Badness 10000 usually indicates that something is very wrong. Usually overfull hboxes. If the text is spaced out to the point where it immediately looks bad, that could still be like badness 5000. What I have seen mostly is macros not playing well with other macros, and in LaTeX there’s a lot of macros under the hood, so it’s very hard to troubleshoot.

If you don’t want an image to float, don’t put it in a float environment.

The reason is that you’re reading TeX, not LaTeX. The latter has abstracted away the fundamental building blocks so few people know how an hbox is set anymore. So, an hbox is a box where the content is in horizontal mode. Between the things is glue. Glue can stretch and shrink. Depending on how you have set your tolerance and penalties, there’s a maximum percentage of stretch allowed. If the glue stretches more, it becomes bad, this is called badness and can effectively be up to 10000 bad. So why not just put more things into the box? Well, (La)TeX probably tried to do that, but came up with worse badness. TeX always chooses the least bad option on a paragraph level. In practice, the usual suspect is often that you have something else that can’t fit the last part of a line, like a really long word. If you can look at it and manually hyphenate it, things might be better.

I don’t know, that’s a level deeper than I know about, but you could be right.

In that case also add ð. If you say the words “think” and “this” out loud, they use different “th”-sounds. “These” would be “ðese”, and “think” would be “þink”.

It could be a David Foster Wallace reference. “In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk.”

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

A good story about a bad day doesn’t have to be about complaining. It can be about learning from mistakes, a strange irony, the absurdity of coinciding factors, etc.

It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”

If you ever do write with pen and paper, it takes little effort to focus on just one improvement. A first step could be to try to get a consistent height of letters. When I’m in a hurry my “o” and “i” become way smaller than, say, “e”. Just a quick look when you’re done writing and a reflection like “next time I’ll try to make this letter as tall as that letter when I write”. When all lower case letter are as tall, focus on something else, like ascender height or baseline. Maybe your “l” tilts more than your “t”, then that’s a good thing to fix. One small step at a time.

Back in the day, find required that you added “-print” to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But… following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.

I think you actually convinced me to start using OpenBSD again.

Is the breaking change going to happen in stable mid release cycle? Or at a major version upgrade?

OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.

The second part of the Tractatus.

Free cost and free as in freedom to understand and modify the code. I also think it’s a beautiful way of doing things. We also have Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. The internet has a tremendous potential for collaboration, people doing things because they want to, for the benefit of everyone.

If you look at the Lascaux cave paintings, there’s great potential for a soft earthy color theme imho. Black and red on off-white, similar colors as medieval vellum with black ink and vermillion red/orange.

Check out the neat themes of UNIX legends:
https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/

And before that, black text printed on white continuous form paper.