NoboruWataya

Interesting that the site is only available in the US. I wonder why that is.

Presumably if the protocol becomes popular you will have public instances that anyone* can sign up to, the same way other federated services work now.

(It's approximately as hard for a layman user to sign up to a Mastodon instance as it is to sign up for X. The fact that most layman users don't do that is a separate issue.)

I did think postmarketOS was a bit of an awkward name but it was also widely recognised, at least in Linux nerd circles. I guess this will cause a bit of confusion in the short term but hopefully lead to broader recognition in the longer term. Though the obstacles to Nura's growth are probably not primarily branding-related.

What do you find is missing? The main apps I need Google Play for are apps that are tied to a specific company or government service (eg, banking apps, or HMRC). For pretty much all basic functions I think F-Droid does the job.

In Biglaw, the scarcity is driven by the hours and stress. If it was a chilled 9-5 job you would certainly have more people willing to do it, even if it paid less.

The salaries are a result of the insane hours they have to do. Biglaw needs to pay those salaries to keep getting young associates in the door because burnout is a real problem in the industry. If salaries were lower and hours/stresses were lower, you would probably still find people wanting to be lawyers. A different kind of person, maybe.

(Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)

Millions if not billions of agreements are made every day without the involvement of lawyers. Lawyers are only needed for particularly complex situations and even there they are generally only "needed" in the sense that parties feel they would add value.

In my experience it basically doesn't even try to interpret the law. It just summarises the publicly available law/guidance out there and, if there is a question about how to interpret some provision, might set out the arguments for each interpretation. It doesn't really take a position. It is pretty good at drafting though. (Legora)

Of course you will get tired if you change your OS every three months. I have used roughly the same ArchLinux setup for years now, probably over a decade, and it is remarkably stable. Things break very occasionally but are easily fixed (and are usually a result of my own tinkering with experimental software).

Also regarding everything convergence of desktop environments, there are plenty of more interesting options out there, but they don't call themselves "desktop environments" - tiling or scrolling window managers, for example, which are often infinitely configurable though scripts.

Probably wishful thinking but does this get us any closer to porting postmarketOS to these devices? (Or even LineageOS, though I think LineageOS may have decent support on many of these devices already?)

A couple of times now I have walked a stretch of the Camino de Santiago (each time it was just a small bit near the end; sadly don't have the time off to do a full route which can take a month or longer). I find the simplicity of it super rewarding and enjoyable compared to my busy life back home. Just, for the most part, miles and miles of peaceful countryside.

It's kind of the opposite of what is described in the article, where the author is using his time off to improve his knowledge in other areas. Personally, I find that back home I am constantly thinking, both at work and in my time off, so much so that I forget what the end goal of all that thinking actually is. So doing these long walks helps me take a break from that and put it in perspective. No laptop, as little smartphone use as possible, I will maybe read a book or two in the evenings but nothing too heavy, etc.

As an aside, I am in a non-tech field, and programming is my hobby (and nothing like my day job). I enjoy it and I think it helps me stay sharp, but it has its drawbacks as a hobby. Being a solo hobby, and not one that many people in my field are into, it's not really something I can easily bond with others over (unlike, say, golf or chess). And sometimes it can be the opposite of relaxing when you encounter a bug that you can't seem to diagnose or fix.

She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.

I had only heard about these things on HN, and thought they were primarily popular as a toy for people to hack on. I didn't realise they are so popular amongst "normies".

I have no current need for one as I am happy with my cheap second hand Kobo but it's great that they exist, especially with the open source alternative firmware. Hopefully they don't clamp down on that in future.

Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc.

A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.

If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.

(As an aside, I have no idea if donations to OSC are subject to sales tax, but I would be surprised if they were given there is no sale or supply happening, and no one here seems to have suggested they are.)

> In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.

I disagree, because it uses the loose term "tax exempt donations", and nobody, it seems, can agree on whether that means exempt from income tax (ie, recipient does not need to pay income tax on it), exempt from sales tax, or deductible for income tax purposes (personally I think this is likely what it is intended to capture, and the only real basis on which to distinguish between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organisations, but in fact is the least supported by a literal reading).

The policy is far from clear cut, and even having read your comments I am still not sure what you think it's trying to say. The policy suggests that an app may lead users to another payment method where the payment is a "tax exempt donation". What tax, specifically, are you suggesting a donation to OSC is not exempt from? You mention sales tax, is it the case that donations are not exempt from (ie, are subject to) sales tax?

Or are you saying the key point is that the donation not tax-deductible for the donor, which is a different thing to being tax exempt (and does not have anything to do with the "taxability of the transaction")?

Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.

The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.

Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.

As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.

Exactly my experience, even worse because for me it's 2x256GB drives. Eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded one of them to 1TB, but not the one my root partition is mounted on (too lazy for that), so now I find myself moving various large directories across to my "extra" drive and symlinking them. Funnily enough I don't remember this ever being a problem back when 50GB was considered a lot.

> Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.

To me it's even less problematic than this. Not being able to remember important codes except via muscle memory is quite unsettling for me because every now and again my muscle memory fails. Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".

With syntax highlighting, even if my muscle memory fails me I still benefit from syntax highlighting (I think). Because I can immediately see the structure of each line. If I am looking through code for a particular thing, I will probably be able to disregard entire lines because they obviously don't have the structure I am looking for. And even within a line, I can just look at the beginning of each "span", immediately know if it's what I'm looking for, and skip to the next span if it's not.

Indeed, I find it hard to conceive of problems that are:

- too difficult for me to solve but easy enough for a cheap model to solve (if it's going to be running autonomously in the background, I ain't paying ChatGPT/Claude prices), and

- don't involve a bunch of my personal data that I am not comfortable sending off to a random inference provider.

One thing I considered was that it might be good for anything that involves web scraping, given that has traditionally been a fairly difficult thing to do well. But you'd have to be okay with the occasional mistake. (You'd also have to be morally okay with contributing to the epidemic of AI scrapers that websites now have to deal with.)

My view is that it doesn't really matter, and focusing on it is likely an attempt to distract from the substance of the encyclical, which could be seen as critical of AI insofar as it calls for stronger regulation and more conscientious use of AI. As an aside, I think the arguments put forward in the blog post you link are pretty weak, but again, getting into that would just distract from the actual points being made in the encyclical.

I think it's a matter of incentives. American billionaires are mostly highly financially exposed to AI, so are not really incentivised to say anything interesting about it except "it's great, you should buy it".

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but Magnifica Humanitas was published earlier this year.

Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.

> You see this in real life on the streets too.

To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)

The "About" page seems fairly clear:

> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.

Surprised TOML didn't get mentioned in the alternatives section, it's probably my favourite configuration format.

I'm working on a project now that uses YAML for configuration (it makes more sense in this context than TOML) and am parsing it using Rust's `serde` crate (via `serde_norway`). It's not so bad if you use `#[serde(deny_unknown_fields)]` everywhere.

> It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description

In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.

I use this regularly when I go on long walks out of the city (including the couple of times I've done stretches of the Camino de Santiago). The offline map support and being able to load and display GPX tracks are really helpful there. Not only because you can sometimes find yourself with spotty reception in remote areas, but also because if you are out all day and your phone battery is not the best, you can just stick on airplane mode which massively saves on battery.

CoMaps also makes it quite easy to edit information about businesses etc, so if you spot something that isn't right you can correct it right there.

Also, for long walks/hikes, OSM is excellent. Most people tend think think of OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes). It will display a lot of paths that Google Maps won't and also has far more granular detail, so you can use it to find nearby water fountains, picnic benches, even bins and so on.

Yeah. Like most people, my only experience of statistics is studying as part of maths in secondary school. I was really strong in maths generally and most of it came relatively easily to me, but I struggled with statistics. Examples like the Monty Hall problem show just how unintuitive the basic concepts are.

Given how effective stories and anecdotes are in convincing people, it really seems like the human brain is not wired to grasp these concepts easily.

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.

Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.