I still see the occasional netsplit.

But with modern nickname and channel services (Nickserv and Chanserv, mostly), and the very small IRC userbase, they certainly aren't as impactful as they once were.

There are people on IRC who I've maintained contact with for longer than anyone I can think of off the top of my head aside from family members. Many now through other channels (thanks to the Discord wrecking ball), though some still on IRC.

Hard to say how many intellectual rabbit holes I've gone down as a result.

I can say for sure life would have looked very, very different without it.

I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.

Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.

It has felt quite good to be a KDE long-timer watching all this unfold.

I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.

Bad compilation options, and/or bad driver/firmware interactions.

I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?

If everything else fails, there is still https://www.trinitydesktop.org btw.

KDE lost some corporate support when SUSE changed their default to GNOME in about 2005(?). I think it sees some use in the automotive world but aside from that it's all volunteer work.

I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.

I’m sorry, but the release of Plasma, around the same time IIRC, was not without controversy.

KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid

It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.

But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy."

Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.

Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.

IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)

I have to admit, I really, really liked Unity. The HUD feature (which let you 'search' in menus for any command) was really useful to me.

Still around, still works, and still in active development on mobile -- that version is in Debian now.

People don't like when I say this, but it's just another piece of evidence that mobile phones ruined everything.

It IS labeled "Opinion" in their defense...

But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.

Made it that much less likely that anyone would withdraw their gold from banks due to the disparity in utility between deposits and cash.

Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.

Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.

Paper money was well established at this point.

When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.

Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.

Terry Pratchett’s Making Money portrays it quite well, imho. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an entertaining read.

I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.

"and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline".

There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".

The issue is that broad money isn't money. It's credit. And measuring credit is like measuring both velocity and position at the same time.

The Fed tried to measure dollar supply globally for decades before giving up as they finally got their heads around how the Eurodollar network works, and they've kept somewhat quiet about the fact that they're just not actually at the center of it.

If only there were a digital asset that had a fixed supply to prevent inflation that nobody could control who could spend what (to avoid unjust debanking) which was highly divisible so that you could spend large or small amounts, and because it's digital it could be spent very rapidly across long distances using the magic of the Internet. And if only it's governance model wasn't subject to the corruption seen in governments and private banks alike.

I bet that thing would be a pretty useful monetary tool, even if it were attacked, as one might expect by all of the government and banks around the world who were trying to cling to the power they have by virtue of having captured the ability to print money and use it when it is most valuable, fresh off the press.

The price of gold pre-1971 was always a fantasy as there was no free market for it, due to the policy rate sitting on it at $35/oz.

The price of gold before 1933 (EO 6102) was also not a terribly good indicator, as the friction of taking physical delivery of it also kept it suppressed in most circumstances, with explosive swings in times of crisis.

Arguably it's even more gamed after 1971 as it's not even used for exchange, and has a ton of rehypothecation and elaborate derivative networks.

Gold's drawback was always its physicality. Arguably its heyday was before the invention of the telegraph, when at least the expectation was that money was going to be slow, and the only way to move it across most distances was physically, unless you had some handy Knights Templar or Hawala network handy.

That we still cling to it despite all of this is a good indicator of just how fucked up fiat is though. Thankfully, we have a better alternative network being built out.

There's something to be said perhaps for preferring tools that do one of those things, rather than all of those things, and doing them well.

Not to say you can't then make an umbrella interface for interacting with them all as a suite, but perhaps the issue has become that gpg has not appropriately followed the Unix philosophy to begin with.

Not that I've got the solution for you. Just calling out the nature of your demands somewhat being at odds with a key design principle that made Unix and Unix-likes great to begin with.

Mastering Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, and finished up a few other books I'd been in the middle of -- Against the Gods being most of interest here, as it was a good history of the discoveries of probability and how we think about risk management.

Also about halfway into Mastering the Lightning Network.