> Unison https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ is a tool to keep two folder structures in sync - that is its main goal but it can have other uses.

And though I tend to be a GUI hater, Unison is one tool where I find the GUI much more useful than the command line alone. The game is to iteratively come up with a set of rules which Unison will use to into effect on your dataset. The GUI quickly show you the effect of your current rules, and lets you propose the next iteration etc.

I think is what people might call "knowledge capital", "intellectual capital" or some such vague term.

In my experience IP corresponds specifically to legally recognised property in otherwise copyable information.

> But a robust and affordable air travel network is a capability the business world needs to operate our economy.

Then the business world can pay for it through ticket prices.

How is that a contrary view. That guy seems very happy with the Ubuntu and X1 combo. Though he does spend a long time obsessing about the battery, after his initial take was "yup, it's good enough for me".

The guy initially declares “everything works out of box.” But then he spends a long time “obsessing about the battery” because without good battery life, a laptop is useless as a laptop. As Apple understands, alleviating battery anxiety is key to selling laptops.

Or with external display, keyboard, and mouse.

Why wouldn’t you just get a Mac mini and save $1000s?

Because some people like moving?

Yeah, that's the main reason. I can still use it as a laptop and I bring it with myself when I travel somewhere, but when I'm home, it's pretty much a desktop

Does OpenBSD have an alternative to wpa_supplicant?

I've been using wpa_supplicant under the hood for ages, but only recently learned anything about it... and it's actually very good, except that it's CLI interface is so low-level and difficult to use.

Its standard ifconfig handles all the equivalent functionality.

I don't use OpenBSD for various functionality-related reasons, but experiencing that was an eye-opener. It makes me mad that Linux doesn't use such a clearly superior system, and leads one to wonder what other needlessly complex interfaces we put up with unquestioningly.

There are things other than wpa_supplicant, but wpa_supplicant is just sorta "good enough", everything generally works. It's a different approach.

For me, my OpenBSD moment was when I used the backlight brightness keys on a laptop in a vt, and it Just Worked™.

I would put it the other way around. wpa_supplicant is actually very good at doing what it does. But rolling it's functionality into ifconfig is probably "good enough".

wpa_supplicant is an application of the "do one thing" philosophy. The kernel provides a some basic hardware-abstracted plumbing which lets a specialist tool do all the complicated handshaking and what-not for wireless.

This saves the basic tools (ifconfig, ip) from having to build in all that wireless complexity. But it does introduce an extra moving part that has to be configured. For this reason, just bloating it into the basic tool is likely to be good enough, and also provider a superior UX (for nerds like us).

This isn't quite accurate, you need wpa_supplicant for 802.1X authentication aka "WPA Enterprise" (typically only really seen in schools or very corporate environments).

But on OpenBSD thats the only thing it handles, its not an otherwise generic WiFi manager like on linux.

wpa_gui does come with wpa_supplicant in many distributions and is easy enough to configure. This helped me configure it: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-953484-start-0.html

Circular references like that are called "recursive types" in formal type theory. They are one of those big issues that academics like to write papers about.

Even if you just want to write a practical interpreter, and choose to gloss over the issues, they will still come back in some disguised form and either by requiring some sort of implementation kludge, or just by creating weird edge cases.

And how is that an issue for type checking, would you elaborate?

Smell is an interesting point

As travisjungroth points out, the most obvious mechanism is feed-back where they eat something, it works, and the body is designed to do more of the same.

But if there is a feed-forward mechanism, i.e. where genetic information tells you "eat this thing now, even if you normally hate it*; then the most plausible thing would a pretty low level mechanism that matches chemicals detected by smell.

> By building this project [CrossRail], London is just catching up to its peers. Paris has had a similar system, the five-line RER, since the 1970s. Berlin’s S-Bahn predates World War II.

I think I lived in London when CrossRail a just an expensive glint in the government's eye. I didn't know that it was an S-Bahn thing. I guess it makes sense, as London always was the city with the most famous of U-Bahns but no real S-Bahn.

Now I live in Sydney, a city that has always had an S-Bahn (of course we don't call it that) but know U-Bahn. But just a few days ago the Sydney Metro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Metro) was opened.

So it seems like the combined approach is what big cities converge on. Although the Sydney metro doesn't even go into the centre of the city, so it's not really equivalent.

Or that S-Bahns were some kind of new technology.

I find it interesting that

Sydney metro will go right under the CBD and through Central station [1]. The next stage planned is Parramatta to the CBD.

[1] - https://www.sydneymetro.info/map/sydney-metro-interactive-tr...