I recently read on the Firefox blog about better search suggestions in Firefox. Basically, they announce a new feature they are working on that makes it possible to display direct search results in the address bar as we type. This is not a major innovation, to be clear. But it does show, I think, that Firefox does continue improving the browser and coming up with new ideas, in spite of the fact that plenty of people criticize them for supposedly abandoning the browser. It's not a fair criticism, I think. {link to this entry}

It looks as if everyone in the Linux world is talking about Omarchy lately. It's a new distribution put together by David Hansson, the famed creator of Ruby on Rails web development framework. A good friend recommended it to me as a possible way to get ouf of the dreaded comfort zone which, from time to time, I like to do by doing things like changing my default window manager or installing and testing something like OpenBSD on a personal laptop. However, I'm afraid my overall assessment of Omarchy is not very positive. As a matter of fact, it aligns much better with this review I found somewhere on Hacker News. For starters, let's be very clear about something. Omarchy is not a Linux distribution. It's not ricing on top of an already existing distribution, namely Arch Linux. You may love it or dislike it. You may decide to run it or not. But this is not a distro. It's just a set of personal preferences on top of an Arch Linux installation configured with Wayland, Hyprland, a given set of themes and menu choices, as well as a set of preinstalled applications. Second, the choices made by Hansson are very personal, at least to my liking. If you share his aesthetic preferences, good for you. But, if you don't, you'd better turn your attention to any of the true Linux distros out there that will allow you to run a variety of display servers, desktop environments, window managers and applications to your heart's content. I just don't see why he didn't simply share a Github repo with his own ricing preferences, like so many people do. But, for whatever reason, instead he chose to label it a "distro" and, because he is famous (and, let's be honest, that's the main, if not perhaps only, reason), everyone is talking about it. Third, I must say that I find his choice of default applications installed on the system quite arguable. I don't know about other people, but I have no particular use for AI applications, the Google suite of URLs (for these are truly PWAs, instead of fully-fledged applications), or things like Basecamp, iPassword, Electron 37, Figma, Obsidian, Pinta, WhatsApp, Zoom... the list is pretty long. I just don't need any of those apps, useful as they may be to Hansson. And then there is the fact that, by default, the only browser installed is Chromium, Alacritty is the terminal app, there is a whimsical screensaver configured by default that looks awful... About the only good thing I can say about Omarchy is that, when it comes to ricing, it's very well put together. But, as it is, Omarchy appears to be pure eye candy. That's all. And I've never been an eye candy type of guy. {link to this entry}

The folks at Open Culture share a video on Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit that should prove quite useful these days:

Here is a quick rundown of the nine principles:

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts."
• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
• Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
• Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
• Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives.
• See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
• If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
• If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
• Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

{link to this entry}

Came across a reference to the Ortega Hypothesis, which I had never heard of before. According to the description on Wikipedia:

The Ortega hypothesis holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science. According to this hypothesis, scientific progress occurs mainly by the accumulation of a mass of modest, narrowly specialized intellectual contributions. On this view, major breakthroughs draw heavily upon a large body of minor and little-known work, without which the major advances could not happen.

Interestingly enough, as the Wikipedia entry itself clarifies, Ortega himself would most likely have disagreed with the hypothesis that was named after him, since he held "not that scientific progress is driven mainly by the accumulation of small works by mediocrities, but that scientific geniuses create a framework within which intellectually commonplace people can work successfully." One way or another, when it comes to this particular issues, as with many others, my position lies somewhere in the middle: yes, the work of a small amount of "geniuses" does advanced human knowledge, but it also does so thanks to the work and collaboration of a large amount of "mediocre" people who contribute to it. In other words, it's not an either-or option. {link to this entry}

I read that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched a new LibrePhone project to create a fully free software OS for mobile devices. According to their official announcement:

Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.

(...)

Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.

So, basically, they are not working on a new mobile OS. Nor are they going to be releasing any hardware. They will just be working on an alternative, non-proprietary firmware. I cannot wait to be able to run a free mobile device like this. For a while now, I've been running GrapheneOS on my smartphone, and the experience has been good overall. I just ran into a minor issue recently when RCS stopped working for about a month or so after Google made some changes to the way they run things. I say "minor", but it wasn't such a minor thing on a personal level. The vast majority of people here in the US still use texting as a way to communicate. So, the problem with RCS meant that I was unable to see messages from a few chat groups all of a sudden. Since I use these to coordinate rides and school activities with other parents, that was a serious issue for me until the GrapheneOS developers fixed it. I know there are other alternatives available, such as the Librem 5 smartphone and Pine64. However, it't not clear to me there is a texting app based on free software that fully supports RCS. {link to this entry}

After playing a bit with different terminal emulators and shells, I noticed the following warning every time I launched a new terminal:

	discover_other_daemon: 1
	

I had to do a search to find the cause. My .bash_profile included a line that started the gnome-keyring-daemon. I added that a few years back when I needed to solve another problem. However, it looks as if it is no longer needed because systemd takes care of starting the daemon. {link to this entry}