Soot

This sums up in two sentences why I never really fancied visiting the US

I do agree. But calling the UK Orwellian is kind of funny, given Orwell's 1984 is largely, if not mostly, based on the UK:

• Like Winston, Orwell worked in the UK as a war propagandist, and lamented that he constantly had to lie and censor facts, but thought it worth it to defeat the Nazis.
• The 'ministries' were entirely based on the UK's, especially e.g. the 'Ministry of Defense' actually being a ministry of war.
• Orwell complained that the UK secret police constantly opened all his letters because he was a commie.
• Room 101 and the Ministry of Truth is basically just satire of the BBC.

As well as cultural changes in the 80s-90s, I think people don't quite realise how much the internet 'escaped' the grasp of governments for the past few decades. By constantly banging the drum of "what about the children D:", governments are finally just catching up to where we used to be.

"you can look it up" provides no specific details.

It is true, the beetle is the Regimbartia attenuata. There's a paper on the idea of active escape post-predator-contact https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220308423

Previous thread about it.

I'd also say the commit message isn't clear whether they're ending Linux support now, or if that's "the next step if I get more annoyed".

Because most governments are the inseparable playthings of businesses, it is largely their job to cowtow. If you're wedded to capitalism, then encouraging businesses to overinvest is kind of a good strategy to make line go up.

Capitalist "innovation" relies on having some stupid-ass bubble in which rich people can massively overinvest in the vague hopes of a big payout.

Hollowed out white elephants are the only way to properly circulate currency these days.

Static typing is bourgeois foppery. Real proles enjoy Python's ultradynamic typing that lets you jam any object into anything

He has his own wikipedia page.

Yes. They did the relicensing a year ago, so that's a decently sized delta.

I mean sure, but it'll still likely leave 'em scratching their heads for a while before they go "I guess I just.. replace the semicolon..?"

They didn't make it themselves, the project has a not-insignificant amount of contributions from other authors, and the repo owner (possibly illegally) relicensed it such that nobody else can legally fork it.