that's a very useful comment, thank you for sharing you experience with older hardware!
4,560 karma · joined January 20, 2012
MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
not really. The referendum was planned long before Fukushima, but then Fukushima happened at just the right time, reminding voters just in time to vote against nuclear.
By the way, Italy had several nuclear reactors, but they were shut down after the first referendum.
As this discussion made abundantly clear, that's not what it says at all.
Google insists on pushing its own "standards". And other browser vendors are criticized for being slow to conform to these non-standards. The result? A web cluttered with pointless animations, devoid of cross-browser compatibility, and drowning in superficial bells and whistles.
And the irony? It’s boring. Every website looks the same.
If you’re not testing across browsers and engines (including non-Chromium ones), you’re not building for the web. You’re shipping Chrome-specific extensions that happen to use HTTP. You are not a developer, you are a plumber, and an incompetent one. Good plumbers are so damn rare.
Peak security theater: banks (at least in Europe) mandate smartphones as “safe,” yet the device itself is the ultimate attack vector.
- 2FA apps? Single point of failure (SIM-jacking, zero-days, bricked phone = locked out of life).
- Mandatory apps? Swapped phishing for supply-chain attacks + 24/7 location leaks.
- Biometrics? Your face now lives in a corp database that will get breached.
The irony? A YubiKey was objectively safer: no GPS, mic, or app permissions. But we’ve normalized “security” as surrender to surveillance capitalism. Banks want your data, not hardware tokens.
Smartphones manufacture threats:
- AirTag stalking requires… a smartphone to detect.
- Signal/encrypted chat? Tied to a phone number (→ ID → surveillance graph).
- “Find My Phone” = backdoor with a UX polish.
The system isn’t securing you, it’s securing access to you. Every forced 2FA method is another node to map, monetize, and manipulate.
btw. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41310150 - old ASK NH of mine, i still welcome ideas.
Consider retirement: we dismantled pensions, replaced them with 401(k)s, and now blame individuals for not magically becoming Warren Buffett. Or student loans: we tell 18-year-olds to “shop around” for degrees as if education is a commodity, not a societal investment. Healthcare? “Just be a savvy HSA optimizer!” Meanwhile, the system is a Skinner box of late-stage capitalism—overdraft fees, algorithmic rent hikes, predatory loans—all while whispering, “You should’ve read the fine print.”
Behavioral economics has shown we’re not rational actors. Yet the system demands perfect foresight: save exactly enough, borrow exactly enough, die just before your 401(k) runs out. When people fail (and they do, because life is stochastic), we scold them for not being “literate” enough, rather than asking why basic survival requires a PhD in personal finance.
This isn’t empowerment—it’s exploitation gaslit as morality. Countries with robust social safety nets don’t obsess over teaching kids to day-trade; they structure defaults that work for humans. Financial literacy has value, but weaponizing it to justify atomizing every risk onto individuals? That’s not education. That’s a rigged game wearing a meritocratic mask.
on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.
i wait it to break before moving on, changing for the sake to changing feels like waste.
in case of crisis the gov routinely starts bailouts and save the financial markets with interest rate operations or open market operations. those operations have deep re-distributive implications. don't think they are free.
after three major financial crises in the past 20 years, it’s hard to call private finance “safe” from ponzi-like risks. more than a quarter of Americans have no retirement savings at all, and the 401(k) balance for near-retirees often falls well below $100,000.
but it's the logic of the argument that is faulty: declining birthrates also hurt private markets, which rely on a growing workforce just as public pensions do. do you think finance is somewhat magical? if there is no growth also the financial markets won't grow. pensions shouldn't be about growth, but they are mainly about redistribution.
if we dismiss public pensions as a ponzi scheme, then by the same logic, private plans—completely at the mercy of market swings—could be called ponzi too, except they often leave those who earn less with nowhere to turn when things collapse.