Linus has stepped away from kernel development before, and probably will again. Life continues on.

Second person excited for bcachefs, I'm planning on swapping over as soon as it supports scrubbing.

When you make a project with git, what you're doing is essentially making a database to control a sequence of changes (or history) that build up your codebase. You can send this database to someone else (or in other words they can clone it), and they can make their own changes on top. If they want to send you changes back, they can send you "patches" to apply on your own database (or rather, your own history).

Note: everything here is decentralized. Everyone has the entire history, and they send history they want others to have. Now, this can be a hassle with many developers involved. You can imagine sending everyone patches, and them putting it into their own tree, and vice versa. It's a pain for coordination. So in practice what ends up happening is we have a few (or often, one) repo that works as a source of truth. Everyone sends patches to that repo - and pulls down patches from that repo. That's where code forges like GitHub come in. Their job is to control this source of truth repo, and essentially coordinate what patches are "officially" in the code.

In practice, even things like the Linux kernel have sources of truth. Linus's tree is the "true" Linux, all the maintainers have their own tree that works as the source of truth for their own version of Linux (which they send changes back to Linus when ready), and so on. Your company might have their own repo for their internal project to send to the maintainers as well.

In practice that means everyone has a copy of the entire repo, but we designate one repo as the real one for the project at hand. This entire (somewhat convoluted mess) is just a way to decide - "where do I get my changes from". Sending your changes to everyone doesn't scale, so in practice we just choose who everyone coordinates with.

Git is completely decentralized (it's just a database - and everyone has their own copy), but project development isn't. Code forges like GitHub just represent that.

How would rust fare any better then a tracing GC? Realistically I'd expect them to use more memory, and also have worse determinism in memory management - but I fail to really see a case where rust would prevent memory leaks and GC languages wouldn't.

There's built in functions to leak memory that are perfectly safe. You can also do one really trivially by making a reference count cycle. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-06-reference-cycles.html

Rust only prevents memory unsafety - and memory leaks are perfectly safe. It's use after frees, double frees, etc. It prevents.

Rust doesn't guarantee the lack of memory leaks anymore then java/C++ does, so sadly not sure if it would help here. :)

In this context it actually means that you can take the source code, and get the exact same binary artifact as another build. It means that you can verify (or have someone else verify) that the released binary is actually built from the source code it says it is, by comparing their hashes. You can "reproduce" a bit for bit copy of the released binaries.

See if you can find a book on python, and work through it a bit. Sit down with him once you know some and try making something basic with turtle or the likes. Your goal is to keep his interest up and not make it a "studying" thing. For a kid the most important part is that he needs to be able to see results of what he's making. Drawing simple shapes, cool patterns, etc. in python is a nice way to start and it can teach all the basic initial things he needs to know.

There's also simple robot kits for kids that could be fun to play with, which he could eventually move on to basic electronics to after from.

W.r.t. safe browsing, I'd try blocking egregiously bad stuff with some DNS blocker that you either buy or host using something like pihole. Use it to block ads and well known "bad" domain names. Also have a conversation about it. (I'm not sure how much this helps here considering he's 8... but better then nothing.)

The point of federation means your content doesn't only stay on your server. The person you're talking too can be on a different one and their admin can see them too. Also, I wouldn't want to be able to access content from any user - it's a "no trust needed" thing.

Idk about everyone else but I was fine with the specs. A basic Linux machine that can hook up to the network and run simple python scripts was plenty for a ton of use cases. They didn't need to be desktop competitors. The market didn't need to be small form factor high performance machines, and I'd argue it wasn't.

Yeah, and Linux still doesn't have a good answer to AD for managing suites of end user machines. Linux has a lot going for it - but windows isn't strictly inferior or anything.

Honestly, the entire AD suite with auth and everything else built in is genuinely a good product. And if what you want is supported by Microsoft, their other services are decent as well.

Because CDNs lighten load and work as a global cache for load times? Game servers and plenty of other types of servers have exposed their IP since the dawn of time.