I would vote for docker as well. The last time I had to inherit a system that ran on virtual machines, it was quite a pain to figure out how the software was installed, what was where in the file system, and where all the configuration was coming from. Replicating that setup took months of preparation.

By contrast, with Docker, all your setup is documented. The commands that were used to install our software into the virtual machines and were long gone are present right there in the Docker file. And building the code? An even bigger win for Docker. In the VM project, the build environment for the C++ portion of our codebase was configured by about a dozen environment variables, none of which were documented. If it were built in Docker, all the necessary environment variables would have been right there in the build environment. Not to mention the build commands themselves would be there too, whereas with VMs, we would often have developers build locally and then copy it into the VM, which was terrible for reproducibility and onboarding new developers.

That said, this all comes down to execution - a well-managed VM system can easily be much better than a poorly managed Docker system. But in general, I feel that Docker tends to be easier to work with than a VM. While Docker is far from flawless, there are a lot more things that can make life harder with VMs, at least from my experience.

I doubt that you're interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover...

Excellent news:

At the heart of Monday’s findings are three elements of Apple’s practices, including fees charged to app developers for every purchase made within seven days of linking out to the commercial app.

source

This is, in my opinion, the most egregious non-compliant practice from Apple. They have no reason whatsoever to entitle themselves to purchases made outside their repository just because the software runs on their hardware. It's also the most asinine set of rules that they established to pretend that they were complying with the DMA.

It's a bit disappointing that it will take so long before the fines can be enforced, but I really hope that they get the maximum penalty over this because it's really the most shockingly brazen breach of the DMA's terms. In fact, I hope that they get imposed the maximum penalty multiple times - the same article I linked mentions that there are two other DMA investigations being launched into Apple, though I don't know what grounds those other investigations are looking into.

And I really hope Apple gets the message loud and clear: they're gonna start making less money. And this is a good thing. They don't deserve it, and they were never entitled to it in the first place. This is what happens when you invent new revenue streams that are criminally worthless.

The intent is to allow companies time to implement the change. But if you'll pardon my cynicism, in practice, what ends up happening is companies just use it as a tactic to delay the implementation and continue recording the revenue.

At the very least they should forfeit the revenue that they earn during the period for this. I'm not sure exactly how the fines work and whether they take this into account, but I doubt Apple is seriously going to use the 12-month period to actually come clean and change their ways. I think they'll just use it as more time to come up with some new bullshit form of non-compliance.

But what's the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn't care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you're writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like "type", and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it's right. And autocorrect systems can't really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.

Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn't even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don't get me started on how many calls I've missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn't find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!

Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!

There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they're far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it's just all about aesthetics and nothing else....

Interesting! Sorry, I don't know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.

Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I'm pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!

If it weren't for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I'd probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one...

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Great, then I'll finally have some time to play them....

However bad they may make it, it can't possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.

But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It's not like they have a reputation for it or anything....

Despite that success, and the App Store’s role in making it possible, Spotify pays Apple nothing.

That's because Spotify doesn't owe you anything. If I release a piece of software for Apple, Android, Linux, Windows, etc., I don't owe these OSes anything for that. Apple makes plenty of money selling hardware, that's good enough for them.

These delusional bastards really need a few slaps around their heads to get this concept to sink in.

Sounds to me like these tech workers could really use a good union to protect them.....

The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they're just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it's pretty hilarious watching them flail.

You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It's actually kinda poetic because now he'll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.

Don't worry everyone, I'm here to help:

Mail

Garbage

Outlook

Hot Garbage

Outlook (new)

Shit-tier garbage

Glad to be of service! Until next time....

Oh goody. I've been wanting to use this since my slashdot days... today is my first chance!

Your post advocates a

[x] technical
[ ] legislative
[ ] market-based
[ ] vigilante

approach to fighting (ML-generated) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why
it won't work. [One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea,
and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad
federal law was passed.]

[ ] Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
[ ] Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
[ ] No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
[ ] It is defenseless against brute force attacks
[ ] It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
[ ] Users of email will not put up with it
[x] Microsoft will not put up with it
[ ] The police will not put up with it
[x] Requires too much cooperation from spammers
[x] Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
[ ] Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
[ ] Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
[ ] Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

[ ] Laws expressly prohibiting it
[x] Lack of centrally controlling authority for email^W ML algorithms
[ ] Open relays in foreign countries
[ ] Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
[x] Asshats
[ ] Jurisdictional problems
[ ] Unpopularity of weird new taxes
[ ] Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
[ ] Huge existing software investment in SMTP
[ ] Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
[ ] Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
[ ] Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
[x] Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
[x] Extreme profitability of spam
[ ] Joe jobs and/or identity theft
[ ] Technically illiterate politicians
[ ] Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
[x] Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
[ ] Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
[x] Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

[x] Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
[ ] Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
[ ] SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
[ ] Blacklists suck
[ ] Whitelists suck
[ ] We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
[ ] Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
[ ] Sending email should be free
[x] Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
[ ] Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
[x] Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
[ ] Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
[ ] I don't want the government reading my email
[ ] Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

[x] Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
[ ] This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
[ ] Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

According to this, the fine includes a punitive damage:

Vestager said that the lump sum of €1.8 billion had been added as a deterrent since the basic amount of the fine, which she compared to a "parking ticket," would have been quite small.

The total fine of €1.84 billion amounts to 0.5% of Apple's worldwide turnover, according to Vestager.

Still not enough in my opinion, but hopefully if this sticks, future damage awards will be even higher. In any case, there will be a lot more fines and regulations coming down on Apple into the future (thanks in large part to the DMA), so even though this is just a single instance, they will hopefully add up pretty significantly in the coming years.

Xournal - a great way to draw on pdfs

Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.

And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.

(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)

Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it's just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.

I'd really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors....

Everyone in this thread is saying that this comes as no surprise, and that is certainly true. But the thing is, a lot of management types do know this already but they simply don't care for two reasons:

1. They care more about leverage/control over employees than they do about actual good work being done. You cannot understate at all how important employee control can be for managers and how seriously they're willing to destroy their own business to keep this kind of power.

2. RTO is basically a layoff program. As much as I love working remotely, it's very important to keep in mind that remote workers are the first ones that will get laid off when the business wants to cut back - purely because of how easy it is to do. They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won't have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs. Still, this shouldn't sound like comfort for employees that do work in the office - there's a good chance that once RTO is in place, another round of layoffs will strike when the company doesn't meet its cut targets. So any time a business announces return to office, it means that there's a good chance that layoffs will follow too.

tl;dr: Managers knew this would happen all along too - it was just a trade they were very willing to make.

I hated the trend of flat buttons. Then they removed the buttons. Then they basically removed the entire scrollbar altogether.

At this point, I'd happily go back to the age of flat buttons. That's how bad things have gotten....

No one has said Ocaml yet, so I will. It's not a perfect language, but it has a lot of cool ideas and concepts. It's a functional language, but allows you to write imperative code when you want to. Algebraic data types and type matching are built natively into the language and work very nicely. It's type inference capabilities are very powerful (though that can backfire at times), and the |> operator is really, really fun to use. It also has very powerful module/functor capabilities, though they go a bit over my head since I haven't had a chance to play with them. Also, Opam is a very powerful package manager and it's pretty easy to wrap/bind external libraries with it.

I'd love to see some improvements to the language - the syntax is a bit confusing and ugly at times (but this unfortunately can't be fixed without breaking the language of course) - but overall I think I'd have a lot more fun programming in Ocaml than what I do in my day job.

A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn’t even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple’s App Store and Play Store were a thing.

If this actually were Linux's killer feature, then Linux would have had a much higher market share by now.

Make no mistake, this is my favourite feature of Linux as well, and I have never used a snap/flatpack/appimage in my entire life. But it doesn't have the kind of broader public appeal that you seem to be suggesting.

And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.

This is true, but there are only so many times that they can pull off what they did in Munich. If enough cities keep trying at this, there's no way they're going to be able to hold the floodgates back forever.

I'm usually a pessimist, but stories like this actually do get my hopes up

I love it when someone sends me a message like this:

Hey there! What are you doing on 4/5?

????

Perhaps! But only if they allowed third party app stores. Because as it stands right now, they're basically inventing a cost that they pass on to developers, and then rewarding themselves handsomely for the cost that they would have never needed to pay if they allowed others to compete in this area. It's still a tactic they could not get away with if they were not a monopoly.

Yes. It's my way of voting with my wallet. I already have a few nice headphones and I'm not replacing them just because phone manufacturers are cheap and lazy.

Besides, I hate batteries. They always die at the most inconvenient time. And USB-c just for audio is way overkill.

I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.

The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.

It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.

Apologies... /rant

Speedrunning the demise of cable tv!

Two simple words: digital sovereignty.

Hopefully this serves as another case in the push for the EU[0] using native alternatives instead.

[0]: Not just the EU of course. Any non-American company should see dependency on Microsoft as a liability. I hope all countries around the world see this as a warning of things that could happen to them.

This one might be a bit controversial, but has rung true in my general experience. Probably a lot of exceptions to these rules, but here goes:

You don't really know a programming language until you understand a fair amount of the standard library and how packages/modules/dependencies work. Syntax is pretty easy, and any mainstream language will work just fine for solving basic leet-code style problems. But when you really spend a lot of time working with a language, you're going to spend more time learning about common libraries and how to manage dependencies. If you're working with a language like C++ or Java, this could also include build systems and how to use them.

Another precursor to being able to say that you know a language is that you should also be familiar with best practices (ie. how to name modules, how to write documentation, etc.) and common pitfalls (undefined behavior, etc.). This is one of the hardest parts about learning a new language in my opinion, because the language may not necessarily enforce these things, but doing them the wrong way can make your life very difficult.

I doubt the EU would look kindly upon this. Allowing people to opt out of personalised ads is done for a good reason, and punishing people who opt out like this sounds like a very hostage-like "or else" kind of tactic.

Should facebook go through with this, it will be interesting to see what happens.

First thing is to not mount it at all. Any writes to the overwritten partition will corrupt your data.

Second thing: install system rescue cd to a live usb and boot it. Look into testdisk and photorec. It's been a while since I've had to use these tools, but I believe testdisk can restore the partition and photorec can find files in a file system that has been deleted. I would try running photorec first to save the recovered files to an external hard disk, and then testdisk to try restoring them. But disclaimer: it's been a while since I've had to do this, so my memory is foggy here.

Good luck!

Yup, he's the absolute worst. I can't think of a single product that Google has even improved during his tenure as CEO... let alone a product that he successfully launched on his own. All he can do is make existing products more expensive.

Look at how he completely lost his shit when chatgpt was released - probably a huge part of the reason he lost it is cause he realized he'd have to actually do something useful instead of just squeezing more blood from the collective stone of all Google's existing products. His claim to fame is creating Chrome. What fucking good is that? Web browsers have existed since the time he was born. There's nothing to innovate there, and there never has been. It's clear: he's not an innovator.

Whoever takes over after he's gone is going to be in for a hell of a time. The only thing he's created for Google is a shit-ton of anti-trust lawsuits. The company is an empty husk at this point. There's nothing left for them to become.

It's not wrong, but it's just terribly short-sighted. You're giving greed-crazed companies total control over a device that you own and nobody else should be able to touch.

Shiny things come at a cost. Sure, it may look convenient and super cool to have all these features, but it's important to understand the trade-offs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg - we don't even know what kinds of malice these companies will think of 5-10 years from now when these machines are even more widespread and probably come with even more invasive anti-user hardware capabilities.

It's not wrong... it's just very very naïve.

Well, there's one good thing that will come out of this: these kinds of idiotic moves will help us figure out which companies have the right kinds of management at the top, and which ones don't have any clue whatsoever.

Of course, it will come with the working class bearing the brunt of their bad decisions, but that has always been the case unfortunately. Business as usual...

The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.

Software development is logical and predictable. It's (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you're doing should work every step of the way... without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.

This is the core problem. The overlap between people who use facebook and people who are interested in VR is not very big. Most people on facebook just want to see pictures of their grandchildren and are hardly the kinds of people who would be early adopters of technologies like this. VR enthusiasts on the other hand simply have no interest in whatever kinds of shit Zuckerberg has to offer. Some might hold their noses and try it anyway, but you're just making your potential userbase smaller and smaller.

This idiotic "metaverse" thing has always been a hilarious joke and is doomed to fail. This has been obvious ever since it was announced. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook turning out to be a great way to creep on^W^W keep in touch with friends and other contacts. He's not a visionary and doesn't have a clue how to build a new thing people want from scratch. But he thinks he does cause he got lucky with facebook.

The reason why American tech workers haven't unionized is because when times are good, they think they don't need a union, and when times are bad, it's far too late.

Source: reading too many of hopeless comments like this on hacker news

Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it’s to their benefit

Seriously. We have fossil fuel companies knowingly and willingly destroying the planet in the name of profits. Where's the outrage over that? Or is that moral and ethical?

But when we're talking about technologies that give power to the people to break from the shackles of the content cartels, then all of a sudden, out come the morality police!

Personally, I'm just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.

In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.

This may force Google to address their terrible dispute resolution policies though. If they keep removing software without providing any meaningful dispute resolution, then I would hope that there's a possibility for alternate repositories to fill that void.