As an internal implementation detail, it’s fine and pretty standard. Exposing it to the end user so that they have to know whatever janky-ass domain and capitalization you picked to run your application is braindead.

Exactly. Everyone complains about ad tech and enshittification until you point them to the conveniently located button that lets them pay for the service…

It’s just Maslow’s Hierarchy. The person who doesn’t have a job should be egocentric, at least in this narrow area of focus. If your position is that people should prioritize abstract societal benefits over their own security and well-being, I’m not sure what to tell you other than to prepare for a life of people disappointing you.

Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.

There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there’s the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we’ve created that we need to solve. It’s not that women are bad at this job. It’s that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won’t automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That’s a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.

But there’s a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there’s a societal good being pursued doesn’t make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I’m not a fan of the idea that “let’s mistreat them like other people were mistreated” is inherently a good thing.

I agree with you. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to do something. We all start basically every endeavor not knowing how to do it. My complaint is specifically with people who march into that thing they haven’t learned yet with an attitude of “and you’re all wrong and stupid for not fixing it for me”.

Well, we’re here on a web site discussing it, and the top two recommendations are “build one yourself from parts” and “buy a used one in cash”.

Seems to me that it’s the very definition of unrealistic if the real world has almost no examples that do it.

Or just use their built in sync and sign in one time, and all your addons will be installed and enabled for you.

If your argument boils down to “none of the browsers are exactly pre-configured for me, one of the 7 billion not special people on the planet”, I’m not sure there’s a productive conversation to be had here.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of “if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems”. The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

That’s a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company’s field sales operation, I’m not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That’s just how the world works.

There are lots of problems here. First, if you have to “hack” something to get the code, then it likely invalidates your own defense that you thought you were allowed to release it. Second, even if you can prove that nVidia knows that they should have to GPL their code, you still have no legal right to hack something to get it. If the hacking is illegal, then it’s illegal, even if it’s done to enable an otherwise legal activity.

For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can’t replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.

That’s definitely not the norm. Used to be that installing Windows would wreck Grub, but you just needed to but a rescue disk and reinstall Grub one time to fix it. Most people dual booted for decades without any issue there.

WoW still runs great under Wine.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Windows machine, but doesn’t Windows index the content of files as well as their names? If so, that would have fairly profound differences from slocate.

I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

This distinction only exists in your head.

https://privacyis1st.medium.com/abuse-of-the-mac-appstore-investigation-6151114bb10e

Those are apps that got through app review and silently did malicious things in the background with no user action aside from the initial download.

Who cares what the technical exploit was? The net result is that there’s an app in the store that if you download it, does harm to you in a way you can’t prevent except for uninstalling the app.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-app-store-scams-fraud/

https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/84-dangerous-scam-apps-found-on-iphone-app-store-your-stealing-money-check-full-list-of-apps-71658128703429.html

https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-scams-apple-app-store-google-play/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/crypto-scam-apps-infiltrate-apple-app-store-and-google-play/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/pig-butchering-scam-apps-sneak-into-apples-app-store-and-google-play/

https://www.laptopmag.com/news/84-scam-apps-still-active-on-app-store-steal-over-dollar100-million-annually

I could keep going down the rest of page one of the search results, but why?

Pretty sure Samsung guarantees 4 years of upgrades and support.

Honestly the only thing Apple vets is that the app maker isn’t trying to weasel their way around Apple’s cut of the revenue. They’ll 100% catch it if you have a link to your sign-up page instead of using in-app purchase, but if you want to make an app called Threads and scam 300,000 people’s info, go nuts.

The Google Store is no better, but if I gave 1000 people money to spend on software, the ones who would be scammed out of the most are the people using these app stores. It’s an absolute travesty that Apple continues to get so much mileage out of their bullshit claims about their strict and thorough review process.

Also, I think it’s kind of hilarious that you just want a phone to work without you needing to mess with it, and then your phone cycle with Android sucked because you apparently picked something called the WileyFox Swift and started fucking around with bootloader replacements.