Resources and influence will always drunkard’s-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.

They’re going to be drawn to it, they’ll fight dirtier for it, and they’ll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.

Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren’t massive piles of shit.

I do know about window managers, thanks.

And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.

Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.

Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.

Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.

Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.

also jesus christ kde.

And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.

But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.

Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.

But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.

And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.

I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.

And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.

The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.

For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.

But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.

Let me guess, they laughed at trump?

What do you think an algorithm is?

He says, on social media

How complex does a neural net have to be before you can call any of its outputs ‘pain’?

Start with a lightswitch with ‘pain’ written on a post-it note stuck to the on position, end with a toddler. Where’s the line?

How about a law stating that the terms of all contracts with corporations be listed in a public registry?

You want the state to enforce the terms of your agreement, you put that agreement out in the open. No secret laws, and no secret laws-by-proxy.

If you want something decent, check out ‘Lauren Ipsum’, by Carlos Bueno.

THe phrasing of the message implies that you’re still subject to eg. your employer logging your network access, and third-party sites logging your IP - both of which would be physically unavoidable and not within the browser’s ability to control.

It very carefully avoids saying ‘we’re still selling your identity and browsing habits to ad companies and dataminers even though we could totally prevent that lol’.

Universities aren’t there to teach marketable skills, and they never have been.

In fact they get quite snotty about the distinction; they’re not some trade school, ugh.

They go and market themselves as employment-enablers, because that drives enrolments which drives funding, but a large percentage of adademics see undergrads as a vexing and demeaning distraction from their real work of writing grant proposals. Which to be fair is what their whole career (and the existence of their employer) depends and is judged on, so…

The other thing is that there’s two skillsets involved here: learning to use a specific set of tools and techniques to produce a desired outcome (the trade part), and learning to wrestle large, unwieldly and interconnected tasks in general, while picking up the required specific knowledge along the way (the adademic part).

Teaching just the trade part gets you people who are competent in narrowly-defined roles for now, but it doesn’t necessarily get you adaptable, resilient, bigger-picture people with common sense and a strategic outlook. Teaching just the academic part gets you people who aren’t necessarily productive right now, but have a lot of potential wherever you put them.

Employers would like to hire people who are both. They’re also lazy and cheap, and will use anything they can get their hands on as a resume-filter because they aren’t willing to put time and money into usefully evaluating someone’s potential usefulness as an employee. If they can farm that off to the universities to do (and the students to pay for), they’re happy to let a degree stand in as a not-chaff marker they can require of all their candidates. It’s like bad video game designers using bullet sponges to ‘increase the difficulty’.

Teaching CS is important and useful, but the benefits only really pay off longterm - apart from the bullet-sponge factor.

Teaching programming is important and useful, but the benefits can be short-term and dead-end.

If you only pick one… depends on whether you can afford to eat while those nebulous long-term benefits slowly kick in.

Universities should communicate these things better, and employers should be incentivised to stop using junk degree-requirements to offset their laziness and incompetence. Make it so for every position they require a degree for, they’re taxed the tuition fees for that degree every year.

third party cookies != cookies

Unless they’ve invented a stateful http, cookies aren’t going anywhere.

He committed the ultimate crime, though: stealing from rich people. And he even had the effrontery not to be rich himself while doing it.

That’s what they’re punishing here.

How the fuck is it America’s business?

paywall.