arximboldi

I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.

Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.

Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:

- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).

- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.

- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.

Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.

Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.

I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.

The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???

I went to see the video expecting to agree with you, but actually I agree with the parent poster.

The video comes off as she doesn't care about her mom, or the recipe, or cooking, and the person doesn't even know what a peach is. The tone in which she says "what did mom mention...", as if she's clearly distracted thinking about something else, probably her busy NY job, and just have AI deal with this annoyance of family as fast as possible... plus she needs AI to read the email and tell her which peaches to get? I dunno, read the email and interpret it yourself, you probably know your mom better than Siri? And call your mom in case of doubt? Maybe I'm too Spanish... but it felt quite dystopian...

another obvious example is climate change, where China is way more committed to solving it than the US. the division of the world into good guys and bad guys by a rather arbitrary definition of democracy looks so naive, even stupid. Anthropic is not a Democratic institution either, should we trust it? if this proposal for pacing the frontier is to be taken seriously, Dario should give its competitors, also international ones, the same assumption of good faith that he demands from us.

I live in Europe and me and most of my friends (which of course are not representative of the whole population) consider the US a larger threat than China. On the other hand the US is a pretty aggressive country that has been supporting coup-de-etats and starting wars for more than a century. The current president has an open expansionist vision that includes European territories (Greenland), has started a war that is fucking up the world economy (Iran) and could start WWII, is supporting a genocide in Gaza, has an ambivalent position about Ukraine (and all the post-soviet foreign policy of the US over two decades have probably contributed to this situation), completely disregards current most existential threat to humanity (climate change), openly supports neo-fascist groups in Europe like the AfD, Vox, etc.

Meanwhile China exports cheap stuff, is leading the world efforts developing green technologies, is leading the efforts democratizing AI technologies, and doesn't bully people around with their army.

Sure the US, with its bipartisan system, is barely more democratic than China, but should also judge countries by their actions not just their deliberation process.

If you "rationally" decide to kill me, I'd rather you had been told by "god" not to kill me, even if I don't believe in god and generally think that non-theistic morality is better and more democratic.

"Built minds they did not fully understand, then asked those minds to understand them."

Did you write the copy? This is very good.

Denns in Germany recently moved to an app. I used to have a physical card but I lost it and they told me they don't print them anymore. I imagine many other are like that.

curious: what are the advantages of futo vs leantype? i use the latter but never looked deep into it, it just seemed the easiest better than aosp thing on f-droid

i bought my first smartphone this year. when traveling I was carrying the android tablet half of the time in my backpack, and even at home more and more you need apps for everything (e.g. lockersat club, gym entry, supermarket loyalty card, etc).

i just gave up. grapheneos + olauncher give me a minimal and open source enough experience to make it somewhat tolerable, but it makes me sad that as a society we've come to expect that you are carrying a computer with you at all times to exist.

strong disagree. much harder to browse the menu in a tiny screen, many of those websites are written by the cousin and barely work at all, nefarious ux, etc.

A muscular person can be "overweight" by BMI standards but not overfat at all. This is the case for many types of athletes, specially in strength disciplines but not only. It is the case in the fitness world that people ignore BMI and are intesterested in body-fat-percentage instead. This is hard to measure accurately so not so useful metric for the general population.

Was gonna say the same thing. Also by the standards of the time one could argue that Austria and Germany where kinda the same thing. There's a parallel history where Austria could have ended up being another German Lander. Nationalism is a weird and now anachronic 19th century invention.

I rated the vertical ones the highest, I think it's genious. It automatically struck me as way more usable. You can see the denomination as you are handing it to someone. It's easier also hold a stack in your hand and count them by flipping the free end, without twisting your hand to read the numbers. Also we are more used to vertical layout in things than we hold in our hands (books, phones, etc.). Definitely a superior design, even if less usual.

I sympathise with a lot of the negative and pesimistic sentiment shared here and in other comments and been drowning in some of it over the last few months. However I have slowly been having a shift towards a way more optimistic outlook on the current state of affairs.

One side of it is the advent of open-weights models. This alleviates part of my fears, fears of my free software and open-source tools being made irrelevant by black-box machines built by American corporations that absorb infinite capital, with capital gaining infinite power against labour.

But the other side, is that I am slowly witnessing how LLM's are not diminishing my value as a software engineer, more on the contrary. I see the outcome of projects that are vibe-coded to oblivion, immediately turning into unmaintainable messes no matter how many tokens you drop into them. Architectural insight, establishing proper processes, properly trading off features, applying engineering restrain, are more important than ever. I see my influence in projects even more crucial than before. Furthermore, the skills that I gained by sculpting code with my bare hands are only gonna become more and more rare, as I belong to one of the last generations that wrote code on their own.

I realized this weekend that a good analogy, is that we are like airplane pilots. Modern commercial planes run mostly on auto-pilot; the job of the pilot is nonetheless of uttermost importance, and is remunerated accordingly. We are code pilots with auto-pilot for code, and because of that a small team can build systems with levels of complexity before unimaginable used by thousands or millions of users, and for this reason, our responsibility and impact on projects is greater than ever.

I do miss some of the craft. As others wrote here, I can visualize in my head codebases I wrote even two decades ago, I even remember the color scheme of the editor I used for them. This won't happen with the code of the new era. I miss hand-optimizing a clever algorithm, designing elegant abstractions using rare language features, obsessing about a crucial piece of code. I worry about some of my brainpower atrophying. But maybe, if I open my heart to it, there will be good things that come on the other end of all this crazy time. Even if I sometimes feel like I am "just" a manager now, if I look closely, I can notice how I am still an engineer, perhaps, more than ever. And with my intelligence I can build great things, perhaps, greater than ever.

It just shows that the whole point of "regulation is bad" blanket statement is an intellectually dishonest argument, as what most people actually mean is "regulations that I don't like are bad". In fact, the whole market vs state thing is very confused, markets are created by the state, something most serious economists specially economic historians will admit. It's no surprise that market driven capitalism has devoleped with the expansion of the reach and capacity of the state, and that weak states devolve into things more similar to feudalism than market utopia.

also substantivizing everything and using "gate", "latch", at every turn. a normal person would say "add the pasta once the water boils" or "the water should be boiling when you add the pasta". Claude would say: water boiling state gates the pasta addition. it sounds obnoxious and engineery but it's so mentally tiring to read and decypher.

thank you! I'll definitely consider those.

one thing that helps me is using OLauncher as replacement from the system "shell" UI. it's on f-droid.

and the News Feed Eradicator browser extension. God's send.

and of course don't install Insta, X, Reddit, etc.

I recently bought my first smartphone, just went for a refurbished Pixel 8 with GrapeheneOS.

To be honest, life without a smartphone was increasingly becoming a PITA.

For example, Ryanair doesn't accept printed tickets anymore.

A few clubs in Berlin (Tresor, Ohm, Oxi) have recently replaced their cloakroom by automated lockers that require a smartphone to operate.

I've encountered a few gyms (2 in Spain, 1 in USA) that use live-updated QR codes to enter the gym.

I did a project in the US and the client's office required a smartphone to open the door.

In Spain it's common since the pandemic to have restaurants that only offer the menu as QR code.

In fact, the pandemic was rough, as you had this system where you had to register with a QR code in most places. In many places they had a paper-registry that I could use, but often I would have to end up just using a friend's phone.

Plus all 4G dumbphones are crap compared to older 2G models. The few that exist are built really bad, designed for old people, lack features like T9. 2G is out already in great parts of the world.

To be honest, it saddens me deeply that the only way to live in society today involves carrying an internet-connected computer in your pocket. But it was just too much of burden... With GrapeheneOS the experience still feels somewhat acceptable and I get a somewhat similar feeling of control to what I get using NixOS on my laptop. But still...

that's a misleading equivalence because you're also not considering the energy it took to grow the plants that produce that oil millennia ago. perhaps comparing to biodiesel or alike would be better. but even then it underestimates the efficiency of the human body, because food contains not only the energy we use, but also the materials to build the body itself. so you'd need to account for the inputs into that biodiesel and then all the extraction of materials and production of the machine itself. biology is amazing

can you post some details about the spam detector, and just your general setup? I am also an emacs-emailer, using Notmuch, but never looked too deep into the spam story

As someone that tries to survive (every day more difficult) with just a dumbphone with me, I just fantasized about a parallel universe where all those kiosks still existed, and they were somehow like computer that you can briefly rent, to do the things people do with a smartphone. Perhaps you tap a card, and it picks your accounts, and you can quickly Whatsapp someone, check your email, call an Uber or use Google Maps (maybe even check hacker news, but with time limit?!)

Maybe then many people would stop carrying their own portals, as you can briefly use the public ones for the one-off situation where you need it, but enjoy a portal-free mind the rest of the time. Also quite useful in case emergencies as it seems those portable-portals tend to run out of battery, or get lost or damaged...

Very well put. I'd add Money and Goverment by Skidelsky to the list of recommendations.

Almost every every person I've met that describes themselves as empath tends to rank rather low on empathy, under my own judgement at least.

One explanation I have for this is that precisely because empathy is a more rare experience for them, it becomes a more remarkable one, perhaps even overwhelming at times. This leads them to believe that they experience it more than or more intensely than others, when on the contrary the rest of the world is simply more habituated to it and integrate it more gracefully in their ordinary experience.

The other interpretation is that it requires certain level of narcissism or egotism to describe oneself in such flattering terms.

Or ultimately, as the Spanish proverb says: dime de que presumes y te diré de que careces.

Probably some degree of all of this is true in most cases.

As a former user of the Sansa Clip, I recommended the Shanling M0 as a modern alternative (they sell a separate case for the clip if you want that). Great audio quality and features, format and Bluetooth codes support.

Same... I bought a 13 last year, super happy with it but was kind of sad after seeing this release because this new design is just so much better and addresses all the concerns I had with the machine... until I saw this.

Fuck I do love these guys! Give me a little hope in humanity.

Will definitely buy this new chasis as soon as I can!

I implemented these in C++ a while ago. Arguably some aspects of the concept work even better in C++ as they do in Clojure.

https://github.com/arximboldi/zug

An interesting application in cursors in Lager:

https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

> My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.

So the only reason to discard a working laptop is because Apple decided to stop offering updated, and you buy Apple again? Why not buy anything else that is Linux friendly and you get software updates until the hardware dies?

Do yourself and the world a favor and buy this instead: https://frame.work/de/en/laptop12

As a counter-data point: I have been asked a few times to move to the US by American companies, but no money in the world would make me move there permanently. Also, sticking again to pure anecdote, most people I know that moved there eventually came back; but in the other direction this seems to be way more rare, I know lots of people of Americans that settled over here. Last example is a friend from the US that after 8 years in Germany moved back to the US last year for career reasons, and she is already fed up with the life style and is planning her return...

Don't get me wrong; I've spent months in the US and there are things I love about it. The almost naive way in which everyone believes their own bullshit is energizing. The way individuality and risk taking is celebrated allows for the interesting and novel (but also sometimes the worst) to happen. It is invigorating. But soon it all drains you, the grind, the lack of depth in relationships... The lack of social security net, the dystopian levels of inequality, the egotism, the fetichization of violence. It's all crystalized now in the goverment. No, thank you.

They switched me to CGNAT in my last speed upgrade, but I wrote to them about it and they moved me to native v4 straight away.

Their service is good on a technical level but they have the most aggressive and obnoxious sales reps. They scammed me twice with open lies on the phone (probably abusing also the fact that german is not my mother tongue) and had to fight for ages with their customer service later to get the issue resolved.

If you wanna go with them, buy on their website and hang up if anyone from 1und1 ever calls. They are official 1und1 reps and they will prove it you yet behave like scammers.

I moved to a Framework laptop a few months ago, but I do miss the design and keyboard of the X1 carbon that had been serving me since 2017...