alxlaz

It's very hard to untangle it from the rest of its context (the prompt is built dynamically, from a lot of parts, some project-specific, some specific to my preferences, some built from interaction history), so I can't really share it. In any case, I don't think it's some specific prompt engineering sorcery I'm doing, it's not like I've spent any real time refining it or experimenting with various magical incantations. It's probably just some model features making it more amenable to the kind of instructions that are relevant in these cases (directness, questioning trade-offs, thoroughness etc.). My chatbot swears equally graphical in review prompts and news summarizing prompts so I'm pretty sure I'm not tickling the machine just right :)

I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice.

Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.

I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.

Yeah, the Arch wiki is the Gentoo wiki we lost. I was around for it and the Gentoo wiki was amazing, it was one of the best Linux resources all-around, it was tremendously useful even if you didn't use Gentoo.

> [German engineers and tech workers a]re not the kind to release half-baked products and patch issues later

What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience.

If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too.

This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea.

This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways:

- People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues

- People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough

"Right" is a bit of a stretch. Manicured screenshots are a tiny subset of theming requirements. People went to great lengths to theme GTK because, for the longest time, Adwaita was truly atrocious, with poor contrast in inactive windows and retina-burning acid active colours.

KDE solved 99% of the theming requirements by just allowing color customisation and shipping with a default theme that doesn't suck too badly.

> some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".

Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).

A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.

I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:

1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.

2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.

3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.

Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.

I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.

These aren't local credentials, these are credentials from various third-party websites that made their way into stealer logs. Garbled or not, using your personal email address for both legitimate purposes (e.g. Google Calendar, as the article points out) and honeypots isn't the best idea.

Ah, I thought you meant what sites list the stolen credentials. The exact overlap of websites across four separate stealer logs is enough to leak an email address pretty reliably. The only thing that's "telling" for is that they're not willing to dox this person.

They're linking to the original source of the news, which literally names "the sites".

Yeah, inputing "secure credentials" traceable directly to you with what you'd hope is a bogus password is a very bad idea, especially if you're doing highly secure work.

From the linked article:

> user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware.

So this isn't from website dumps with plaintext passwords.

> My email appears in dumps on haveibeenpwnd too, because of database dumps. How is that evidence that there's a key logger on my system?

If your password is in the dumps, too, like this person's passwords, then yeah, you might want to look into it.

Oh, wow, have we come full circle -- from Apple breaking the law in a jurisdiction where they do business to, err, Cyprus, and Europe, and... Ivan the Terrible having somehow become a woman for half a sentence?

Touch some grass, mate, Apple isn't worth your energy. No company their size is, whether on this side of the Atlantic or the other.

Having accidentally argued against his own point with inadequate metaphors time and time again, OP returns to namecalling!

I see we're back to Coca Cola, McDonalds and Burger King. Oh, and Meta, somehow? This is about Apple, I think you're in the wrong thread.

All the metaphors I've used are yours, Ivan. Why would they anger me? I'm not the one who came up with them :-).

What you've pointed out has no bearing whatsoever on what's being discussed here. This isn't about some stretched out definition of "payment system" that applies to those services that happen to have both iOS and Android client applications. It's strictly about what works in applications available on Apple's App Store. For many of them your point 4 doesn't even apply because they don't have an Android variant in the first place.

Let me know when you'd like to go back to discussing the actual issue from the linked article. Bye!

The root of yours is that you keep trying to make this about McDonalds, Amazon, Ebay, Costco or some other contraption instead of the App Store, which is what this is actually is about. Not that the argument matters, because the exact moment when you leave Costco has no bearing on the fact that Costco doesn't restrict what payment processor are used in the digital goods that it sells.

But even if it did, Apple's ToS clearly distinguish between the App Store and the licensed application, and between interactions in the App Store and interactions from within the application. You may not want to make the same distinction in order to be right about some imaginary system that you're thinking about, but this is about the actual App Store, not whatever iMcCostco-Amazon marketplace you've dreamed up.

I am sure they will be, I'm just saying that a Western front will be extremely different from the Ukrainian front, especially in the Baltics, where #3 is particularly salient. So I would recommend caution when applying over-arching lessons from Ukraine to these situations, that's all.

It's not my comparison. It's yours, and just as meaningless as your previous one about McDonald's.

This one's no better, either, as Costco's terms for its wholesale suppliers aren't anywhere close to Apple's, even though the agreement is structured more or less similarly -- but sure, let's entertain it: Costco's terms for its suppliers aren't public, but at least the ones that are on public record (via the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1940372/000149315222... ) make no restrictions on the choice of payment processors for digital products, which is what Apple got fined for.

There is a restriction on promotional material enclosed with the product (as in it needs prior written approval from Costco, not as in it's completely banned) and an explicit mention that it applies to digital products as well. But there is no requirement that digital products sold by Costco as merchant of sale for the supplier enable purchases only via Costco.

> Do you expect Amazon marketplace sellers to be able to link to their items being on ebay or shopify from the actual Amazon website?

From the Amazon website? No. From the products they're selling? Yes, absolutely, and lots of them do, I get one of those business cards with "Find us on Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/whatever" in the box with almost every purchase.

Same with apps. I obviously don't expect them to link to items from other stores from their App Store description pages. But from their application? Yes, I totally expect that.

That's how marketplaces everywhere work, including IRL. Go to any farmer's market and most sellers will give you a business card with their website or phone number so you can also order from them directly, or from their Amazon/Shopify/whatever page.

Edit: not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.

No, they did the equivalent of saying to Coca-Cola if you discover a customer via the App Store then you cannot tell them they can buy Coca-Cola from outside the App Store, too, a decidedly anti-competitive practice that also happens to be illegal in just about every European country, even without EU intervention.

Except Apple tried to exert control over that, which is exactly what they got fined for, because it's illegal.

> While Ukraine unquestionably put up a hell of a fight, the fact that the numerically superior army with the better and more numerical equipment, backed by the multiple times bigger and richer country failed is a failure. Especially when you consider that Ukraine doesn't have a navy and barely had an air force and anti-air, yet Russia failed at establishing air or naval control, let alone dominance.

That's certainly true, but much of this failure can be ascribed to:

1. Lack of co-ordination (both inter-force and within each unit) and basic best-practices in terms of logistics. The Russian armed forces are still far from anything NATO has in this regard but are also a lot better than when the war began.

2. Poor mobilisation and insufficient initial forces. Most of this was based on the obviously misguided notion that Russian forces would be welcome as liberators (which, haha, no, 40+ years of Soviet or Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe have ensured this would not happen for generations), and is unlikely to be repeated.

3. Considerable strategic depth, which further compounded #1 and #2, which the Baltics don't have.

4. Considerable development of expertise on the Ukrainian side, which has been fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk since the first Russian invasion in 2014, whereas neither Poland nor the Baltics armed forces have had much exposure to real-life war outside the GWOT.

5. A smaller mismatch in terms of equipment than media coverage makes it sound, certainly far smaller than that of the Baltics.

The odds varjag puts forward aren't at all outlandish, especially with NATO commitment so uncertain at this time.

This is:

1. Not about any monopoly (in fact the word "monopoly" does not appear in the press release at all).

2. Nothing like McDonalds, whose business model is completely different from an app store's.

3. Not about Apple can do to consumers who aren't in the Apple ecosystem but about what it can do to developers who wish to sell their applications and services for Apple devices.

If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.

Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:

> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. > > The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.

This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.

> Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.

Folk dances and culture in general were a whole thing with Stalinists, but authorities exerted a considerable degree of influence and a ban on some specific folk dances (or cultural manifestations), or on some specific aspects of them, wouldn't have been out of character at all.

Where I'm from, a whole range of folk dances, songs and theatre were banned not by name but under either a ban of the religious denominations that prominently practiced them or a blanket ban on public celebration of major Christian holidays, especially Christmas and Easter.

Folks dances, too, are kind of murky in this area. Perhaps one of the most widely-displayed folk dances of the Eastern Bloc in the communist era, a Romanian dance called "Căluș", retained some of its essential choreography, but was otherwise radically changed to drop its religious undertone, to the point where it was pretty much a different thing by the end of the sixties. Some of it was "recovered" in the eighties, when a peculiar for of protochronism began to permeate some official circles so doing the ancestors thing was cool again, but during the high Stalinist period the "old form" fell under a general repression of what was officially termed "religious mysticism". This led to an entirely peculiar situation where the dance was technically okay, kids learned something resembling it in school and danced it during official ceremonies at the city hall, but grown-ass adults who'd learned it from their parents (edit: not literally from their parents, the way it was taught was a whole thing and didn't help with the whole mysticism issue but anyway) and practised it outside official cultural institutions got rounded up.

> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.

Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.

Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.

Sure thing! News agencies could really do a better job when reporting on historical issues. This is no exception. What they're saying is plausible but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a news outlet to casually throw around without sources. "Plausible, but unproven" shouldn't be the reporting standard. That's how false reporting gets in. For all I know (as I mentioned above, dance, and art history in general, is hardly my thing) this could be one such case, too.

> Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire. > > The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom

I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.

First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:

> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.

I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.

(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).

Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"

The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).

These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.

Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.

> Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.

A good grasp of French language is not a requirement for French residency. Some visas require it, but not all, and if you can travel and reside in France without a visa, you don't have to know it. For EEA and Swiss citizens, all you need is a valid ID and a clean record.

> Note: I'm importantly not talking about the native minority languages in France.

Why not? NWS translated languages in minority languages of the US, that's exactly what this is about.

English was mentioned above the GP, which is why it was brought up, but European institutions commonly provide English translations along with regional languages in part because a lot of the EU population is bilingual. That actually helps a lot, especially since state regulation is a little slow to catch up with society at times. E.g. where I'm from we have a sizable Turkish population, and while Turkish is an officialy-recognised minority language, some local institutions are slow to catch up with population dynamics, so a lot of Turkish residents end up perusing the English version instead and they're fine with it.