. Like, a CI run being deferred usually isn’t a huge deal. Version control is probably distributed these days. But code review is something that you’d like to keep going.

If you do code review in email or something, it’s distributed. You can keep working. If your email server goes down, it might prevent new messages from reaching other users, but all of the review requests you have can be worked on and any review you’ve already received can be read. But if people are using some centralized Web-based code review system, and that goes down, then that kinda halts a lot of stuff.

Same centralized problem for issue tracking.

EDIT: I’ve never used a distributed issue tracker, but apparently they are indeed out there:

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

EDIT2: A lot of issue trackers involve people attaching large files to issues, so there might be some fundamental scalability issues in that regard for distributed operation; might need to centralize that part. That being said, I’d rather temporarily lose access to just a large-file-hosting server than to that and all of the other issue data.

Note that this is specific to Germany (or, probably, the EU, but they’re using Germany as a benchmark). German DDR5 prices had started coming back down slightly earlier in the year — I remember articles earlier in the year commenting on that. According to this article, they’re now drifting back up again, albeit slowly.

I don’t know if “explode” is really the right term. The price changes since the initial increase around late 2025 and early 2026 haven’t really been dramatic.

https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/01/18/apollo-a6000-review-the-ultimate-68k-amiga-rebuilt-for-the-modern-age/

Apollo A6000 review: the ultimate 68K Amiga, rebuilt for the modern age

The Apollo A6000 ships with 2 GB of Fast RAM

It succeeds where emulation cannot, delivering the tactile, hardware‑level experience of owning a new Amiga‑class machine in 2025/2026.

https://www.apollo-computer.com/a6000.php

:-)

Though that one I suppose can be avoided, as you can use a programmable universal remote instead.

I mean, I wouldn’t personally get a Switch 2 or their subscription service, but I don’t see why this dedicated button is especially problematic. Suppose the same functionality were accessed via chording two buttons. Would that eliminate the objections? I’d assume not.

That’s like half a years salary

Also, it’s a post-tax $50k, whereas your earned income is a pre-tax $100k in that scenario.

There are some limits on what you can put in a Roth IRA in a year. I don’t think that you can contribute $50k in one year.

searches

https://www.schwab.com/ira/roth-ira/contribution-limits

The maximum total annual contribution for all your IRAs combined is:

• Tax Year 2026 - $7,500 if you’re under age 50/$8,600 if you’re age 50 or older.

• Tax Year 2025 - $7,000 if you’re under age 50/$8,000 if you’re age 50 or older.

For single filers, in 2026, your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) must be under $153,000 to make a full Roth IRA contribution.

Hmm. I dunno if you can defeat that via the Roth backdoor loophole.

searches

Sounds like not. That apparently defeats the more-restrictive income-induced contribution limit, but not the absolute cap on contribution limit.

https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/article/how-to-set-up-backdoor-ira

“Backdoor Roth IRA” is a term that describes a strategy used by high-income earners who can’t contribute to a Roth IRA because their income is above certain limits. Rather than contributing directly to a Roth, the backdoor strategy calls for contributing to a traditional IRA and then converting it to a Roth.

EDIT: That being said, would be possible to invest it and to annually max out the contribution. Have to pay capital gains taxes on the gains you make prior to getting it into the Roth account.

EDIT2: If you’re currently working somewhere with a 401(k) that you aren’t maxing out, I think that you can max that out. That apparently increases the annual absolute contribution limit.

https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/earn-too-much-contribute-Roth-IRA-conversion

High income taxpayers can still benefit from the tax advantages of a Roth account by converting traditional IRA or 401(k) dollars to Roth, or by contributing to a Roth 401(k) if available. Roth conversions have no income or contribution limits, but do require payment of applicable federal and state income taxes.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/401k-contribution-limits

For tax year 2026, the most you can contribute to a Roth 401(k), a traditional 401(k), or a combination of the two is $24,500.

I’m not a huge fan of tomatoes in isolation, but there are a lot of very popular foods that incorporate tomato. Hamburgers have tomato. Chili has tomato sauce. Pizza has tomato sauce. Pico de gallo—what most people in the US refer to when they say “salsa”—has tomato.

There are a substantial number of non-commercial FOSS games that aren’t on Steam.

Many—though not all—of them are packaged in Linux distros.

Luanti, basically a FOSS Minecraft clone, is one example; that’s in Debian.

A number of older games occur to me that aren’t either in Linux distros or on Steam. They aren’t necessarily the top FOSS games, but people may not be aware of them, if they rely on looking in distro packages or Steam to find things.

Linley Henzell, the guy who did Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, which later became the well-known roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, had a couple of open-source games that he wrote way back. Overgod looks like it’s been packaged and is in Debian. Lacewing is in Fedora, but not in Debian.

Video of Lacewing

Video of Overgod

There’s a genre of games based on Paradroid. One of the first games I played on Linux was in this genre—NightHawk. It used to be in Red Hat Linux, but it looks like at some point, it fell out of the package repository, as it doesn’t appear to be in present Fedora, and it’s not in present Debian either today. Not on Steam, either.

I can’t find any videos of anyone playing NightHawk on YouTube.

Abuse is a DOS-era action platformer, heavy on jumpscares, that was open-source and had some of the data files (the ones for the shareware version) put into the public domain. Could use the full game’s datafiles too, if you got ahold of them. I think that that used to be packaged and in Red Hat Linux at one point, but it’s not in Fedora or Debian these days, and it’s not on Steam.

Video of Abuse

Surprisingly, while Empire—a very early game in the genre—is in Debian, xconq is not, and doesn’t look like it’s in Fedora either. Neither are on Steam. You may have played later hex-based strategy wargames in the genre, like Battle for Wesnoth.

Video of xconq

There is a very large collection of non-open-source-but-free text-based interactive fiction out there. These are games that are all or almost all text, where one writes instructions to the game in a somewhat-natural-language format and has the game respond. Zork is a (not-free, commercial, but you may be aware of it) early example of a game in the genre. Sites like IFWiki and IFDB catalog these. Many of the runtimes exist on Linux distros; gargoyle-free is a graphical frontend in Debian that can display games written for many different engines, and there are various terminal-based frontends, but the actual games are not generally packaged in Linux distros or on Steam. One notable exception—Anchorhead, a Lovecraftian game, was updated and had a commercial (and graphical) release on Steam a bit ago (which I cannot seem to get running on Proton under Linux, though given that it’s Electron-based, maybe it’s possible to run it natively using chromium…I’m not really long on Electron familiarity). I think that the reason that they haven’t seen more popularity recently is partly because of the rise of the smartphone and touchscreens and onscreen keyboards. It’s a pain to play them without a real keyboard, which many smartphone users don’t have available. If I were going to recommend one particular game that I’ve enjoyed, maybe Babel, for the TADS interactive fiction engine.

Do a video search with “site:youtube.com” on the various Web search engines that have a video search.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bif+naked+let+down&iar=videos

You don’t need to use YouTube’s search engine to search YouTube.

EDIT: I mean, many of you, like me, probably long-since tried and then gave up on using Reddit’s (really bad, at least last time I tried it) search engine to search Reddit, but found that doing “site:reddit.com” searches on Web search engines was still useful. The same principle applies elsewhere…

EDIT2: Plus, you may not even want the site:youtube.com qualifier, if you’re fine with videos from other video-hosting websites.

If I had to make a guess, not handling cash is a way of helping tamp down on crime, and the benefit is probably relatively-larger in poorer countries. Like, it’s hard to rob a store if the guy at the counter has no access to the money that the customers have been dropping off.

'course, cash is good for privacy, and especially when compared to a smartphone app, but…

Bring back the penny.

The penny going away is not cash going away.

Trying to even find some estimate of inflation going back that far is a pain, but it looks like the smallest federally-issued denomination was the half-cent coin, in 1793.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent

https://www.in2013dollars.com/

Based on the above, a half-cent would be 17¢ today. The dime today is worth less than the half cent.

I’d be more-concerned about whether new bills of sufficiently-large denominations are available to make using cash practical, not coins of very small denomination.

The issue with the penny is that the handling costs are significant. Like, getting rid of it means that businesses don’t need to pay the costs of processing it. (It is not, I might add, the issue that Trump gave as justification for ending minting it, which is that it costs more to manufacture than the face value of the coin.)

I mean I’m new here

You have already become part of the solution!

$90, which makes it one of the most expensive keycaps I think I’ve ever covered on this site.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1036438779/gold-greenman-14k-solid-gold-with?show_sold_out_detail=1&ref=nla_listing_details

Gold Greenman - 14K Solid Gold with Genuine Emerald Gemstone Eyes / Keycap Worthy of Royalty 585 Golden / Artefact for Mechanical Keyboard

$4,837.37

Most of those artsy keycaps that I’ve seen go do their blingy design and then encase the whole thing in clear plastic shaped like a regular key so that it doesn’t have a weird shape.

Example:

https://www.keychron.com/collections/artisan-keycaps/products/magic-animal-resin-artisan-keycap

I don’t play games multiplayer these days, but probably Carrier Command 2.

A team plays a crew on an aircraft carrier (well, really an amphibious assault ship).

There aren’t fixed roles in the game, but a single player is going to have a hard time handling all the workload in the game (and certainly won’t play optimally). I do play the game that way; it’s possible.

If you’re playing multiplayer, though, I think that you’d have a pretty hard time if all the players on a team are just going off and doing their own thing, without coordinating, though. I mean, they’re operating one ship and having to coordinate logistics for it, allocating ship power, operating various weapons systems and sensor systems on the amphibious assault ship, operating a fleet of support ships, managing construction of supplies, and commanding and operating a bunch of ship-borne vehicles that need time on the amphibious assault ship’s deck to launch or recover or need to be deployed or recovered via the well deck. It’d be pretty unplayable if you weren’t setting up common goals and then parceling out tasks.

I have someone coming for check-ins, but they can’t come in 5 times every day to give food,” a Reddit user said.

You can pamper your cat however you want, but your cat is not going to die if they don’t have someone portioning out food five times a day.

Yeah, the user experience of “just wipe cookies on browser exit” is a lot better than “have a million prompts all over zillions of sites”.

However, regarding “every single damn time”…some sites can have their “do you want cookies” popup just blocked by the Firefox I still don’t care about cookies addon. It’s not a solution for every site out there, but it’ll get a lot of them.

It’s also possible to use another extension, Behind the Overlay on some sites. This does require a click, so manual action, but it tries to identify “pop-over” content that covers up the browser window and remove it with that click. It’s really intended as a more-general solution to “pop-over” stuff, but cookie pop-ups often take this form and can be dismissed.