ufmace

I've used and defended ChromeOS for power-users for a while now, though I'm rather less interested in it after the last year or two, and especially with this "Googlebook" push.

The good of it is, you get a state-of-the-art browser, constantly auto-updated against any security vulnerabilities and locked down against any type of hacking or malware, with first-class support for audio, video, bluetooth, and things like that that have tended to be hit-or-miss with Desktop Linux on bare metal. Contrary to lots of tech community noise, UBlock Lite continues to work fine and is perfectly adequate for blocking ads. You can indeed save local files and use them fine.

You also get a full Linux OS with command-line and desktop apps working fine. Pretty much everything you could want to do Linux-y works. Android apps work locally too, if that's helpful to you. So it seems, or seemed, like the best of both worlds to me.

Alas, nowadays, Google seems rather less interested in it, and Googlebooks sound much more limited to me. Meanwhile, Apple also discourages, though has not blocked (yet?) installing apps outside their App Store, and wants you to keep all your data and messaging in the Apple ecosystem. Microsoft is trying to do the same regarding apps, and apparently, at least some configurations of Windows 11 will force you to log in to a OneDrive account and then upload your files to it, delete them locally (!), and try to bill you to access them if they take up more than a gig or something.

I already decided months ago anyways that my next laptop is going to be a Framework running native desktop Linux, since it's much easier to troubleshoot in the LLM era, and it seems like every other desktop OS just keeps getting worse.

I don't understand why it's so common for Europeans to act like they speak for the entire rest of the world outside of North America.

I mostly agree. I think it's more of an imperfect world thing though.

I agree that I don't entirely trust Google with all of this power. The problem seems to me to be that every other relevant player in the industry has even less interest in setting up reliable universal secure messaging. Apple is mostly interested in keeping everybody inside their walled garden. The carriers are mostly interested in figuring out new revenue streams in an attempt to get themselves out of the "dumb commodity data pipes while also forced to spend big money on constantly updating nationwide infrastructure" role that the mobile tech world has forced them into. Mobile hardware providers are basically the same, except for hating the "dumb commodity hardware provider of the 13th black rectangle" role. Nobody else's opinion actually matters in this world.

I'd be happy to see them set up their own servers and an actual federated system, it just seems like none of the other players really want to do it.

> key verification - I certainly don't see any of that in Google's "Messages" app!

I do! I have a old-ish but up-to-date and stock Pixel phone, and I see (what appears to be) full E2EE with several text contacts in Messages, with ability to verify keys (which admittedly I have not attempted to use yet). It only works if both devices / all of the devices in a group are fully compatible with the version that adds encryption or newer, but when they do, it just starts working automatically and transparently. AFAIK, that's primarily thanks to Google's work.

I think what we've learned from the rise and fate of current alternative messaging apps and services is that, if we actually want to get the majority of the world's population on modern-quality E2EE for all of their communication, it's going to have to be done gradually and transparently through the apps they already use. Getting everyone to switch to a different app is a pipe-dream that will never happen, at least not thanks to the work of any particular person or company.

Apple is pretty good at privacy and security for people playing within their ecosystem. They seem rather indifferent to any attempts to communicate or interact with anybody without an Apple device. Better than nothing, but not great IMO. Google has many faults in many areas, but I think they're doing awesome work at a difficult and thankless job as far as developing a standard for modern and fully encrypted communications that is actually possible for everyone to switch to transparently, and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into actually using it. Apple just rolled out support for it in beta 4 months ago. Very likely in the next year or so, we may see the majority of texts and group-chats between Android and iOS be actually E2EE without the users needing to do anything besides ordinary OS updates. That will be IMO 80% Google's doing, and 20% Apple's.

It's a silly idea that's full of holes:

> Free use comes with responsibility: whoever occupies a home must keep it in excellent condition and cover its ongoing maintenance costs. If you can’t afford to properly maintain a particular home, you can’t occupy it

Exactly who decides what constitutes "excellent" condition? Exactly what do you do with people who fail to keep their home in what whatever authority figure considers to be "excellent" condition? If I really want a property somebody else has, can I trash it right before inspection day or pay off the inspector to declare it non-excellent? What do you do with the poor hard-working family who just doesn't have the time or money to keep their place in "excellent" condition? What do you do with the mentally ill person who trashes their place every other week and can't afford to fix it?

> For desirable homes or plots, anyone can apply during a fixed period. If demand exceeds supply, the new resident is chosen by lottery, regardless of income, wealth or status

Lottery? Riiiiight. There's just no chance a simple lottery system will be able to manage the issue of to what extent particular homes or areas are desirable. There's no way a lottery system massive enough to even attempt to address the issue will actually be free of influence by wealth and status.

> The country must always keep at least 10% of homes/plots available, creating real choice and mobility

Exactly how is this going to work in practice? Which "10%" is going to be kept available, and how do we make it available? If we have a desirable city center with under 10% free, do we have to kick some people out to keep that 10%, or do we kick some people out for a while to build denser/taller buildings? Or will our "10%" only be in the undesirable areas?

If I'm a rich person, can I pay off a poor person who happens to have a nicer house to move out to a somewhat less nice house so I can move in? What if I say, I'll pay you to voluntarily move out, or I'll pay someone else to trash the place or pay off the inspector to get you kicked out?

Nobody is smart enough to dream up a new system in 10 minutes that actually covers every possible use-case and situation more fairly than our current capitalistic system that has existed and had all of its rules in practice and iterated over for hundreds of years.

Your link doesn't really work right, but note that light bulbs are not at all planned obsolescence. It's been known for a long time that making the filament temperature of an incandescent bulb hotter makes it brighter, more efficient, and whiter, but also burn out faster, due to the tungsten sublimating. Anybody can make a super-long-lasting bulb that is really dim, inefficient, and dull just by making the filament temperature lower. Nobody will ever buy one to actually light their home, because it sucks compared to the competition, but it can run for a crazy long time in a museum or something. And the useless museum bulb will cause a bazillion news and blog articles to be written in support of a mostly-false narrative that we don't make things to last.

We still don't have much of a theoretical understanding of many things in medicine and healthcare, or have since learned that what we thought was a theoretical understanding is grossly wrong. Usually, the only way we can get any closer to such an understanding is by performing what are essentially experiments on people and seeing what happens, particularly people already suffering from horrific diseases and injuries. It may be disturbing and scary in some ways, but that's how things work.

Well clearly you'll need to stop using Google search too

I presume that at least some of them just log the host as accessible and maybe some basic statistics into a list for an actual person to look at later on. That actual person would be the one to look more closely to see if there are any interesting credentials to steal or important data to steal or ransomware.

I'd be more curious to know what these SSH scanner bots actually do if they manage to log in. Automated recon, install spambot/cryptominer/phishing site, something else?

Sorry, I forgot that this building only has 18 floors, it's on me that your elevator is now airborne.

> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.

Yeah there's a certain type of engineer mindset that loves the idea of optimizing things. But if you want to really optimize something, you have to carefully account for every single possible factor, situation, and use-case. Miss anything, and it's a much bigger disaster than saving 2% of whatever resource. It's rarely worth it.

Much better to treat the presumptions as a vague heuristic, make generous assumptions and add some slack, and call that good enough. Now there's probably enough slack to cover most of the edge cases you didn't think of, other things you based your original assumptions on changing under you, etc.

Ehhhh I think it'd be more accurate to say that in a small percentage of potential routes there are alternatives.

All that stuff actually works decently well on mobile... as long as one is willing to accept certain compromises.

Note-taking works fine, in Google Keep, Apple Notes, or some other cloud equivalent. Yup, your data is in the cloud and owned by one of those tech megacorps, but most people just don't care.

Basic photo editing works okay too, in Google Photos, Apple Photos, etc. Ditto the cloud stuff.

What really makes most desktop users outliers is caring about, or even being aware at all of the concept of, actually owning your own data versus trusting cloud providers for everything.

It does effectively, if you turn on bucket versioning.

I think write-only is worthwhile for database backups to guard against a ransomware compromise.

I don't think they are anymore. The vast majority of ordinary person computer/internet use has already moved to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other such devices. It seems nowadays many people don't even know the basics about how to use a desktop operating system.

Well I'll give you that most of the stuff about accessing other star systems is deeply unrealistic now. But pretty much all of the awesome stuff that we've actually created in the last 150+ years started out with someone's imagination running away on something that didn't seem very realistic at the time. The idea of having artificial satellites was once a pipe dream, and now we have so many of them we have to redo our numbering scheme to track them all properly.

I'm not gonna hold my breath for the other star system stuff, but if they manage to get the kinks worked out of Starship and it delivers full reusability as promised, it seems like off-world colonies might actually be possible in our lifetimes. If that gets up and running, we might plausibly develop enough space infrastructure that some of the ideas don't seem too crazy anymore.

I agree, and add that the N900 shipping 2 years later is another piece of proof that Nokia was doomed long-term. It was way too little, way too late. Nokia was never anywhere near the expertise they needed to be a first-class mobile OS platform developer. Apple and Google started executing on features and platform capabilities 10x faster than Nokia ever did, and they never even really tried to figure out how to fix that.

The published reports of the exact things requested of them in the French arrest seem pretty vague. If they're related to the security of private messages and chats, it would seem to prove the point that they do infact refuse to provide that for anybody. The details around his release seem even more vague. We have only speculation and no actual proof that he or Telegram caved on such a request. As far as I know, we've never seen any charges that definitely came from Telegram revealing the messages of a private group chat.

Meanwhile, if you believe that any Governments actually refrain from prosecuting Signal executives due to their refusal and/or inability to produce the messages from private chats because they have E2EE, well, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.

If they actually are refraining from going after Signal executives in a similar fashion, most likely either 1. Nobody is actually using it for anything interesting, 2. They are actually secretly cooperating somehow, or 3. Governments are already happy with other technical means of extracting the contents of Signal chats they are interested in. See the US FBI's curious sudden lack of interest in Apple's ability, or lack thereof, to extract a wanted suspect's iMessage messages.

That's vague to the point of being completely meaningless. Do you have any examples of a time they've been in "very big trouble", whatever that means? Exactly how often constitutes "all the time"? Do you have an example of a valid court order in any jurisdiction that they have failed to comply with? Do you have any examples of a court not mandating similar compliance for Signal, iMessage, or any other E2EE platform due to that? There is no exception in the law for E2EE and it will not save you from consequences from failing to comply with a valid court order.

I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.

For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.

Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.

If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.

Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.

> Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.

I'm a subscriber, and I just tested that translate still works fine

Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.

I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.

I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

I'd summarize the concept as, this youtube video could have been a tweet

I tend to feel like, I start out with a rough idea of a program I want to write in my head. I find it easier to just write the code directly than to write a document with sufficient detail about how I want it to work for an LLM to actually write the right code, then have the LLM write the code. And the resulting documentation is about as likely to be useless or a burden as it is to be helpful in the future.

Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.

There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.

Good recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.