steltek

"Old nerds" were ostracized in school. They got started in tech when it was about coding and tech being fun; there was no crazy money in it. Even the dotcom boom can't hold a candle to the salaries and status swirling around now. It's a different attitude and I think it shows in how you approach work and the workplace.

Ageism is a serious topic in tech and I wonder how each generation will be viewed. Certainly "greybeards" were considered oracles of wisdom and solid foundations.

I don't have an Xbox but I love that mouse and keyboard are considered cheating devices.

They're normalized in some places. I see people wearing them and not just the "Covid isn't over!" folks.

I thought this was a bug in Youtube. It's intrusive and annoying.

Do other video apps do this? Why?

Wikipedia is anything but anarchy. There's so much bureaucracy it would surprise even Kafka.

I also don't think Elon's psyche is built around an abstract notion of economic systems. He's simply a narcissist that desires shiny things, in a very basic and unrefined way. Rich people just want to add baubles to their menagerie.

The privacy thing was always hiding the real truth. Apple will never be able to compete with Google on ads or tracking: they have neither the engineering chops nor the reach. By being "privacy first", it saves Apple money and cuts off a little of Google's revenue stream.

The benefit to customers was a secondary effect.

I know, right? That quote led me to the brain-bleach-required section of Wikipedia. If you want to ruin a nice Friday too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

Although above that one, "goombah" can be (not always) used as a slur against Italians? Growing up with Super Mario, that is kinda funny but then also concerning. Like it's been hiding in plain sight.

The Nvidia thing was a subtle way to point out that you can't "brew install" your way out of every bit of missing OS functionality. The subtly was sadly too subtle.

"Posix" is such a trivial set of APIs that until recently Windows claimed to be Posix compatible (and basically still is???). Darwin, the MacOS kernel, lacks pretty much everything above that slim foundation. No user or network namespaces. No capabilities. Even if you switch to GNU coreutils (ls, ps, netstat, etc), you get a reduced featureset because Darwin lacks /proc, /sys, ioctls, and other knobs&levers to make stuff work the way it does on Linux. Xorg works because X11 was common across all Unixen back then. And on the built in BSD utils, stuff gets weird like ls ~/Downloads -l doesn't work and case insensitivity leads to weird bugs in things like shell wildcards (like ls ~/downlo*/*).

The Linux network stack is complicated because it can do absolutely everything, at insane speeds and scales. MacOS' network features are geared towards being a laptop and not much else. I won't defend Linux as user friendly but it's been my daily desktop for 25 years, I guess I've figured it out. I use and appreciate stuff like VLANs, bridging, nftables, ebtables, etc. If you need to change behavior, there's probably a /proc/net flag that will do it. It's stuff that MacOS hides or simply doesn't have.

A public good? Like roads, firefighters, etc? You want the government to pay for your Youtube Premium subscription?

Less snarky, if you're arguing that Youtube has earned a special legal status, a natural consequence is that Google gets to play by a different rulebook from all other competitors. That's quite a dangerous direction to take.

Does this mean brew install nvidia-drivers works for you?

"Posix compliant"? I'm not sure you fully understand the gap here. Linux has containers, performant and feature rich virtualization, robust networking, user friendly GNU utils, case sensitive filesystems, etc. It's not stuff you can duct tape on by recompiling Linux tools and be all set. You're trying to keep up with a Ferrari using a Fiat.

There's more to "AI" than ChatGPT. Deepfakes, propaganda swarms, precise tracking of people online across pseudonyms/handles. The power available to malicious organizations and governments is absolutely terrifying. Any social media that doesn't also have AI-based countermeasures is vulnerable.