Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

I thought it was a Dragon Ball Z reference.

What is the reason we don’t run as root?

We are human and make mistakes. Not running as root means the computer will ask us to confirm when we are about to do something major (like a software update, or formatting a partition). This reduces the chance of making big mistakes. (But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

Yes, because tomorrow you may face the same bug.

Not sure about this particular textbook, but ours did explain what open-source is. So I’m guessing it might have been covered in a previous chapter.

The problem is that India has many local languages. So you need one language, equally foreign to everyone (so no one has an unfair advantage) for things like federal laws, national-level competitive exams and inter-state communication (each state is, in theory, composed of the people speaking one language). English conveniently fits that bill.

We almost had civil war in the 1960s over this. The compromise was that (1) India has no national language, (2) all federal documents would be in both English and Hindi (the biggest Indian language) and (3) all schools must teach any three languages, including English.

Don’t worry, you’ll have a bright future at Boeing.

Rarely used stuff isn’t junk DNA. It is still part of the genome, just expressed only under certain conditions (like stress).

Viral sequences do get embedded in host DNA. Some stay mostly inactive, others keep jumping around (and shuffling our genes in usually harmful but occassionally useful combinations) and yet others actually become useful to the host.

Funny thing is, I’m a biologist who learned this lesson when I studied programming. As a famous biologist said, god is a hacker and not an engineer.

Oh yes, DNA is more like a reference library than a blueprint. Proteins and other molecules decide what they want, then activate the appropriate genes. Also most of the DNA is stuff that isn’t in everyday use - genes that are to be used only under certain circumstances, genes that were once functional but are now deprecated, random DNA that got in by mistake, and stuff that serves no discernable purpose but breaks everything if removed.

Males are bloat. Reproducing asexually and exchanging genes horizontally is clearly more efficient.

Something like WhatsApp >> Youtube > Instagram > TikTok > Telegram > Facebook > Reddit > Twitter, with some variations and local additions from country to country.

But is that an Apple thing or an ARM thing?

README is usually a text file. While some platforms can now use markdown, that is nowhere near universal. So it might be better to ask for screenshots to be put on the website / wiki.

You do not want to fight a Chimpanzee unless you don’t care a lot about your life.

As someone who lives in a country with monkeys, you do not want to fight them either.