GAMBAS is a free development environment and a full powerful object-oriented
language and development platform based on a Basic interpreter with optional
just-in-time compilation, as easy as Visual Basic™ was.
Thanks for sharing this. If it has a RAD I actually might try this. I don't care what HN says, sometimes I just need to display some data with like 4 buttons without the nightmare that is modern front end. Ya I can write front end sometimes I really don't want to.
Absolutely does provide a RAD front-end. It's actually a spectacularly well-provisioned development tool with which you can build Gnome/KDE/terminal apps, and even provides a web forms engine for deploying much the same apps via HTTP.
Its only real issue is that it's a great tool for client-side-first RAD development in an era when much of software development has moved to web-side-first.
I worry about this too. I wonder if this same fear was felt by those who lived through the shift in Western Europe from village to industrial town life two centuries ago, and those who likewise lived through the era of post-war growth and leveling of society towards the expanded middle-class into the cut-throat selfishness of the Reagan and Thatcher-era economic rationalism which would in turn foment today's populist backlash.
You state: "My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac."
And as a Linux user since the the MCC Interim distro[0] was made available through the floppy-distribution network in 1992, my advice is for most normal users to begin the process of migrating to Linux.
Why? Because even if the Mac has some current advantages over Linux for some normal users today, in the long run, Apple cannot ever be trusted any more than Microsoft can. If you believe that they can be, you're delusional. Whatever enshitifaction process Windows has undergone, whatever further reductions in user rights and freedoms Microsoft has introduced since it became platform hegemon, Apple will do the same. This is almost a law of nature.
No, it is time for everyone to understand that in the long run, if we want a free and open society, the only way that that can be achieved is through free and open software. And as software comes to dominate the operation of society, then this becomes critical.
So, the sooner most every normal user bites the bullet and begins the migration to Linux, the less painless it will be for them in the long run, and the safer for humanity.
It doesn't. I actually completely reject that theory, and it's nice to see that Wikipedia notes that it is "controversial". There are extremely good reasons to reject this theory. For one thing, any quantum effects are going to be quite tiny/ trivial because the brain is too large, hot, wet, etc, to see larger effects, so you have to somehow make a leap to "tiny effects that last for no time at all" to "this matters fundamentally in some massive way".
It likely requires rejection of functionalism, or the acceptance that quantum states are required for certain functions. Both of those are heavy commitments with the latter implying that there are either functions that require structures that can't be instantiated without quantum effects or functions that can't be emulated without quantum effects, both of which seem extremely unlikely to me.
Probably for the far more important reason, it doesn't solve any problem. It's just "quantum woo, therefor libertarian free will" most of the time.
It's mostly garbage, maybe a tiny tiny bit of interesting stuff in there.
It also would do nothing to indicate that human intelligence is unique.
Re: "The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk."
Sorry to break it to you, but all of the US hardware firms have now fallen into this same trust-abyss. Trump's USA is now seen in many parts as as big, if not a bigger, digital sovereignty threat as China's communist party is.
Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are great. This is coming from someone who used BSD 4.2 on a Vax 11/780 in the mid-80s. They don't lack in terms of 'technical architecture'.
What these dialects of the Unix operating system do lack is a licence which ensured their success.
Linux won in the end as much from its copyleft licence as from its development methodology or personalities involved.
You say: "My concern at this point is what the picture will look like with embargoes around software development and FOSS"
Can you elaborate on this point?
To my mind, there is no better warranty mechanism for digital sovereignty than FOSS, even if that means each nation has to fork the software tools that they're embargoed from.
It's going to be a headache if America and Europe can't share code and we see the balkanization of Linux and FOSS in general. Developers, many who work for free, will potentially have a whole lot of hoops to jump through to submit (or accept) code, and there's the potential for them to commit serious crimes without even realizing it.
Yes it's great for sovereignty, but I really hope it doesn't get to that point.
The thing about copyleft FOSS however is that the code is almost certainly available, can be vetted by any nation, and accepted into any digital sovereignty framework.
If what we were talking about here are proprietary (or "closable" non-copyleft) codebases atop proprietary protocols, then yes, we're doomed.
From the fine article: "$12.2 million, representing a 149 percent increase."
One wonders just how much of a price hike - or how much of a digital sovereignty threat from the Trump regime - it would take to have the Australian government public sector shift to alternative solutions, like this one:
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