As a German, well, I don’t understand enough about the US side of things to answer to this, but I do always get spooked when I see nations pulling shit like that.

And, by the way, I do hope the USA finally get 9/11 under wraps this year: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/09/07/notice-on-the-continuation-of-the-national-emergency-with-respect-to-certain-terrorist-attacks-3/

I mean, these communities do get created when someone feels like there’s a reason to. There’s just no council or whatever regulating when and where a community gets to be created, so any user on any instance can decide to open up and promote their community.

And frankly, I have no idea what the precise effects are. When you subscribe to all of these, it won’t really be much different from just one big community in that sense. It may mean, though, that someone new accidentally joining only one of the communities will not be presented all the content they want, yeah.

On the flip side, having it split is kind of cool, because you can decide to only subscribe to 2 out of 4 communities, if you only want half as much of this content in your feed. Or you can decide to subscribe to all of these, but not to the one on angry-instance.net, because you don’t like the tone of the discussions in that one.

Yeah, it’s federated, meaning you can subscribe to each of them and post to whichever one you fancy. If you want to post to multiple, it’s a good idea to use the cross-post feature.

Having only one singular official community would be rather bad, as then the respective server owners and moderators would have central control like on Reddit.

Hmm, yeah, it is a bit surprising to me, too, especially for an audio issue, but it’s always possible that you had some weird configuration values in about:config for historic reasons and now some new code, that came in with a Firefox update, isn’t working with that configuration.

Either way, it happens often enough that Mozilla has a troubleshooting routine for it, too, namely refreshing your profile.

If I remember correctly, it places your old profile data into a folder in your Desktop folder. But you can also separately backup your profile by closing Firefox and then copying ~/.mozilla/firefox/ onto an external hard drive or such.

Does it also still happen in fresh profile? It will be like a factory-reset Firefox (except that you can go back to your current profile), so then it definitely wouldn’t have anything to do with your Firefox configuration.

Does the problem still happen in Troubleshoot Mode?

Well, if you’re self-hosting GitLab, there might not be much of a difference. Codeberg is hosted by a non-profit organization, so you don’t have to self-host it.

The open-source software that it uses, Forgejo, is also more so developed by the community, rather than just one corporation, who could change the license for future updates at any point.

Huh, so Tony Hoare invented null and then Graydon Hoare invented Rust, immediately terminating the existence of null which does not have a traditional null value.

It’s a format published by Google without much industry input. I imagine, that’s why it isn’t seeing terribly much adoption.

AVIF and JPEG-XL might do better, but they’re still relatively young formats.

Yeah, GIF is an extremely old format and rarely used these days. You just still see files being called “.gif”, even though they’re APNG or MP4 or something else under the hood.

Making the API version a feature flag is a very interesting idea.

Excuse me, Windows is the cheap copy of KDE.

It’s like camouflage, but for stairs.

I actually even made my own bullshit-Spotify. As in, I’ve got a server running on a single-board computer which reads my music folder and serves a small music player as a webpage.

I didn’t want to install a music player client on my work laptop, but still wanted to listen to my own songs there.

Kann konfirmieren. Achso ne, Moment, kann ich nicht, bin ja Atheist.

What the others wrote is already pretty good. An interesting observation I made in this regard: If you take a white noise sample and cut it really short, it sounds quite a bit like a snare drum.

That’s kind of the level of randomness you can expect from various unpitched percussion instruments. They don’t just have one tone, or the tone from multiple octaves layered on top of each other, like pitched instruments typically have.
Rather they’re all over the place, with many tones layered on top of each other, and those tones change rapidly, too. So, it kind of has many pitches and therefore not really any particular one either.

But that is what I mean with it needing an extension of the language.

So, I’m not saying you could just build a library that calls existing PHP functions to make it all work. Rather I’m saying there’s certain machine code instructions, which just cannot be expressed in PHP. And we need those machine code instructions for actually managing memory. So, I am talking about reading/writing to memory not being possible, unless we resort to horrible hacks.

Since we are building our own compiler anyways, we could add our own function-stubs and tell our compiler to translate them to those missing machine code instructions. But then that is a superset of PHP. It wouldn’t be possible in PHP itself.

Again, I’m not entirely sure about the above, but my web search skills couldn’t uncover any way to actually just read from a memory address in PHP.

I mean, I’m a bit out of my water there, both in terms of the featureset of PHP and what’s actually needed for a kernel, but I’m still gonna go with no.

For one, PHP uses reference counting + garbage collection for memory management. That’s normally done by the language runtime, which you won’t have when running baremetal.

Maybe you could implement a kernel, which does as few allocations as possible (generally a good idea for a kernel, but no idea, if it’s possible with PHP), and then basically just let it memory leak until everything crashes.
Then again, the kernel is responsible for making processes crash when they have a memory leak. Presumably, our PHP kernel would just start overwriting data from running processes and eventually overwrite itself in memory(?). Either way, it would be horrendous.

Maybe you could also try to implement some basic reference counting into your own PHP code, so that your own code keeps track of how often you’ve used an object in your own code. Certainly doesn’t sound like fun, though.

Well, and secondly, I imagine, you’d also still need an extension of the language, to be able to address actual memory locations and do various operations with them.

I know from Rust, that they’ve got specific functions in the stdlib for that, see for example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/ptr/index.html#functions
Presumably, PHP does not have such functions, because its users aren’t normally concerned with that.

How? You’d need to compile it down to machine code somehow, for the processor to have any clue how to run it. And you’d need some custom library with custom compile instructions, to be able to control memory allocations, memory addresses etc…

I did a quick search and found two operating systems written in JS, both of which cop out when it comes to the kernel. Did you maybe mix it up with those?

Good thing that this isn’t actually possible…