As a FOSS advocate, I am quite astonished that this space has no FOSS "product." I mean PBX has things like asterix. We have good servers like ejabberd and prosody for XMPP. There are excellent voice chats like mumble.

Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage.

I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".

I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.

I doubt you break your leg every year though. The kind of companies that we're talking about (big tech that are national champions) offers health insurance (among other benefits) and 200-500k USD/year salaries.

I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.

The thing is that in Europe, you don't need your employer to have health insurance. It's more beneficial for everyone in the end (well, obviously not for the private health insurance companies who care more about their margins than public wellness).

I really don't see money as an incentive. Political and economic stability of the whole country is much more important. Of course you need enough to afford food and roof, but after that, I'm not chasing it.

I'm a freelance, and I take fun jobs, not jobs that pay well.

> I think culture and quality of life not withstanding, the raw numbers simply don't favor the EU becoming a tech leader with the current incentives.

But maybe culture and quality of life should not be ignored :-).

Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high, and you get the insane salaries, and your healthcare is oftentimes mostly if not completely covered by your employer (I pay literally $0 out of pocket for high quality healthcare here in San Francisco).

> Quality of life in places like San Francisco and New York is very high

Quality of life is also a cultural thing. I know it's hard to understand for US people (I truly believe it is the case for cultural reasons), but many people really don't want the lifestyle of the US for all sorts of reasons. For some people, quality of life means easy access to healthy food, or to nature, seeing trees instead of giant concrete parking lots or 6-lanes highways, etc.

Have you ever been to San Francisco? How many 6 lane highways do you think exist in the city of San Francisco?

I can tell you (I live here) -- there are none. SF is one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, and I'm trying my hardest to visit as many cities on earth as possible.

I think the OP used "breaking a leg" as an analogy. Interesting that you didn't pick that up.

A analogy for major health events that demand a lot of money, to which I replied you don't have $major_health_event every year. Interesting that you didn't pick that up.

If its not just breaking a leg, than you can be sure that you'll have at least one or two in a 10 or 20 years, each one you'd have to pay more than 50kUSD or more for full treatment including pills. In most of Europe, you'll be paying close to 0.

The article is basically "we use PostgreSQL, it works, but we had to do some optimization to make it scale".

I don't really get the point here. What is novel and great? It feels they followed the first " how to scale pg" article.

Claude started to get "wonky" about a month ago. It refused to use instructions files I generated using a tool I wrote. My account was not banned but many of the things I usually asked would just not produce any real result. Claude was working but ignoring some commands. I finally canceled my subscription and I am trying other providers.

I love neovim but I always forget the keybind I did set myself, "which key" helps a lot here. There are many very nice addons like this that can help!

I'm sure design theory says the new ones are better, but the very first one was much clearer for users. Also on the phone I could say "click on the ink with the pen".

There is no such "design theory," only schools of design

There are basic principles of design -- of balance, emphasis, color, weight, etc. -- that are very much part of a general "design theory". That aren't dependent on any particular school of thought.

I feel like this is actually quite a bold claim. Just within this thread there is wild disagreement. The term “design” is so insanely broad. There are Dieter Rams-style principles of functional objects that have sort of “won out”, but with graphical design, it’s essentially art, it’s all so subjective.

I don't think so. Nobody disagrees that a brighter color draws more attention than a subdued one, or that the eye is drawn to a heavier weight before a lighter one. Nobody disagrees that it looks more balanced to have the round parts of letters like "O" and S" extend slightly beyond the baseline and cap line, beyond where the bottom and top os "E" and "B" are. These, and 200 (?) other things, are the basic principles that everyone learns and plays with -- that graphic designers are taught. It's the vocabulary of design, and is universal. "Design theory" is one way of referring to it -- theory of color, shape, etc. The things that make things clear or confusing. It's really quite objective, in the sense of what looks pleasing and balanced to the eye. It doesn't appear to be cultural.

Schools of design have more to do with values and purpose, and following fads and trends and all that. Maybe that's what you're referring to? They can have their own "theories". But when people talk about "design theory" they're usually talking about the basic principles/vocabulary of design.

> Nobody disagrees that a brighter color draws more attention than a subdued one, or that the eye is drawn to a heavier weight before a lighter one.

But they disagree on which of those is "good design" in which context. For example, some want bold colors loudly distinguishing app icons, some want a consistent minimal theme (idk the state of desktop customization today but it was pretty wild in the early 2000s).

> Nobody disagrees that it looks more balanced to have the round parts of letters like "O" and S" extend slightly beyond the baseline and cap line, beyond where the bottom and top os "E" and "B" are.

I'm not totally sure what this means but it sounds incredibly dubious to state as fact and there are no doubt heavily used fonts that don't do it.

For virtually any "universal" graphic design "rule" there will be successful examples of things that did not follow it. There will be a camp that disagrees with it. They also change and drift, they're relative to time and place, nothing is really static. There can be inherent value in explicitly doing something as a counterpoint or juxtaposition to a dominant trend.

I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't learn the vocabulary and the body of accumulated experience, but there's no way you're going to make a universally right and objectively correct decision.

> But they disagree on which of those is "good design" in which context.

Which is why I literally said there are different schools of design.

> I'm not totally sure what this means but it sounds incredibly dubious to state as fact and there are no doubt heavily used fonts that don't do it.

If you don't know one of the most elemental rules of typography, then maybe you should look it up rather than doubt it.

> I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't learn the vocabulary and the body of accumulated experience, but there's no way you're going to make a universally right and objectively correct decision.

You're missing the distinction I made between basic principles of design, and schools of design. Nowhere did I claim that there are "correct" "decisions". But there are principles of design that are, in fact, universal.

I wish this was better understood.

I remember growing up with Apple computers, even the black-and-white Macs were easier to understand than today's nonsense, with its "liquid glass" and hidden modes like scrollbars that suddenly appear.

Kid Pix was for kids. Kids could understand it. Easily.

Macs were easy to use and understand. What happened? Steve Jobs passed away, that's what happened... and everyone stepped up to "make their mark", first of all Jony Ive.

On the phone you can now say "Command + space, then search pages"

For a moment I thought you meant you could say "command space" to Siri on iOS and was prepared to have my mind blown.

That icon is pretty terrible. Fountain pens were obsolete 50 years ago and ink in bottles is even more outdated. What's with the shiny spherical bottle? It feels like a hipster icon design to me.

Of course picking a meaningful icon is trés difficult.

If we are given the name and then we learn the icon, then perhaps it doesn't matter too much what the icon is?

> Fountain pens were obsolete 50 years ago and ink in bottles is even more outdated

My friend, you have no idea what you’re missing out on. Even cheap fountain pens can be very good these days, and we are living in a golden age of bottled inks.

> My friend, you have no idea what you’re missing out on

Being left handed has its advantages, however smearing wet ink over the page as you write doesn't endear one to nibbed pens.

And leaked ink truely sucks (although I would guess modern technology is better at avoiding that).

Is a fountain pen good for illustration? The very very small amount of writing I do these days is usually mixed words with images/symbols/lines.

To me out in the colonies, fountain pen culture appears to be more about either signaling pretentiousness (what is Montblanc) or designer hipsterism.

I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain pen?

> I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain pen?

Not a lot, but more than zero. I take copious meeting notes and I do a lot of my serious thinking on paper. I find fountain pens vastly more comfortable for writing multiple pages of text, compared to ballpoints.

Left handed users do have to adjust their writing technique, and it’s understandable that many do not find it worth the effort.

I have never held a Montblanc. I believe they run to the hundreds if not thousands of dollars. An extremely niche form of wealth signaling. I’m not sure who they’re even for? Fancy New York bankers maybe? Extremely devoted pen hobbyists? I’d be afraid to carry one around.

and still in 2026 is wide market of those pens with price ranges ~$2000-$3 and ink chooses where some bottles costs ~$50 for 30-60ml.

"Ink? Oh is that what's in the bottle?"

I like how the new icon forces you to do product placement for Apple devices just to explain it. Tap the icon with the Apple Pencil and rectangle. Just don't convey it using color, that's now completely unpredictable.

I just buy bigger and wash at 95° once, then no problem.

There are many magnetic USB C plugs. I am not sure if they are standard compliant but they work fine.

I might as well just use the official magsafe power cable that came with my macbook if I were to do that. The point was more convenience. I have a USB-C charger at my desk, at my bed, at the couch, etc. Anywhere I am I can just plug in without fiddling with other cables (or connectors). Ultimately I'm lazy and just want to simplify my cable management :)

I am working on mine as well. I think it is very sane to have some activity in this field. I hope we will have high level easy to write code that is fully optimized with very little effort.

This is fun, but I would separate specialized outlets. For example Lawson and Lawson 100 are not the same.

I do have the data to do that, I struggled with colors and overlap/readability. With how much interest the sites been getting this year maybe I should do a v2