> Why do people need banking on their phones though? Banks have websites too.
2FA. I was a smartphone hold-out for longer than anyone I know, but banks mandating 2FA with no options for doing it in a standards-compliant way or any way that doesn't involve the app stores was what finally broke my resistance.
I'll repeat a critique I've made about Tonies before [1]:
I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents.
E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.
> “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing?
I don’t think the authors claim we should have 100% specialisation. They just say that the fact that the EU has fewer AI-related patents as a proportion of the total (less specialisation) is evidence that it is behind in AI. That seems reasonable.
> Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?
Haha, funny :)
No, it'll be like the rest of the industries that use more AI, they'll spend the same amount of effort (as little as possible) and won't validate anything, and provide worse service, not better. AIslop is everywhere, and seemingly unavoidable for companies to use more and more to cut more corners.
The validation point is real. We tested this with AI presentation tools specifically - gave 6 of them the same prompt and fact-checked every claim against primary sources. Best accuracy was 44%. Most were under 20%.
The pattern was consistent: the tools produce confident, well-formatted output that looks thoroughly researched. But more than half the statistics were either distorted or completely fabricated. The worst part was finding the same fake stats appearing across multiple tools - not because they independently verified anything, but because they all absorbed the same bad data from training.
The productivity gains from AI are real, but so is the validation cost. People just aren't accounting for it.
I used to live in central London, so I know what you mean, but here's the thing: LOTS of people don't have access to curated local book stores, so doing the same thing but doing it online does add value. I live in rural Germany now. Reaching a brick-and-mortar bookstore is a 30mins drive, looking+paying for parking, 10 mins walk, and then the bookstore won't be curated at all. It'll be a branch of a soulless chain trying with all their might to stay afloat by pandering to whatever islands of book-buying-taste have half a chance of achieving critical mass given the geographical constraint: cookbooks, self-help, books on parenting and pet-rearing, paperback love stories, etc.
Personally, I really like the idea that's at work here, and I like the fact that it generalises: Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion. Doesn't even matter which, as long as there is a side effect of selecting for people who aren't completely brain-dead. Scrape it for book recommendations. Make it into a list. Done. Value added. Use affiliate links; maybe you can even get paid back for your efforts. As a book-buying consumer, I'll say: Let's have more of this, please.
> Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion
I’ll add onto that: find real-life friends/acquaintances who are both not brain dead and read books. Frequently ask them “what are you reading lately?” Not only does this lead to good conversations and deeper friendships, it results in an endless stream of book leads.
Most of the good books I’ve read for the past several years have been curated for me by two friends who are prolific readers and do all the work for me of finding new books. I occasionally find something they haven’t read, but they certainly do most of the heavy lifting.
Graphical login managers are just a nightmare altogether.
Genuine use cases for multiuser desktop Linux are exceedingly rare. (Are university computer labs with desktop computers still a thing? Or is it just Wi-Fi and BYOD now?)
On an effectively-single-user system, there is very little point in distinguishing between the state where the single user has logged in and the session has been locked versus the state where the single user has not yet logged in. Dealing with the discontinuities between those two states, on the other hand, is a nightmare. (e.g. Wi-Fi might be controlled through the desktop session. Why should the computer not be connected to Wi-Fi and its network services reachable, just because the user hasn't logged in yet? What about power management? If the single user has turned off the feature to automatically suspend after x minutes of inactivity through KDE settings, why should that setting only start to apply after the user has logged in, and not yet when the greeter is still sitting idle? Those kinds of behaviours are usually not what you want) -- And, subjectively, I've found the KDE login manager to be the buggiest part of my KDE experience anyway.
I would advise anyone to set up auto login with something like sddm, and skip the whole thing. Password entry is a bit redundant, assuming the user has already entered at least one password for disk encryption, and things like ssh are governed through key pairs.
> Why should the computer not be connected to Wi-Fi and its network services reachable, just because the user hasn't logged in yet? What about power management? If the single user has turned off the feature to automatically suspend after x minutes of inactivity through KDE settings, why should that setting only start to apply after the user has logged in, and not yet when the greeter is still sitting idle?
These were reasons GDM integrated GNOME components and KDE forked SDDM to PLM.
> Genuine use cases for multiuser desktop Linux are exceedingly rare. (Are university computer labs with desktop computers still a thing? Or is it just Wi-Fi and BYOD now?)
When I was a student in 2015, we had several computer labs. One was called the Delphinium because it was populated with Dell machines running Linux, and another was called the Orchard because it was full of iMacs. There was a lab of Windows machines too which didn't have a memorable name.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
A multiuser system is a system where multiple users are logged in at the same time and ussing the computer.
So a multi-user desktop Linux would be a computer where multiple people are logged in each with their own desktop session on the same machine.
That was the way unix was first used, a big computer somewhere with multiple client terminals connected to it all doing their own thing. This is the environment x11 came about as well.
Nowadays even if the computer is shared by multiple people each with their own account only one of them is using it at a time.
No. gyulai complained of graphical login managers and advised to set up automatic login. Multiple users sharing a computer with their own accounts would use the login manager for account selection.
Putting Linux on dumpster-find computers is a hobby for some rich Americans. They'd be happy to hand those out to the poor and needy who, however, wouldn't be caught dead with one of those. Because, sporting the latest iPhone at all times is part of the reason they're poor. -- The world is a complicated place, man.
...let me rephrase that. I frequently am quite surprised by how poor some people are who still manage to sport the latest iPhone at all times. Conversely, a small amount of money or even no money at all and a dumpster find will get you surprisingly far, when it comes to having your basic computational needs met. The world is more complicated than a bunch of stereotypes. "Someone who thinks of sharing of computers as rare, must be rich and conceited" is not a good model of the world. "Someone who is poor must be spending too much money on iPhones" is not a good model of the world either. (One reading of what I wrote would be this, but it's not what I meant to imply).
You shouldn't assume that someone with the disk password is entitled to the user's data. That's kinda a fundamental separation. Your home directory should be encrypted separately from the disk anyway
I am willing to downgrade my statement “exceedingly rare” to “relatively rare”. It is certainly exceedingly rare in my sphere of experience. The last time I worked for a company that had shared computers was 16 years ago. This was on a trading floor set up for compliance. And they were in the process of phasing that out and making the computers on the trading floor just dumb terminals for Windows terminal server. So the desktops, themselves, ceased to be multi-user because they only ran the terminal server client, and it didn't matter which user that ran under.
After that, the only setup I've ever known was company-issued single-user laptops, and rarely BYOD. Company-issued single-user laptops are also what is used by all my friends and colleagues, where I have knowledge of such things.
With that said: The multi-user model is pretty broken on modern desktop Linux anyway, if you only look at how much stuff goes in $HOME these days, including software installed through flatpaks, configuration, even configuration with system-wide effects like power management and network, etc.
Many companies issue laptops. But even some of them have shared computers in meeting rooms or connected to equipment. Single user laptops are rare in medical facilities, banks, call centers, and many other places in my experience. Many shared desktops could be replaced by virtual desktop infrastructure theoretically. But this would cost more in many cases.
My network configuration is in /etc. Flatpak applications can be installed for system or user. And users able to install applications for themselves does not make the multi user model broken.
I have about five Fedora desktops running in my house that I share with my partners. Domain-style logins are handled by FreeIPA. Basic login with the KDE Fedora spin works great.
I've been meaning to set up auto-mounting network shares and such, but haven't gotten around to it; but the login management is very convenient and we use every day.
> I certainly think it’s incredibly false marketing for Apple to claim I bought an iphone, when in reality I paid upfront for essentially AOL.
I wonder if that has ever been tried against Apple or a similar company in a court of law, because I think there might be real merit there. One would have to get a bunch of people together claiming a refund on the purchase price on the grounds that ownership hasn't been transferred and therefore Apple is in breach of contract in relation to the contract for sale of an iPhone. Then those people would have to bring a class action, and the case would revolve around the concept of "ownership". Because "ownership", to a first approximation, means the legal right to do with some piece of property essentially as you please, and Apple is clearly basing much of their business on the assumption that users do not have those rights and is taking positive action to prevent users from exercising such rights.
I don't know much about the law in the rest of the world, except Germany, but in Germany that would certainly be the case, and there is a surprising amount of case law revolving around such things as horses or other animals being sold, and the former owner then trying to restrict the new owner in exercising their ownership rights, which generally end with ownership rights being upheld by courts.
I’ve been thinking for a while now that a really effective way to deal with problem companies would be coordinate a mass action on small claims closets around the world all on the same day.
Often in small claims court you win by default if the other person doesn’t show up and I’m sure judges know average will sympathize with the kinds of arguments that you raised above.
I don't know. We don't have any such thing as small claims court in Germany, but my expectation would be that judges in low-level courts will try their very best not to get noticed for setting any kind of precedent whatsoever. The only thing that's going to happen if you rule against Apple in a low-level court is that they will go into revision, and carrying a high probability that the higher-level judge will overturn the decision and make the lower-level judge look bad in the process.
Also, any kind of effort to annoy someone by bringing coordinated actions in lots of venues all at the same time is probably abuse of process.
The idea isn't just to use small claims courts, but to use whatever first level legal venue to seek redress you can find in your area. That might mean small claims courts, or consumer protection bureaus, or binding arbitration. Whatever it is the idea is to coordinate with others to do so in a way that strains the resources of the organization you're fighting against and is in venues that are sympathetic to consumers and are able to make clear judgements with little chance for the opposing side to appeal.
The goal of this isn't to annoy someone, the goal is to seek compensation for their unacceptable behavior and raise awareness of it so that others may do so as well.
With the mindboggling assymetry in resources between a single individual and an entity like Apple or Google it only makes sense for people to team up and coordinate against them.
Case law isn't directly normative in civil law traditions like Germany and France in the same way it is in common law traditions like the U.S. and U.K. But court decisions that are deemed interesting do get picked up in journals, cited in academic literature, and cited by other judges in their own decisions. There is a herd dynamics psychology where judges and academic writers default to following along with the principles established in each other's decisions and academic writing, rather than go against that consensus. (Unless their conviction is very strong, and they are, depending on the gravity of the issue, willing to stake their reputations and careers on those convictions). -- I brushed over that distinction when I used the term “precedent”. In my mind it's pot-ay-toh po-tah-toh.
You have the legal right to do anything to your iPhone that you please, except for DMCA circumvention. Apple, cleverly, designs it so you can't do very much without DMCA circumvention. But it is the government's fault for this loophole, not Apple's.
I expect that over the next 10 years, one of two things is going to happen: Either Software Engineering is going to reinvent itself as an actual engineering discipline, or Civil Engineering is going to cease to be one and we'll be driving over vibe-constructed bridges (and plunging to our certain deaths, in case the sarcasm wasn't clear).
I came to this discussion, specifically looking for the term "management 'science'", with the quotation marks where they belong, and I found it right here, so thanks for that :-) ...I don't think I'd be capable of letting the term roll off my tongue without doing the airquotes either.
I optimize for maximum amount of natural sunlight hitting my retina throughout the day, as that tends to have positive effects on my psychological wellbeing.
So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).
So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.
With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.
With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.
2FA. I was a smartphone hold-out for longer than anyone I know, but banks mandating 2FA with no options for doing it in a standards-compliant way or any way that doesn't involve the app stores was what finally broke my resistance.
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