Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
I'm not familiar with patent legalese, but from my layman skimming of the patent application, I think you're right.
Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.
To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.
I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun
I’m experience windows 11 which is my first windows experience since maybe NT 2 or 4.
I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.
Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.
I don't think they did an NT 2, I think they started with 3.1 or somewhere in 3 to match the contemporary consumer windows version. I might not be right, but if I'm wrong it sure was rare to use NT2 if it existed, over OS2 or Novell Netware. Anyway, that's a nitpick and doesn't change your point.
Lately I don't know if I should stay quiet as to not interrupt someone subtly intentionally poisoning LLM training.
Fig 11 is clearly inferior to Fig 8, though. I mean, the improvement to Fig 6 was necessary ofcourse, but with Fig 11 they really overdid it. With Fig 8 they found a good middleground.
Sure, not system-wide in rote. It opens with "based at least partially on content of the interactive software application". It's not a far leap from that to screen and audio monitoring. Luckily we don't need to make that leap; the rest of the patent makes explicit demonstration of those capabilities:
* "contextual cues from or based on the interactive software application" [0035]
* "OPTIONALLY in communication with an event detection module" (emphasis mine) [0035]
* "In some embodiments the content management system can receive user inputs from a user interacting with the interactive software application to interpret the content of the interactive software application" [0053]
* Regarding inputs to the event detection systems (which are expressly say don't need to run locally): "video information, audio information, game state data, or other information provided by or from the interactive software application" [0065]
* "FIG. 10 is an embodiment of a frame of video information received from the interactive software application that may be used for identifying events within the user's gameplay." [0073] (Note the patent does not limit itself to video games, just interactive software applications; this is just an example in that context.) [0073]
* "In some embodiments, the video information include user input information." [0092]
And, the design explicitly allows remote processing of this information:
* "The content management system may be stored and/or executed remotely to the client device" [0033]
* "the event detection module may be local to or remote from the content management system." [0036]
You're right, it doesn't include the whole screen and systems audio. Just the parts in the application. But Microsoft just adds this functionality to all software, and then there's no effective difference.
And that is extremely likely to me. And feasible. The patent doesn't say this has to be embedded in applications. Microsoft can implement this on any application. And Microsoft is well beyond the benefit of the doubt when it comes to privacy concerns.
Patents are essentially by design almost unreadable: the attorneys who put them together are trying to make the patent seem as broad as possible, while the actual operative claims (a tiny fraction of the text) need to be single gargantuan sentences that need to be narrow enough to not be invalidated by prior art.
My guess--and this is only a guess, I can't make enough sense to do anything more--is that the novel part may have something to do with the "credit duration" stuff.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...
Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.
I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.
Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.
LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.
If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.
Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.
For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.
Last time I wrote anything remotely academic was several decades ago, but at that time, the argument was that you had to use LaTeX because Word documents had no support for simultaneous editing, version control, and editors comments. It is truly bizarre to see the same arguments repeated after so long time but completely reversed, in favor of Microsoft Word. Surely the tools haven't become worse over time, given the popularity of github, Overleaf and such?
Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.
Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.
Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.
You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.
I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.
It isn't realistic to teach your collaborators a new system just for your own comfort. They'll just avoid making edits/comments. Especially if you're just a PhD student/postdoc interacting with a full time scientist - who will have much more work to do than fiddling around with your esoteric editing system.
It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.
Sure, I did my phd back in the 2010s and latex+git/svn was what everybody used. Im not saying you cant use word, im just saying the criticism raised of latex above is not a valid reason to.
LaTeX used widely for papers, but it does not cover all. PowerPoint is huge, Word is used closer to Markdown’s level for simpler documents (and Pandoc is a huge helper). All administrative staff is using MS Office, that means Excel is used a lot for forms as well. Then there is OneDrive and Teams for collaboration.
Not so much autocorrect, but Excel is very eager to interpret things as a date, which may be useful when you're dealing with dates a lot, but it disqualifies it for anything related to serious data.
People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.
It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.
My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.
Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.
Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.
Not sure why you'd not just use discord if cost is that much a factor, it has better calling that slack and ironically given what slack is used for way better code embedding etc.
I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen
a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.
No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.
I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.
I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.
My wife and father-in-law used to use Skype all the time, and when it shut down, the stars aligned as I suggested they try Signal and they both loved it.
Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.
The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.
No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.
Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all".
Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.
I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system.
Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.
On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.
It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).
Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)
Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.
That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.
> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
> That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash.
Wait till AI driven job losses really start to mount. Nothing divides people faster than an empty stomach. The republicans are leaving a poison pill - they will profit from AI and when democrats win and the job losses really start to hit hard, the democrats will be left holding the blame bucket. Obviously they are not exactly crying hoarse for AI safeguards/job protections either because national security/donors etc.
Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.
One of the most telling quotes of our political era is this one from 2019:
“I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
They voted for him to do “good things” where the expectation was he’d hurt the right people. This person stated it a little more plainly than most but I think this view explains the last 10 years or so.
It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.
Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.
We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.
As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.
Every government has taxed its population, and past governments often used real violence to collect them. The level of taxes we see currently is abnormal and abusive imo, but taxing in general isn’t.
Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.
I don't want to challenge people's deeply held faiths, but I don't think we need the silly "maximise shareholder value" chant in every single conversation thread.
I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
I think your experience is the exception rather than the rule, most people work for a company that dictate the computer and OS to use, as well as the communication tools (teams, slack...) for which they have an enterprise license.
My comment was more on the line "when given options, people will massively choose Windows" just out of familiarity or fear of the unknown, and by people I also mean management. If I was manager, I wouldn't force Linux (which I use exclusively since c. 2000) unto my workers, unless I am ready to set Linux familiarity as a CV minimum requirement, reducing my hiring pool by 90% at least.
The parent comment implies there is some dark conspirancy behind the scenes to force Windows unto us. There might be a couple decades ago, today it is just what people choose if given choice. Windows 11 nags its users all the time, yet they accept it as it was normal and unavoidable.
It's not so much the AI vendors that are the issue. It's everyone else that want to grab some of those LLM profits as well. Apple in iOS/macOS, Google and Samsung in Android, Microsoft in Windows/Office, Raycast, Meta in WhatsApp, a company's helpdesk, random websites, etc. Everyone wants to make a profit by selling you an AI subscription or by reducing the number of humans employed.
> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
I have a reliable system running for years on a Surface Pro 2022, so not sure what your experience with Windows was. It does take a few tweaks to remove some of the junk but otherwise it is a solid work environment IMO. The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds. So both environments can definitely be a shitty experience unless you know what you are doing.
> The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds.
If you value your own dignity you should see that these scenarios are worlds apart. In one case you have a trillion-dollar company actively working against your own interests. On the other hand, you had some trouble finding drivers for a volunteer-driven project, which is a problem that you are actually empowered to fix.
I have been a decade long windows user (and still am), I administer a computer room with MacOS and use Linux. So I know all three pretty well.
Try reinstalling that surface pro with windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Windows is okay, but every update introduces new bullshit, bloatware, accounts you're forced to use, UI-changes. Linux is reliable in the sense that you can chose when and if you want to change things and there is always a way to do it the way you want to do it (something that is the big weakness of MacOS).
Additionally KDE Plasma is the best Desktop UI on all operating systems today. Scripting and automation on Linux is killer, ... The only reason for Windows/MacOS is certain software that doesn't performantly run on Linux (or if Linux scares you).
I think it might be symptomatic of broader tech illiteracy:
People don't know anything else or anything better. They want their software to Just Work, and ultimately the decision is made by an executive who decides that microsoft products are “the most stable” or “easiest” route.
Well some are, some are not. Some are simply invited to a nice dinner and given the hint that this might be a contact that gives them access to affluent circles. I have heard it all.
Gave up? There are more Linux games than ever. Most commercial games work fine on Linux now. Some through emulation of some sort, others completely natively, because most gamer engines support Linux natively, making it trivial to do so. And as a gamer, I can't really tell the difference between the two.
If you mean Linux-only classic open source games, like Angband or Battle for Wesnoth or something, they still exist, but the demand has clearly gone down because now almost all games work on Linux. Except the ones with anti-cheat systems that rootkit-style access to your system.
Steam has been pushing Linux as a gaming OS, and it's working. Mainstream game support has come leaps and bounds over the last several years. It's still not quite as good as Windows. You will run into more bugs and have to fiddle with things a bit more to get them to work. It's improving rapidly though.
My only concern is that this is mostly just the result of one very influential company. If they turn evil on us...
The parent poster said "Linux gaming community". "Most commercial games work fine on Linux now" because a multi-billion dollar corporation, Valve, is paying to maintain Proton to protect their business model, not the Linux community.
In my personal experience, performance is better than I've ever seen on Windows. But less subjective benchmarks exist. Apparently, if you have an AMD GPU, performance is likely to be better on Linux, if you have Nvidia, it's probably better on Windows. I have Nvidia and no complaints.
Bad take, what actually happened was the realization that games wouldn't be released on Linux unless there were enough users there to warant it. Just as with ARM Windows not getting a single usable software when first released. What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.
By allowing a lot of people who are willing to take a performance-hit to transition to Linux, they sow the grass-roots necessary for the game studios to release native games on Linux.
I recently played several games of early to mid 2000 and had no problems.
Maybe for Win98-era and older games I'd had to use Wine, but not for anything semi-modern like this.
You're saying this as if emulation (which Wine isn't really, more of a Win32 API compatibility layer; WINE literally stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator') was a bad thing. In reality, a lot of games benchmark better on Linux than on Windows today.
Emulation is not a bad thing - it gives users options. My point is that Microsoft were the only ones who managed to make a stable gaming platform.
Also "a lot of games benchmark better" - some games. And then some games don't work at all. And some games work with minor or significant issues. Which is not a slight against Wine and Proton as it's not an easy task.
Can't speak to it myself, but I'm not sure how up to date your infos are. I read a lot of reviews and it seems that the vast majority of the Steam catalogue should run fine on Linux today. The most important exceptions are games that require kernel-level anti-cheat (so if you're into online multiplayer games that could be a dealbreaker).
Huh? I just finished Fallout 4 on Linux, a game that is famously unstable and it worked totally fine out of the box. Install steam, install Fallout, go.
Not to discard your happiness at things working out for you, but that's a game from 2015 and it's 2026 now. And is also in top 50 of best sellers of all time, so I would expect it to work.
3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
Because Germany is critically dependent on LNG imports from US.
"
Gas covered a little more than a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use in 2025, making it the country’s second most important energy source. Germany is among the world’s biggest natural gas importers – around 95 percent of its gas consumption is met by imports, according to energy research data group AGEB.
"
"
Energy industry association BDEW said that Norway has now become Germany’s top gas supplier by far, with about 45 percent in 2025, transported by pipeline. Around one tenth of the gas used in the country arrives as liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly at one of four import terminals along the coast. In 2025, around 95 percent of that LNG came from the US.
"
European countries are trading gas between them, we have to look into whole European imports. For example Germany is import lot of US gas through Belgium.
"
Russia has continued to supply a sizeable portion of gas imports, although the EU has decided to fully phase them out by 2027. Most natural gas in a gaseous state was imported from Norway (52%), Algeria (20%), Russia (10%), and the UK (8%) in 2025. LNG came from the US (55%), Russia (14%), Qatar (9%), and Algeria (6%).
"
Buying US helicopters when they've been developing one with France. But Germany has no choice: It has been literally occupied by the US forces and it's only recently that it has regained the right to have an army, but there are still 200k US troops in Germany (among other means of influence).
Germany had it's Bundeswehr the whole time since it joined the Nato 1955 same year the US occupation officially ended. And there are not even remotely 200k us Troops in Germany anymore.
No idea where you get your Infos from, bit a short googling would show that this is simply not true.
My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.
Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.
I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.
In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.
The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.
Yup when courts no longer work at some point we go back to settling disputes the old fashion way. Lawyers and courts were the compromise because the old way can get pretty ugly, but it looks like we are going to have to relearn that lesson.
Where in the UCC does it say that? There may be a State regulation or a company policy, but I don't recall anything in the UCC about a "free" 14 day return policy. I can return a used car, no questions asked, after 14 days? Good luck with that.
Well, not really. If you have unpacked the iphone - I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be easy to return even within the 14 day window. You can return unpacked though, which is not the point of what I'm saying. Also for the benefit of the argument, change 2 days to 15 and you end up at the same place- you cannot legally return the device, User agreement has changed in ways you don't accept and you are forced to use device, for which you have paid or accept loss and buy another device. Oh and also, you cannot change OS to the alternative one for which terms might be more acceptable to you. How is this not a subject of investigation- I don't know.
You can absolutely return it within the 14 day window, even unpacked.
During the reflection period, you may open the packaging. You may try or fit the product, just like in a normal store. But you are not allowed to do more than what is needed to judge the product. For instance, you can try pants. But you cannot wear the pants for several days and then return it. If you do this anyway and the product loses value? Then the seller may charge you the damage. The seller needs to inform you of this before you buy the product.
I have sent back products within the 14 days, including smartphones that I tried and decided that I don't like it. Some sellers also extend the 14 days to 30 days.
Changing the terms later is a completely valid point though and it should be possible to reject any updated terms IMO.
Well, yes really. If it is 2 days, and you've bought it online then you can just bring it back.
ishouldnotbutk8's message was mostly a joke since your argument would work with 15 days instead of 2. And yes, customers should be protected* against altering the deal.
Especially that it is so so common now, with the wide-spread of IT. Companies just push out malicious updates and changes in terms and conditions.
* they probably already are, but not many people try to bring remote downgrade cases to courts
> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.
In the UK, Trading Standards is done at local authority level. There is no funding scenario where your local council is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with big tech.
The point of a class action is it isn't worth your while to go after them for $20 - you would win $20 - but then you have to pay your lawyers a million dollars. However if enough people were scammed the lawyers can get their pay, and better yet the cost is high enough that the company is likely to learn a lesson.
It is still a large enough number that it appears on accounting statements. It is reported to investors. That is there are enough negatives that it gets attention and tends to change behavior
> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,
You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.
Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.
As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
>As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.
Please read the links you included. They're all about watching the content on the screen, not using the camera and microphone like the parent comment said.
The patent for using a camera and microphone was a Sony patent from 2009.
Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.
Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true.
E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.
Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.
I do not believe that anymore.
I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:
1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".
2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".
3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).
4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".
5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...
Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.
When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).
It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.
We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.
This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.
Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.
A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.
In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.
Why not? You could build nuclear bombs and start using them or threatening to use them and that would be a greater threat to humanity.
Plus I didn't say you were the greatest threat today, that would be Russia and probably Iran as a clear #2, I said you were historically much worse because of your colonialist past.
The US (or Trump) is the bigger threat because it is currently actively destroying the rule-based world order, which introduces exactly the lawlessness, chaotic times that opens the window for Iran and Russia to 'do business'. Plus it is destroying the its alliances, which were part of keeping the equilibrium between power blocks in tact.
One can only hope that another power that cares about rules fills the void.
> One can only hope that another power that cares about rules fills the void.
There isn't one. You've got the US or nobody at this point, unfortunately.
> The US (or Trump) is the bigger threat because it is currently actively destroying the rule-based world order, which introduces exactly the lawlessness, chaotic times that opens the window for Iran and Russia to 'do business'.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 when Trump wasn't president. Iran attacked Israel and kicked off a new and worse round of fighting in 2023 when Trump was also not president - the war today is just a continuation of that latest round.
While he has done some damage to the alliance by being a jackoff he also forced Europe to spend more which was required for defense. Europe also made itself dependent on Russian oil and gas, even recently France un-sanctioned some Russian billionaires and is making some awful decisions too.
There isn't one. You've got the US or nobody at this point, unfortunately.
Your belief in US exceptionalism is interesting. Even more so, because it is so obvious that the power that will soon overtake the US economically is very likely to fill that void. But they will also get all the benefits of that role and the US will slowly lose them.
In fact, they have already been stepping in the US' former shoes. Some EU leaders mentioned to Zelensky that the only reason that Russia hasn't used nukes against Ukraine is because China said 'no'. In better (depending on perspective) times, it would have been the US as its role of world leader/police to enforce such implicit rules.
It is true that China is currently supporting Russia, but it's mostly of their interest to drain NATO and increase their power over Eurasia. Well, thanks to Trump they proceeding very fast. Or as the Chinese like to say "Trump the nation builder".
> Your belief in US exceptionalism is interesting.
It’s easy to confuse “this is how I think the world works or is shaping up to work” with a view of American Exceptionalism, but my comments have less to do with some mythical concept that Americans are the best people or something and instead just my own analysis of trends and shapes in the world.
> China
There are a couple of broad problems with your view that China is going to replace the US, uphold global institutions, maintain freedom of navigation of the seas, and such.
The first problem is they simply don’t want to. Most China policy experts that I’ve read (I don’t have a specific source at hand but read a lot of papers - if I think of a good one I’ll post it here) agree that while China certainly wants to continue to become a major player on the world stage, they are not all that interested in usurping America’s current role. It costs a lot of money, the US does it partly because of the petrodollar system (which China also does not want or need to attempt to usurp since they are an export-oriented economy), and in taking on this role you also take on the baggage like having to go to war to maintain the system. China lacks the desire and ability to do these things.
Second, as you point out, China supports Russia as it prosecuted its war against Ukraine and Chinese economic activity has created a lot of consternation and distrust in Europe at least amongst the political class. European citizens are slow like Americans were to realize the problems and trade offs but they will soon. But the EU and Germany in particular are taking policy action now which the Chinese are not too happy about.
Pinning this all on Trump is immature. He’s only been president going on 2 years. It’s a little egotistical I might add to suggest that if not for Trump China would somehow not be full-steam ahead with their plans, whatever they are. China does what China wants just like other major powers do. They would build and do so fast regardless of what the Americans have done.
True, under Obama, but I think that's materially different in size and scope.
Why didn't Europe go to war with Russia then or start building military forces to deter another Russian war in Europe once Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014? Russia actually invaded them I believe a long time ago in the 1920s or 1940s under the authoritarian and evil communist regime.
I disagree with most things that you have said in this thread. But this I agree fully with. Europe should have rearmed in 2014 and this was a big failure of European governments (including Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, who was prime minister of NL back then).
I am happy that we are increasing spending and building up our own industry now. But it was far to late and it was fair for US presidents to criticize Europe for it. Note though that this happened as early as Bush and the 2% norm was established under Obama. Mark Rutte just sold the 2% to Trump as Trump's own win (initially during Trump I) to keep the US on board.
The current 3.5% is still the same 2%. It's some weasel wording about investing 1.5% in infrastructure that benefits the military as well. But you can put pretty much under that umbrella. It was purely to appease Trump. Though a lot of countries are going above 2% anyway due to the increasing Russian threat.
I know Trump has caused a lot of divisions but we can continue to try to have productive discussions and I appreciate that you fairly pointed out your agreement here. There are many things we align on, I believe. For example I believe the US should strongly support Ukraine.
Yes? Donald Trump, and the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy, flailing around and trying to bully its way to a lost dominance that is fading away, is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this. It's quite literally the subtext of this discussion.
And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.
> but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.
I mean, I guess people actually vote for this pathological liar / megalomaniac who is a lifetime failure in every dimension, so true. They're even worse. But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person. It's actually astonishing now how he is basically a simpleton in the White House, lying with every utterance, and it's just another day. It isn't even newsworthy. Oh yeah, his big TrumpTM Arch is now going to have drones and snipers! Also, how about that fantasy deal with Belarus for all that potash that doesn't exist, was farcical nonsense on its face, yet everyone reports it because this foolish liar just makes up stuff endlessly so it isn't even notable. Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?
Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.
> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate
This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.
The US has bombed over a half dozen countries in the past year. The US is led by a vile rapist abomination that openly threatens "annihilation" repeatedly, and has a drunkard, profoundly incompetent "secretary of war" that openly flouts literal war crimes (when US soldiers are being subjected to torture and US cities are glassed, hey, think fondly to when that "germs aren't real" halfwit boasted about how rules don't constrain the US, and "no quarter, no mercy shall be given". That emaciated pathetic little loser is so tough and brave). That casually talks about nuclear attacks like it's nothing.
Trump stood at the lectern of the UN and in an utterly insane, deranged, self-aggrandizing speech (again, just another day in the insane idiocracy that the US has become, and it isn't even notable, the decline so severe and accelerating), boasted about looting the resources of Venezuela. Boasted about his assault on the ICC. Two-bit, shithole banana republic junta type horseshit. A worldwide embarrassment.
The US is repeatedly and proudly engaged in wantonly illegal piracy at sea. It boasts about the textbook definition of terrorism.
The US has done more to encourage nuclear proliferation in the last two years than in all of history. It has taught that everyone needs to get nuclear weapons, and many of them need to be pointed at the US. It has pushed the notion that might makes right, and if you have the ability you can steal and rampage whatever you want, in a lawless world.
Your claim that the US is holding the gates is absolutely perverse, and your worldview is most certainly some US exceptionalism bullshit. From the American ocean to the American ocean, crossing all of Americas on planet America, in a solar system filled with Americas, the US of A is by far the world's biggest danger, and it is rapidly devolving. Time to use the Supreme Intelligence (SI! I told my boy here and he liked it!) to find an answer!
And just to be clear, this isn't all on Trump. He's a symptom, not the disease. This sort of idiocracy garbage utterly infects all corners of the US, and it keeps sloshing to the surface.
This American exceptionalism answer has always been amazing to me.
No other country gives two shits if the US "recognizes" the ICC. As a serial warcrime committing nation, of course the US doesn't want it having legitimacy, as it terroristically blows up random boats and schools full of children.
And of course they also want to protect their serial warcrime best pal Israel in the process.
See, the thing about the ICC is that the countries that do recognize it carry out its warrants. Netanyahu can traipze around warcrime nations like the US, but he can't visit Europe, for instance. Because those countries do believe in the ICC. No one is sending military arrest teams to Israel.
How is this remotely the US' say? I have yet to hear an American explain their belief that they get to force others to not have the ICC that doesn't sound like vile devolved, "but we get to murder children!" horseshit. Yes, I get that you're madly in love with committing war crimes, but understand that you're the pariah. Everyone else doesn't have to worsen their standards to the catastrophically low bar you accept. as your pedophile kleptocracy drags your further and further into the abyss.
> What is this "other country" going to do about it?
Wow, sounds toothless. Pretty weird then the extraordinary lengths the US is going to in efforts to destroy it, right? I mean, these two things almost seem incredibly stupid to claim simultaneously. The US has expended enormous political and financial capital trying to destroy the ICC, all because it's so irrelevant and doesn't matter. You know, not unlike how the various administrative pedos and criminals constantly talk about how little Canada matters by talking about it constantly, 24/7, every fucking day. It's pathetic business.
The ICC is an agreement between the good countries of the world to hold human garbage to account. There is no surprise why this upsets human garbage and busted, shithole cultures.
> America isn't exceptional at all in that regard.
Oh, it absolutely is exceptional. Ignoring that Russia is also a universal shitheel problem for the planet, and there are clear reasons why it doesn't like such organizations, China and India have done nothing to thwart or attack the ICC. Nothing. China has overtly stated that they support its mission and disagree with attacks against it. Because China is an infinitely more civilized country that the US is. Which is why the US is flailing and grasping as a fallen empire shithole relegated to the dustbin of history.
BTW - did you see when Trump thought having a bunch of bombers doing afterburner runs would somehow scare Xi? Pathetic banana republic strongman garbage of a busted idiocracy. Pretty hilarious when that soft-handed weaking imbecile winced at the scary noises, mogged out by Xi who again pointed out that the US is a fallen shithole, all while Trump is showing him the autopen while the entire world laughs at how unbelievably pathetic this all is. But this pathetic business goes hard for tens of millions of incredibly stupid Americans that still fall for this grifter rapist.
> Pretty weird then the extraordinary lengths the US is going to in efforts to destroy it, right?
Maybe the current American administration just hates the ICC and disagrees with some of their rulings and is casually destroying it without so called “extraordinary efforts”.
It...hasn't destroyed it at all. In all likelihood China will join the group just to fully take the mantle as leader of the world.
>without so called “extraordinary efforts”
The US administration has burned enormous political goodwill attacking the ICC on behalf of Israel. But more importantly they have set the gears in motion for enormous financial consequences as well.
Do you know why Europe is fast-tracking replacing Visa and Mastercard? Because the pedo-kleptocracy in power in the US used those systems to punish ICC judges[1]. Do you understand how profound the consequences of this will be?
See, the US has decades of goodwill and inertia and entrenchment in place. These things don't change overnight. But it again elected a criminal pedo that is pushing garbage polices, so the whole world is being de-US'd. The consequences are going to be enormous for Americans.
[1] - as a fun fact, any business operating anywhere in the world should be kicked out or fined enormous amounts if it ever applies sanctions that aren't locally recognized. If the US abuses the fact that post-WWs the West centralized business in the largest "safe" country among the cohort, it should very quickly be removed from this position.
Well not yet but if the US proceeds with sanctions that will likely spell the end. But if the US can’t destroy it then who cares? Have your court, go arrest Putin and the IRGC for their crimes. Let us know how successful you are.
> In all likelihood China will join the group just to fully take the mantle as leader of the world.
I don’t see how China allegedly joining the ICC makes it the “leader of the world”. Seems like a stretch to me.
> The US administration has burned enormous political goodwill attacking the ICC on behalf of Israel.
Well some of that (perhaps most) is well-placed.
> But more importantly they have set the gears in motion for enormous financial consequences as well.
Because of the ICC? No I don’t think so.
> Do you know why Europe is fast-tracking replacing Visa and Mastercard? Because the pedo-kleptocracy in power in the US used those systems to punish ICC judges[1]. Do you understand how profound the consequences of this will be?
That’s not happening. First even standing up a “European” platform has challenges because not all European countries agree on how this would be implemented. Second, Americans have and will for the foreseeable future have a shit load of money. Europeans want that money, so they’ll continue to accept Visa and Mastercard. I see American Express accepted more and more too on my regular visits to various European countries. By the way, you know that Europe can stand up payments systems and still accept cards issued in other countries? Tell me, do you think Americans are walking around worried Europeans are not going to take Mastercard or something? Please have some pride and stop acting like random things like this are your political Super Bowl or something. Americans just do not give a shit about this lol and nobody is worried.
> as a fun fact, any business operating anywhere in the world should be kicked out or fined enormous amounts if it ever applies sanctions that aren't locally recognized.
You should be careful not to confuse what you want the world to look like with how the world actually works. I think it’s clouding your judgement and ability to make good decisions.
> If the US abuses the fact that post-WWs the West centralized business in the largest "safe" country among the cohort, it should very quickly be removed from this position.
Good luck or sorry that happened or whatever. Let us know.
> I don’t see how China allegedly joining the ICC makes it the “leader of the world”. Seems like a stretch to me.
It's a process. The US is a busted shithole, and everyone is moving on. Well I guess you have the Board of Peace.
> Because of the ICC? No I don’t think so.
PRECISELY because of the ICC and the US abusing sanctions.
> Americans just do not give a shit about this lol and nobody is worried.
I mean, yes the whole world knows this. Americans are profoundly stupid and uninformed, generally, and sorry but almost all of your comments are just hilarious to this ends. The original claim that the despotic, terroristic US is holding the barbarians back is just the chef's kiss of insane nonsense.
The US is effectively bankrupt. Bond rates are spiralling. Yeah, friend, revisit this thread in 5 or 10 years. You, and so many like you, have absolutely no idea how the world works and it's amazing.
> You should be careful not to confuse what you want the world to look like with how the world actually works.
Never has self-deception been more blatantly stated. Actually amazing.
I mean, good luck with all of that and everything. As your nation spirals with a fascist bag of shit destroying everything.
What’s a process? Didn’t the poster above already tell you China isn’t a member of the ICC? 2/3rd of the world doesn’t care about the ICC or its dictates.
> PRECISELY because of the ICC and the US abusing sanctions.
So you want us to stop sanctioning Russia?
> The US is effectively bankrupt. Bond rates are spiralling. Yeah, friend, revisit this thread in 5 or 10 years. You, and so many like you, have absolutely no idea how the world works and it's amazing.
Remind us about debt and bond rates in countries in Europe. Perhaps you can speak to the UK, Italy, Spain, and France for starters.
> The US has bombed over a half dozen countries in the past year.
Which ones? I'm sure there's a very good reason for each so let's walk through them with civility.
> The US is led by a vile rapist abomination that openly threatens "annihilation"
Trump is probably a rapist but our justice system has failed to prosecute him. But the memory of justice is rather long. He may yet get his day. Separately yea who cares about the annihilation threats. Iran has been doing that for a long time. If they don't like hearing it maybe they should stop too.
> The US is repeatedly and proudly engaged in wantonly illegal piracy at sea. It boasts about the textbook definition of terrorism.
What examples do you have of wanton piracy?
> The US has done more to encourage nuclear proliferation in the last two years than in all of history.
I'd argue Russia has done more there by invading Ukraine.
> It has taught that everyone needs to get nuclear weapons, and many of them need to be pointed at the US.
No nobody has been taught that. But they have been taught that if they step out of line and don't have enough of a deterrent like North Korea, that if they try and build nuclear weapons they'll be on the receiving end of sanctions, and then if that isn't a good enough incentive we'll come bomb them and stop them. You are welcome.
> It has pushed the notion that might makes right, and if you have the ability you can steal and rampage whatever you want, in a lawless world.
Might does make right though. International law is just some stuff made up largely by western nations and backed by American military power. If you have no will or ability to enforce international law, like, idk, stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon, then the law is pointless.
> Your claim that the US is holding the gates is absolutely perverse, and your worldview is most certainly some US exceptionalism bullshit.
No, it's not perverse. I just disagree with your point of view.
> This sort of idiocracy garbage utterly infects all corners of the US, and it keeps sloshing to the surface.
Isn't it embarrassing that all these idiots are the dominant force on the planet and you have to cry to them to help you against Russia and they make much more money than your citizens? If you're going to insult Americans like this you should at least have something worth insulting us over. I do think biking culture is way better than driving, but I'm not sure about much else.
I'd argue Russia has done more there by invading Ukraine.
Nope, nobody was talking about getting nukes after the invasion in 2022.
Everybody started talking about getting nukes after: (1) Trump has been threatening to leave NATO and casting doubt about upholding Article 5, so nobody is really sure if the nuclear umbrella extends to Europe anymore; and (2) Trump has threatened to invade Greenland.
Basically, nobody here trusts the US anymore, but politicians are keeping up appearances to race to scale up production capacity of arms, etc.
Trumpists will typically say "but why should the US provide the nuclear umbrella for Europe?" Which is woefully ignorant of history, the whole NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, etc. exists, because the US didn't want European countries like (West-)Germany to have their own nukes.
Isn't it embarrassing that all these idiots are the dominant force on the planet and you have to cry to them to help you against Russia and they make much more money than your citizens? If you're going to insult Americans like this you should at least have something worth insulting us over. I do think biking culture is way better than driving, but I'm not sure about much else.
Sorry, but the arrogance is perplexing. First, European countries contributed a lot more money to Ukraine than the US. Second, when the US, Ukraine, etc. signed the Budapest memorandum, they US implied that they would respond to a Russian attack.
However, when negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond. [...] Washington did not promise unlimited support. The Budapest Memorandum contains security “assurances,” not “guarantees.” Guarantees would have implied a commitment of American military force, which NATO members have. U.S. officials made clear that was not on offer. Hence, assurances.
And this is exactly one of the issues of the US now. It is completely reliable. Make a trade agreement and then on a whim Trump can decide to shred it again.
The funniest case was that Trump wanted to impose tariffs when Denmark wanted to send troops to Greenland... Which is an autonomous territory of Denmark.
> Nope, nobody was talking about getting nukes after the invasion in 2022.
That's not what I recall. And I also recall a lot of hand-wringing over how it was a shame that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (in a manner of speaking).
> Basically, nobody here trusts the US anymore, but politicians are keeping up appearances to race to scale up production capacity of arms, etc.
That's not true. Internet commentators don't trust the US, but they don't represent all peoples or governments. Even the Danes trusted us enough to sign an agreement giving us perpetual military access to Greenland even if the Greenlanders declare sovereignty.
> Trumpists will typically say "but why should the US provide the nuclear umbrella for Europe?" Which is woefully ignorant of history, the whole NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, etc. exists, because the US didn't want European countries like (West-)Germany to have their own nukes.
I think you are somewhat off the mark here. Nuclear weapons are of course important, but France and the United Kingdom have them too. I guess a question you want to ask Europe is the details and history about France and the United Kingdom's own nuclear umbrellas. If they have them, why do you need American nuclear weapons? Not that I'm personally opposed to also extending ours.
For Americans (and I have various levels of agreement and disagreement) it's less about the nuclear umbrella and more about the placement and utilization of conventional forces. As you can tell with the Iran war and the early days of the Ukraine war, the United States (thanks in part to Europe) has been brow-beaten so much about (what was it, 14 countries someone said we bombed this year?) how bad America is and how awful and racist and "colonizer" America is and all that stuff that many Americans are just fed up with utilizing our military for much of anything or dealing with the problems of other countries.
I'm not, personally, because I think it would be beneficial for us to stop Russia in Ukraine, stop Iran in the Middle East, and avoid a war with China while maintaining the status quo regarding Taiwan, but you know when someone like some posters in this thread want to spend all day talking about how your country is full of idiots eventually people say, well, maybe you guys should take care of your own problems, even if it ends up worse off for everyone.
> Sorry, but the arrogance is perplexing. First, European countries contributed a lot more money to Ukraine than the US. Second, when the US, Ukraine, etc. signed the Budapest memorandum, they US implied that they would respond to a Russian attack.
You say that like there should have been an expectation that the US contributed the same or more? This expectation you have, that you created for yourself, is of your own making.
Second, let's not forget the UK also signed that memorandum and while Europe was busy denying the US and UK's warnings of an imminent Russian invasion, the US and UK were running 24/7 airlift operations to get supplies to Ukraine, provided intelligence, and more. We did respond to the Russian attack. There's no requirement for US forces to respond.
"Even the Danes trusted us enough to sign an agreement giving us perpetual military access to Greenland"
"Trusted". Christ, I guess you subscribe to the Dennis Reynolds "implication" style of coercion. Recall that Denmark readied blood supplies and literally prepared troops for a US invasion. From an ally. "Trusted". Good god.
No one "trusts" the US. It is a worldwide danger, where a pedophile rapist kleptocracy tries to export its profound stupidity to better nations.
In the end, Denmark reaffirmed an existing agreement from 1951. The one that already saw the US having military bases on Greenland per the alliance. They not only broadened it from just the US, they explicitly restricted it such that the US can only maintain such bases if they remain in NATO.
They took an existing agreement and reaffirmed it with new conditions. So Trump, Mr. We're Pulling out of NATO, basically redoubled on NATO just to have a win, where the win is just the status quo. Hilarious stuff. And this actually sells to some Americans?
When they played "Send in the clowns" for Marco Rubio to sign this new "agreement" was just poetic.
Where do you get your news from? Twitter? Because wow, every one of your take is straight from America exceptional land, and it's bizarre (I didn't respond to your other comments out of mercy, but good god you simply have no idea). The fact that Trump celebrated this agreement is because the midterms are coming up and this pathetic loser, having literally nothing to show but failure from his reign of idiocy, needed a "win".
> If they have them, why do you need American nuclear weapons?
You seem to have missed their point. There was a detente and a worldwide "order". Russia stepped out of line and almost the entire world punished them for it. The order mattered. Might does not make right, and in the rule of international law you can't just steal land or resources.
Suddenly Trump not only heralds Putin and wants to cement his battlefield wins, through his incompetent family reps Kushner (jesus christ) and Witkoff, he continually praises Putin and justifies his aggression, constantly repeating Russia's absurd justifications for this foolish war. Then Trump engages in the same behaviour on behalf of the US, stealing the resources of Venezuela, and openly threatening Cuba. And I guarantee that Trump has repeatedly talked to his drunken halfwit SecWar about invading Canada. They openly threatened invading Greenland, just because they want it.
Right now, every capable country should be getting nuclear weapons. Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and on and on. Putin tested the waters and Trump redoubled them and affirmed that there is no international rules, and everyone should be willing to murder billions of people. Any Americans -- having lived a life of peace, security, comfort and affluence -- who think this improves their lot is impossibly fucking stupid. All of history says uncountable Americans are going to die because of this foolish imbecile.
So Trump, Mr. We're Pulling out of NATO, basically redoubled on NATO just to have a win, where the win is just the status quo. Hilarious stuff. And this actually sells to some Americans?
"Art of the deal"
You seem to have missed their point. There was a detente and a worldwide "order". Russia stepped out of line and almost the entire world punished them for it. The order mattered.
Exactly this. It seems that the US has forgotten what soft power, alliances, rules-based world order means. You have the power because you have allies, because you can hold others to rules (and mostly keep up the appearance that you obey the rules yourself), etc. Initially, you can benefit from abusing that position, but it is short-term only. Your allies will form new alliances (e.g. Canada getting closer to the EU), stop buying your weapons, wean themselves of your products (this very news item), etc. The problem with incompetent people like Trump and his administration is that they only see the benefits of the short-term abuse, but not the terrible harm they do to themselves and the rest of the world long-term.
> "Trusted". Christ, I guess you subscribe to the Dennis Reynolds "implication" style of coercion. Recall that Denmark readied blood supplies and literally prepared troops for a US invasion. From an ally. "Trusted". Good god.
Yea interesting how they're so much more ready to go fight the US than fight Russia. But if you want to argue there's no trust there then you certainly can't trust our military being in Europe or backstopping NATO so if your goal is to dissolve NATO because of some arguing over, frankly, a lack of European defense investment in an area that is critical to American security (you own it you need to secure it) then well that's up to Europeans to decide.
I'm ignoring all the other stuff because it's boring and uninteresting. No I don't get my news from Twitter. I don't use social media.
> You seem to have missed their point.
No I'm debating their point. There's a difference.
> Suddenly Trump not only heralds Putin and wants to cement his battlefield wins, through his incompetent family reps Kushner (jesus christ) and Witkoff, he continually praises Putin and justifies his aggression, constantly repeating Russia's absurd justifications for this foolish war.
There are two large problems with this.
First, Europe has no ability to engage with Putin, and if Kushner and Witkoff are the people he will see then we should try for some manner of diplomacy even if the people that are sent aren't the ones you would prefer.
Second, while I fully support Ukraine regaining all of the territory it has lost, if Ukraine is unable to re-take the territory and Russia is unable to progress, it's stupid for all these soldiers to just go and die for no reason. If we can stop the war completely, for example, with Ukraine ceding this land, that's up to them but we should at least explore options and try to bring an end to the war.
> Then Trump engages in the same behaviour on behalf of the US, stealing the resources of Venezuela, and openly threatening Cuba. And I guarantee that Trump has repeatedly talked to his drunken halfwit SecWar about invading Canada.
I don't agree with how we've approached Canada.
Venezuela and Cuba are entirely separate things. Happy to discuss why if you want.
> They openly threatened invading Greenland, just because they want it.
It was a dumb negotiating tactic but it's important to us that it is defended to our satisfaction.
> Right now, every capable country should be getting nuclear weapons. Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and on and on.
If you're in favor of nuclear proliferation then sure. But it doesn't include just the "good" countries. It also means Israel gets to ramp up its nuclear forces, Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Argentina can get nuclear weapons, and anyone else on your naughty list. So we will further double down on a more dangerous world and you're advocating for further breakdowns of international law.
Yea interesting how they're so much more ready to go fight the US than fight Russia.
Ehm, Russia didn't invade Danish territory. The US was threatening to invade Danish territory.
First, Europe has no ability to engage with Putin, and if Kushner and Witkoff are the people he will see then we should try for some manner of diplomacy even if the people that are sent aren't the ones you would prefer.
Putin only wants them because they are weak and can be played.
It was a dumb negotiating tactic but it's important to us that it is defended to our satisfaction.
It was not a negotiation tactic. They already had an agreement for over half a century that they could scale up US military presence as they would like. The US has reduced presence over the years.
Trump wanted to add land like every pathetic little (wannabe) dictator. But the EU showed some teeth suggesting that the trade bazooka could be employed, country moved troops to Greenland (so it wouldn't be a clean invasion without blood). So Trump TACOed out.
If it was a negotiation tactic it is bloody stupid ("art of the deal" I guess). Aside from getting a worse deal then before, as a side-effect many European countries that were planning to buy US arms are now switching to European options.
If you're in favor of nuclear proliferation then sure. But it doesn't include just the "good" countries. It also means Israel gets to ramp up its nuclear forces, Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Argentina can get nuclear weapons, and anyone else on your naughty list. So we will further double down on a more dangerous world and you're advocating for further breakdowns of international law.
Yes, and that was exactly my point earlier, the Trump and the US opened pandora's box. He disturbed the equilibrium by threatening to leave the NATO/not respecting article 5, by threatening to attack its own allies, by yelling Zelensky out of the White House. This sends ripples all over the world and Europe, Canada, and East Asian countries get the message "we cannot trust the US as an ally anymore", which leads to proliferation and probably more wars. It's very likely that Putin will try some sort of attack on NATO countries soon, just to test how firm Trump's commitments are. This would never have happened if he didn't weaken NATO. It's understandable that Poland gets nervous and wants to be able to MAD Russia.
> Ehm, Russia didn't invade Danish territory. The US was threatening to invade Danish territory.
Can you invade a territory in which you already have a dominant military presence? I appreciate Denmark’s bark loud approach but the country is militarily irrelevant. I think it was more of an awful negotiation tactic. We weren’t in the room. Maybe the Danes simply needed a reminder to take US concerns seriously and this was the crappy way of doing that.
> Putin only wants them because they are weak and can be played.
Either way they’re in the room at least trying something. Why aren’t European leaders in Moscow trying to get the war to end? Because they’re strong? Sorry that doesn’t pass the smell test.
> It was not a negotiation tactic. They already had an agreement for over half a century that they could scale up US military presence as they would like. The US has reduced presence over the years.
I disagree. Guess we can agree to disagree here. The new agreement protects American bases even if Greenland declares independence and also establishes formal, legal rights for America to prohibit hostile nations from mining or establishing military infrastructure on the island.
> Aside from getting a worse deal then before, as a side-effect many European countries that were planning to buy US arms are now switching to European options.
Well the deal is better. That’s an objective fact. Nobody in the US is threatened by or cares if Europeans are buying local. We led the way on that and we are happy that Europe is investing more in its defense and defense industrial base.
> This sends ripples all over the world and Europe, Canada, and East Asian countries get the message "we cannot trust the US as an ally anymore", which leads to proliferation and probably more wars.
That doesn’t reflect reality though. Japan and Korea for example haven’t lost trust. Putin by attacking Ukraine sort of forced the issue and to get countries thinking about whether the US would use nuclear weapons I guess in these wars? But the same is true for the EU. Even the language you are using doesn’t make sense to me. If Putin attacks a NATO country why is he all of a sudden testing how firm Trump’s commitments are? He would be testing how firm the EU’s commitments are instead. How fast do you think Spain or Italy will tap out when their kids are off dying in the cold to defend Estonia? What will to fight does France have when its economy is so heavily indebted? Poland and the United Kingdom will fight, the baltics would too since their lives are at stake. You can read for yourself survey results out of Germany where some large majority of German citizens said they wouldn’t fight to defend Germany. You’re going to read this as an attack on Europe. Nothing is further from the truth. I love Europe, but folks need to have a sober assessment of themselves here instead of hiding every possible problem behind Donald Trump.
> the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy
America isn't a fallen empire (if indeed it ever was an empire), nor does Donald Trump existing all of a sudden make everyone else stupid or something. Just because you disagree with someone's politics doesn't make their entire country an idiocracy, nor does it all of a sudden lower the IQs of everyone else.
> is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this
They are just following Trump's lead in decoupling from dependencies like we are from China (and a few others).
> And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.
No that won't happen. Also your assertion about Visa and Mastercard are just incorrect. They may be disrupted by technology if they fail to adapt, but it's not because Europeans don't want American money for example. I go to Europe all the time, at a minimum once/year for about two weeks and my wife and I spend $20,000 or $30,000 or something and believe me you guys love it when I swipe my credit cards. In fact, every time I go to Europe I see American Express more and more accepted.
Nobody is rejecting or ejecting the US banking system except maybe some bad actors but nobody cares about them.
> But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person.
I don't think you can be a profoundly stupid person and still be the president. There's a minimum amount of not being stupid you have to have in order to run a campaign, hire people, make decisions, and more.
> Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?
Maybe you should question why you feel so strongly about this yet the citizens of the wealthiest country in the world with many of the best companies and institutions in the world feel differently. You should maybe question why groups like the AfD are gaining shares in election. You can coddle yourself by chalking it up to just Russian propaganda or something, but that isn't going to do you any good.
> Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.
It's a lot easier to say stuff like this when you are coming (I assume though if not the point will change slightly in form but not substance) from a place of safety and have no stake in the fight. If the US and China were to go to war it would be devastating for both countries. Tens or hundreds of thousands might die. Maybe a little pomp and diplomacy can help avoid that confrontation? It's not like the Dutch are going to be dying on beaches in Taiwan so maybe let's let the folks who have a stake actually do the talking yea?
> You should maybe question why groups like the AfD are gaining shares in election.
When life sucks and there's no hope, people vote for parties that promise to shake things up, not for parties that promise more of the same. That comes in two flavours: far left and far right.
Not to get involved in this argument, but just noting that Trump likely now has MCI (mild cognitive impairment), which has developed over the last two years. He was in better mental shape when he was reelected. Both you and the person you're arguing with can be right on this one.
No, Trump has always been incredibly stupid. His intellect has only ever convinced people dumber still.
Trump grew up wealthy, surrounded by handlers and supplicants obliged to glaze every statement or utterance. This led this utter dunce to believe his idiotic thoughts are pearls of wisdom offered up to an ungrateful world. Did you know there is a "B" in the word dumb? Have you ever heard of the old-timey word "groceries". Affordability is a hoax. Super intelligence!
He is a spectacularly stupid idiot, and he always has been. This isn't new. Dementia doesn't explain it.
I think Trump is smart, but like conman smart. In fact I think he is brilliant in that regard. He is not a food statesman. He wouldn’t even be a good autocrat, because of his untrustworthiness. So yeah Trump is not profoundly stupid, like down syndrome stupid.
The guy has accomplished the extraordinary, and it's easy for loads of people to see that as some sort of intentional, purposeful brilliance.
But I just don't see it.
Instead I see someone who just breaks people's brains. People cannot comprehend someone that immoral, who lies so effortless with every word, and so utterly shameless. They just can't. So when Trump declares that he's going to cut trillions from government spending and eliminate the deficit and pay off the debt, it's impossible for many people to understand that he has no fucking idea what he's talking about, and the little bit he does understand he simply lies about.
Like I keep seeing articles from left wing sources talking about Trump being "humiliated". Trump is utterly incapable of humiliation. When caught in the most outrageous lie, he redoubles on it, which again, tens of millions of people just cannot comprehend someone so utterly immoral and busted, so immediately they think "oh okay...I guess somehow he must be right? I mean, no functioning human could lie so egregiously".
He is so thoroughly a garbage human that many are caught out by him.
The US administration does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. US corporations will take profits over defending ideals or sound principles.
It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.
I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then
- I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
- "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
- The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads.
- Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.
But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.
What's truly wild imo is how the vast majority of consumers keep choosing absolute crap when better alternatives exist. Microsoft, Google, Twitter... oh my
wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."
"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."
Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Theory:
Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.
I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.
> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
And how about Meta's "pervert glasses"? Zuck himself probably conjured up the idea that everything you look at will result in you getting a "relevant ad" for that item. Yuck!
I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.
I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
Thank you for your service! I hope you can cooperate also with other countries, I am specifically thinking of Canada here, given they're dual-language English-French. I'm convinced NixOS is the right way forward.
> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.
Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, come easily to my mind. Switzerland is a very interesting counter-example because although the French-speaking cantons (Romandie) have French as the "prevalent language", meaning that public services are almost exclusively in French, in practice most people speak German too because they're pragmatic about language: the German kantons are the center of economic activity and not speaking German is a huge disadvantage. Quebec, par contre, is full of people that wistfully (I had intended to write "wishfully" but the auto complete was fantastic this time) think they can manage with speaking only French and ignore the rest of the world.
Your paranoia is typical of Quebec. You need professional help, Mon ami.
> Did you know there are tensions in Switzerland because there is a will to stop kids from learning French while they attend primary school?
I lived for a while in Zurich as well, and it was well known that kids are exiting high school being unable to speak the second language they supposedly studied.
> Do you know where Quebec is located?
Yeah, I'm in Montreal right now and have been living there for quite a while.
It's people who speak french not being able to make a choice about their children's education, yes it's weird, and no it's not judgemental to wonder why parents can't make a very basic decision in their child's education.
Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
Italianman here, I totally understand and respect your point. I just wish this was a collectively funded initiative, English-first but open to all translations. I’d be so happy if my country understood this and invested in this as well, so kudos to France for leading the tech here!
Je t’assure que ce besoin qu’on certains français de montrer leur capacité de parler l’anglais, de nommer leurs entreprises avec des noms à connotation anglophone, etc. est considéré très gênant ici du Québec.
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.
I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
That's an accurate description of the status quo, but it's also a good example of massive inefficiencies in the EU.
FWIW, I'm not saying that I would expect the EU to do a better job than the Dutch government. Likely quite the opposite. But it's frustrating as passionate European... that these problems aren't tackled on a union level. You'd think that's their job? The EU will never compete if it stays a loose partnership of 27 countries, and if it can't even get France, Germany, and the Netherlands to work on this together instead of running 3 separate projects...
This is the equivalent of two competing startups getting an advantage over an enterprise, just at government scale. It's a good thing.
Two competing products emerge, they are battle tested, opinions form, reviews are conducted. At that point it's a much better time for a significantly larger organisation to create a more focused realistic plan based on learnings and outcomes.
Imagine the analysis paralysis that would set in if the EU tried it from scratch - years of requirements gathering, pilots, reports...
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.
I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!
The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.
But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.
one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem.
https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv
llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).
IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.
> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software
May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.
e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.
With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.
If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.
When I just want to make something work and there isn't a nix package that can instantly give me what I want with `nix-shell -p $PACKAGE` then I use containers. That's what I've done when playing around with llama.
I’m hardly an expert, quite the opposite, but I imagine coordinating all those groups across multiple countries that don’t have a unified bureaucratic system would undo any disadvantages of just working on them independently and open sourcing at all. In theory they could all start borrowing from each other eventually.
It's not just a structure problem. The needs are different. And monoculture is always bad, so developing a plurality of solutions is a good idea.
I'm not saying every small administration of a 200-souls village needs to do this, but on the scale of a nation who has a GAFAM budget in the hundreds of millions of euros (probably, haven't made the calculation), it's not crazy to invest a few million on a side project like this to reduce dependency.
> Strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands.
Apparently the US becoming an authoritarian state means people don't want to do business with us. We're giving away our best advantage, our reputation for freedom and openness, for absolutely nothing in return.
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.
If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.
Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.
> Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?
I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
code.overheid.nl Suspended (slopfondlers)
And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn games
Federation is a people-problem, not so much the resource problem.
Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins, perhaps prompted by the users) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
So they would not want to federate with another instance that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
Those are all problems codeberg doesn't want on its system. Allowing a codeberg user to comment on someone else's system wouldn't bring those problems to codeberg.
Why should a fallible, biased human “admin” be able to block an individual from communicating with another individual or group of individuals? This just creates weird social silos and echo chambers. It’s made worse because the people who choose to be jannies are often deeply broken people.
The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
I have one with a spam filter that I control myself, not some BS like GMail who wants to decide for me. It’s well-tuned at this point and hasn’t given me problems.
If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.
weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")
Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:
Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).
Man I was so excited about Tangled, until they announced they sought and got VC investments, which makes it not even worth looking into for long-term projects. I still wish them luck and hope they'll be the lonely 0.1% that can resist enshittification even during pressure from investors, but realistically my hope is fairly close to the bottom.
Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.
Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.
Radicle is not based on crypto. The governance organization uses a DAO, but that’s not tied in with the project, only with the main dev team; it’s irrelevant to users. They had some early ideas to incentivize participation through crypto, but they abandoned it in alpha. I don’t know why this notion persists.
Personally I don't find the incentives of the only developer team working on something to be irrelevant to me as a user, if I'm looking for a long-term solution. Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
> Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
Radicle is self-hosted? Not sure what you mean by this.
If one doesn’t want anyone working on it to be crypto-adjacent, then I guess it wouldn’t be a good fit, but you can host and use it just fine without touching crypto yourself.
We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.
Furniture is actually an ongoing service on the scale of public organisations. When I worked for a Danish city we had a set of subscriptions for furniture, depending on what sort of institution it was. This probably won't surprise you but city hall had the supreme plus subscription which meant that furniture was replaced regularily, while schools had the shit tier subscription meaning the furniture almost had to break into pieces before it got replaced. It's done with purchase agreements for an entire sector.
I think the comparison is fair enough considering that self-hosted would work sort of similar. In that you'd rent the physical space for your hardware (and possibly the hardware itself) at local suppliers, and not actually have it in your basement.
As much as I hate vibe-coded "slop". I feel like this is idiotic. I and most good engs with decades of experience do use AI now to type nearly all the actual "code", but we read EVERY SINGLE line, always fix and rework every feature before a commit to make it clean, optimized, and de-slopified.
But still, we wouldn't be allowed to use codeberg because "generative ai" was used significantly for most lines of code?
AFAICT they are dealing with resource exhaustion from slopcoding agents hammering them with copycat garbage. It's existential. If you use AI to help you thoughtfully write code, review it with humans, and respect their service, I don't think they will have a problem with you.
Maybe not... I personally wouldn't use a service that would boot me off if they did find out because I spoke about it online or committed too much code one week or something.
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.
I was looking at alternative hosting for some of my projects that are going to be opensource. I've heavily used AI to speed up dev (I've been a software developer for about 20 years now) and it was quite disappointing to see that they made that decision.
> I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
Point out what verbatim piece of text forbids any and all usage of LLMs for coding and having that project on Codeberg?
Literally the first "informal guidelines" (subject to change of course) states:
> Projects who have an active community that cares about and maintains the software
You can use LLMs for development + fulfill this requirement, contrary to popular belief.
They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
I have read it. This effectively narrows down the use of AI drastically IMO. Which is what I said.
This effectively limits it to stuff like code completion and using it as a chat assistant and doing some medium level refactors.
They should have just completely banned it. As the ambiguity itself causes problems. Even if you use LLMs maybe say 25% of the time, sooner or later that means that a significant portion of your code base is AI generated.
> They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
I am not a vibe coder (I am a software dev with almost 20 years experience) and am using Heavy LLM assistance (I am running Qwen 3.8 locally) for some of my projects. I am making sure the code output is decent, well documented, has tests etc. Sure what I am doing is something betweeen "vibe coding" and "proper development" but there would be no way for me in the few hours an evening to even get to the stage I would be at in some of them without LLM assistance.
I would not be able to use codeberg for hosting my project under their rules.
Banning AI generated content works just fine, and arguing otherwise is nothing short of FOMO.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
> Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project.
Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
> If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
there might be other places that better fit your needs:
- Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
Forgejo (the Codeberg-maintained Gitea fork) is essentially becoming an EU-based community of familiar compatible alternatives to GitHub.
It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.
Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.
Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.
Curious about your comment on two counts (genuinely, not being argumentative):
1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.
(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)
>in what cases is this illegal for governments to do?
It's legal certainty principle and equality before the law principle and also prohibition of discrimination principle.
For the law to be lawful (weird, but it's a thing, right) it should satisfy certain criteria. Me, being subject to the law should be able to predict whether my actions are allowed or not when I plan to do or not do them. If I can't predict the outcome of my actions, the law isn't valid. One of the outcomes of it is being able to read the law -- it's published and it's comprehensible, it has advance notice, etc.
If the rule says "don't host LLM generated code", but everybody hosts LLM generated code and then I say mean things about one of the people providing the hosting and suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego. Or being part of a specific group. You are often explicitly prohibited to make certain decisions based on belonging to a certain group (religious, ethnic, sexual, trade union, health, criminal record based), but it could happen that somehow the outcome of the shadow policy correlates with those. Since we don't know the shadow policy and the stated policy doesn't seem to be applied equally, this is not great.
See example about weed in a different comment.
>how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
They look silly for stating it and not following (loss of credibility), then once they suddenly start following it, there will be different interpretations, including "I'm banned because I'm $protected_thing_that_you_should_not_be_banned_for", which is bad press.
> suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego
This is ultimately a matter of framing though. You can equally argue that (a) that person shouldn't be deplatformed because others' LLM use is tolerated or (b) all of them should be deplatformed including that person. In the latter case (b) the person who said mean things still experiences the same outcome, but by your logic this is just. Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
> > how is this bad
> they look silly
> bad press
This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
>Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
The difference is -- if I know the effective policy, I can plan better and choose a different platform in advance (if the it's option (b)).
>This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
Subjective opinions matter because people act on them (more) consistently than on objective facts. I would for example act on a subjective opinion that a platform provider is a bunch of racist assholes or affiliated with r-country.
The difference is that without consistent enforcement, the rule becomes just a fig leaf for arbitrary decisions by the moderation team, who then receives an enormous amount of unintended power. Most reasonable people wouldn’t argue that the moderation team should be allowed to ban anyone that they have a personal disagreement with, for example. Yet here we are.
The problem is for the platform as a whole, not the individual who may or may not be punished.
Governments have a lot of laws that they don't enforce, or enforce only lightly. For example, weed is still illegal in Netherland, despite many decades of tolerating its use.
I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.
It's illegal but you can't be prosecuted for usage or possession (unless you do it in a blowverbod area in front of a village cop that is having a bad day) -- the judge will ask why this person specifically is prosecuted if everybody around is smoking and will throw it away. It already happened in fact.
Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
That & the legal aspects of hosting code of questionable copyright.
The LLM revolution has proven that if you have enough institutional investors, the Berne Convention doesn't apply to you, but it's sofar unclear whether that exemption from international law extends to small EU-based non-profits.
But they don't want to. They want to provide all needs for approved projects. They want that if a FOSS project legitimately releases 50 times a day, they want to make it work. If a slop project is wasting those resources that could be used for KDE, on nonsense, then they don't.
They're not a free for all, they do KYCP (know your customer's projects) with an initial assumption of good faith.
Also they're a voluntary society you can join by contributing money. They're not a charity as such, more like a group of people pooling resources, and also offering them to people outside the group on a good faith basis.
Every single issue they brought up in their blog post starts with even just 1% AI code. If they actually believed the absolutely absurd stuff they spew, banning it all would be the only logical solution.
The current solution solves none of the issues, AND pisses off most sane people (mostly because their arguments are fabrications). They dropped the cake and shit on it too.
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...
> or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).
For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!
At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.
Proponent: EmergingTech is gonna be amazing, it'll at revolutionize everything!
Bystander: Alright. But I'll hold off until I see actual evidence of that happening. Truly revolutionizing tech usually shows clear signs of being revolutionary, and doesn't need evangelists.
Proponent: You're gonna be left behind! Act now, or forever miss out! Here's analogies with things we know in hindsight were revolutionary.
Bystander: Those analogies are bad for these specific reasons.
Proponent: You will be proven wrong!
It's so dumb. At least you AI proponents don't post pictures of yourself with glowing laser eyes when you evangelize, so I guess that's an improvement over the cryptobros.
PS: I emphasize that I'm not claiming that the technology won't have huge effects on society. If that's your take on what I write, you have to read again.
Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.
I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.
And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.
Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.
As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.
Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.
Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.
Is it? A lot of software is really just a pile of context-specific database front-ends. There is virtually nothing difficult in the implementation itself. Most businesses in this space survive because they know how to dress up their pile of CRUD for their customers. And it gets worse: a less reliable, buggier product may still be the better fit for a customer if it works well enough for what they use it the most.
You sound exactly like the cryptobros of yore. Just stop.
If you're right, the evidence will bear that out. Stop evangelizing. It's insufferable. And it's paradoxical that so many who believe this technology to be absolutely world-changing also feel that the technology needs to be pushed onto people actively. It reminds me of religious people ("my god is all-powerful, but if you meaningless mortal insult him he'll be mightily upset").
I also hate preachy sermons about new tech with a deep passion and that transfers somewhat to the tech they preach about.
Despite this, there is a reality that LLMs for coding can create pretty decent results fast. There is something real and usable hidden in all that mess. It's like the dot com bubble in some ways: the bubble died with all the overhyped "x on the web" BS that had no real substance, but the web itself stayed. This time around, LLMs and agents will stick around as tools, but the hype will likely die a loud, messy death.
Nobody here is saying otherwise. The Codeberg policy in question does not forbid LLM-assistance outright; their policy is targeted towards unmitigated slop. Even myself, as I argue heatedly against the religious adherents, not only use LLMs daily but work for a very successful LLM startup developing and selling LLMs-as-tools. That does not make the zealots who won't shut the fuck up about LLMs-as-gods any less infuriating.
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.
How do you think currencies are established? By accepting chickens and cows in lieu of legal tender? That’s precisely the meaning of legal tender. This is the exact analogue thereof: information is required as value is required, information and value are required in a mandated standardised form, other forms are rejected a priori.
I agree, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why. Like, why is good collaboration in an open-source office software so unrealistic when way more complicated-seeming state synchronization happens in open source and indie games all the time?
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
Yeah, there’s no VBA support anywhere. LibreOffice has their own scripting thing, and it works ok but it’s not compatible with the VBA and VBA stuff broadly doesn’t work there.
Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.
I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.
I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.
I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.
Yep! It actually made the front page of HN a few days ago :)
It supports Office 365 and Office 2024 Home works as of about two days ago.
I think it would require very little if any effort to get Home and Business working but the license for that was too expensive (though pull requests are welcome!)
Currently limited to stuff that can be activated on Microsoft’s website. I tried very hard and was ultimately unsuccessful at getting Office 2024 Pro Plus working from a gray-market key I bought on Groupon, because the MAK activation stuff appears to depend on a lot of stuff that Wine/Proton doesn’t implement. Again, pull requests are welcome if someone here figures out how to do it.
People can apparently imagine and accept future Recursive Super Intelligence and Datacenters in Space but can't imagine or accept a future where a free/libre Office Suite with support and funding from a motivated sovereign state can get close to Microsoft's offering
I think many office suite use cases can be covered by simple, less feature rich software. Not everyone needs dozens of text formatting options. People use them because they are there but not making better documents necessarily.
I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
That's correct. The challenge is going to be creating a forward looking environment that doesn't just create 80% replacements. I'm deep into a mobile software project that needs to be ready for on device tool calling. Retrofitting that to existing monolithic apps is going to fall short of realizing the potential. Apps are going to change in big ways. Driving in the rearview mirror won't get you there.
I think a whole nixified country would revolutionize the work. Just gotta take the off the shackles of proprietary software and let human nature do its thing.
- Nix needs weird tricks to make its packaging scheme work
- The main repo is uncurated and hosted on Github
- The functional nature of packages means a low level update can either trigger a huge wave of updates or you end up with out of date deps. Usually both happen at the same time
1. The rigidness of it all, which after a while is the main point ofc. Takes getting used to, but awesomeness for servers
2. The highly specialized filesystem layout requires some tinkering when trying to “just get things to work” that is not already packaged/wrapped for nixos
3. The language is… special. An acquired taste perhaps.
Coming from fp background, I find Nix language very sensible. Especially for something like hermetic packaging.
The primitives for packaging in nix feel exactly like what they should be. When you look at a definition, the things that piece of code could do in principle (and things you could do with it as a consumer) tend to cleanly match it's semantic purpose and its responsibilities. So a lot of things are self-documenting.
Give it a go, I don't know anyone who has converted back (n=3). Agents/LLMs make things much easier these days.
If you have a single machine and only use stuff from the official nixpkgs, there are no more struggles than any other linux distro, this is a very happy path (imo).
Going outside of that you will, practically, need to convert to using flakes. The conversion is easy, but its another learning curve and there are conflicting docs. Agents make short work of this.
Packaging things yourself can get quite hairy. For simple projects in a single well supported language its easy and just a couple lines of code. For a rust+wasm+solidjs+vite+julia+more monorepo, it was a couple of weeks on a steep learning curve. Agents are pretty okay at packaging in general, I've been able to oneshot a number of difficult-for-me packaging problems, other times it can be an unmitigated mess.
For remote deploys, secrets management, and other devops-like tasks, things get harder, but most people don't need/want this and if you make it this far the remaining learning curve is totally worth it.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
I hope someone is security scanning all those NixOS provider modules.
I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.
With the hypothetical providerless NixOS you'd get new config settings the moment the source code changes, without resorting to extraConfig escape hatches.
Over 400 comments and it’s all flamewars and almost zero discussion of NixOS.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
I am curious about your confidence for NFS for the nix store.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
You could use multiple shares and limit each configuration to the software required. In this case you would share common configs through modules on the build server. The build server would output updated configs to the proper share paths.
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
Man going from a Windows environment all the way to NixOS is quite the change isn't it? Probably good if NixOS can get more attention and easier to use. I see a lot of hype for it, and then people seem to give up as it can get pretty gnarly with some of the configuration. I'm a fan of something like Fedora Silverblue with the immutable OS setup.
Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.
I see about a dozen of these stories every year. Often some German municipality or some other bureaucratic enclave. Slashdot, back in its heyday, was filled with these stories.
What I'd love to see is a 5 year follow up to one of these stories. What worked, what didn't, how many people are still using the linux OS, etc. Because I feel like windows is as entrenched as always in the government space, whereas in the corporate world most people I know have migrated to macs long ago.
Yes, and they should also rewrite all available packages for Nix in Rust, along with the Linux kernel.
No, that's still not enough complexity! They need at least a thousand agents using trillions of tokens around the clock to get us the Nix and Rust slop we need.
> Sextant: a graphical interface for NixOS management as an alternative to Intune, by Bram Buijs [1]
Now that's a fairly interesting project and a way to actually bring technology like NixOS to the administrators in the way they expect. From my experience (sample size one, yes) there are more systems administrators that use web interfaces for management than DevOps IaC folks. This would be a good bridging solution if it is a successful project.
The first, second and fourth items can be provided for NixOS.
As for the third item - that's not answering my question, it's a homunculus answer: What could the Netherlands have regulated that requires making changes to NixOS? Which NixOS maintainers themselves could not oblige?
I'm sure NixOS can provide those, but rather than each department figure out how to do that, organisations try to centralize figuring this out: which packages and configuration satisfies the requirements.
One of the items discusses MFA. Organisations will want to standardise on exactly which MFA devices they provide and support.
It looks like they are using Claude to develop it, though..
> Things that cost somebody hours, written down so they cost the next person minutes. Each one is here because it actually happened, not because it might.
> Same commit, different answer, decided by the runner's store rather than by the code.
My opinion is that Microsoft’s software business practically goes to zero in an era when anybody can vibecode changes to open-source projects to fit their exact needs. All that will be left of MSFT is Azure.
My follow up opinion is that Satya agrees with me, and that is why he has so much anxiety around AI.
What took so long? Now start building a Arm computers native to Europe the Dutch have a long history in electronics ie.. Phillips which collapsed mainly from self inflicted wounds similar to some of the old-line American companies IBM, Xerox, Motorola, and Kodak...
I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly
figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?
I’m not talking about software install/updates, that is easy and straightforward on every major enterprise distro. I’m talking about Group Policy specifically, that is, the ability to enforce many settings across the whole OS/DE.
Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.
Nix does more than software install/updates. It also manages system wide config (e.g. files in /etc, systemd units, timers/cron jobs, firewall, etc.) or even user preferences with home-manager. You can also organize your config into modules to have e.g. a base for everyone + special settings for different BUs that need it. And it does all this declaratively with the ability to rollback to previous working config if needed since it can handle multiple versions of packages all being present until you choose to garbage collect old generations of the system config (which you can also set to automate, of course).
It's basically what people think they want from Docker but don't actually get from Docker.
The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.
You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.
Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.
You still need to have somebody half competent to ask the electric shaitan to the thing and validate the result and also demonstrate this ability during the hiring process. I'm not sure it's easier than actually finding a person who can do those two lines.
If you trust someone to manage IT policy in the first place I'd think they'd be smart enough to be able to learn the basics of Nix? Like 95%+ of it is just declaring obvious settings that are already in nixpkgs. In practice it's mostly an ini file, but with the power to do more if you need it.
That's before it is introduced into the government or a bank. Those environment tend to turn every trivial thing into a multi year project.
It takes three really nice and cleverly designed things that are all very easy to use separately. Then you put those things into the hands of smart, bored and slightly undercompensated people and divide those people into four separate departments so they don't ever talk with each other.
Then you introduce a fourth thing into the mix, let it ferment for a while and make sure some people dealing with the first three leave the building and are replaced with total imbeciles who have no idea what they are doing and also never say no to any silly idea of their boss.
Then you ask to change something. Anything really. And it for some magical reason unbeknown to anybody involved at this point takes a few years.
Windows will not make it easier, but the institution choosing it, including all the people they hired on the market will have pre-existing and agreeing with each other beliefs of how much a shitshow this will be and will happily watch it happen paid by your taxeuros.
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards).
That's it.
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
Thanks for your detailed reply, that was what i was after. I wasn't having a go at Nix or their decision, just wanted to understand the why in the choice. Your two responses have helped explained that.
I agree with Guix, the whole package really appeals to me. I found the same issues between Nix vs Guix, having to do a lot more fiddling to get to where i wanted to be.
Guess next time I will word my statements better :)
Your forgot to pay your local mafia to maintain the glass wires this week, so they sent a 12 year old with a grenade and scissors to throttle it to pre-2000 level
This thread seems hopelessly tone deaf to non-technical people's experience with something like NixOS. I can manage it just fine myself given my background, but I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS. I mean, good for them for trying, I just think HN is full of Nix purists who tend to gloss over all the warts that has kept this ecosystem from growing much over the last few decades.
Who is giving a standard office worker admin rights on their Windows machine in 2026?
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
First off - decoupling from Trump-USA is a must. Canadians noticed
this; european countries are still slow. The Netherlands is faster;
the biggest slow-ass behemoth is Germany - no clue why. Germany is
a big reason why the EU fails, but also the expansionistic agenda
and what not (why do only poor countries want to join the EU;
UK left, Switzerland and Norway are not going to join, so there
are indeed INTERNAL problems, but let's go back to the dependency
on the USA).
So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well
as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as
it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING.
For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment
guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other
problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.
In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many
reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static
system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus,
Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought
a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define
static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already
describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses
to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like
why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned
AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program
directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but
I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that
simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ?
It can't be simpler than that.)
Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden,
Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please
everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being
such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems
go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize
power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad.
Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill
LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany,
so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on
dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable
why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as
they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth
will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the
EU.
Europeans are absolutely delusional, but I hope they're serious about dropping Microsoft this time. European governments have been pretending to do this for about 20 years at this point, though.
Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Maybe soon it will be called Microsoft/OpenAI, then OpenAI/Microsoft, then just OpenAI.
It's a bad sign that they chose NixOS instead of something boring like Debian, though (and it seems France, too.) Makes me suspect that this is being driven by a single strong personality who will eventually lose interest or even rugpull support, leaving the project in disarray and a poster child for criticizing doing anything but buying Microsoft as European flakiness. On the other hand, I'm happy that it will involve money being put into NixOS.
Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
The nix website doesn't have the sentence that Claude gave you above, but it does describe the declarative approach to package management that nix is known for. "Having a single config file" doesn't really even describe what makes nix unique. Perhaps you should have read the website instead of skimming and asking Claude.
You're making the same mistake again. I saw NixOS and I wanted to know what kind kernel it is running on first. Why? Because the post title is talking about a Windows alternative, not a package manager.
The website nixos.org talks immediately about package management, which does not help with answering if it is a viable Windows alternative. It is like saying Apt or RPM is an alternative to Windows.
Whereas you are coming to it knowing what NixOS is, so already have the context. Clearly whoever wrote NixOS.org was the same. A pretty site for people who already know what Nix is.... which is a very very common pattern for open source projects. A nice front page mantra for true believers, but useless for outsiders.
Claude actually explained it all to me but I forced it to summarise it down. That is enough for all the people on this thread, who don't know what NixOS is to see that they are pushing a Linux distro as an alternative to Windows.
That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)
It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)
I think we have pretty decent examples where browsers remove malicious root certificates if they have been so proven. Do you think the matters will be different if those belong to a country level root?
And I think we have pretty decent examples of all kinds of initiatives where governments (or corporations) promise not abuse something which clearly can be abused, and then proceed to do just that. In the age of "cheques and bank balances" and continuous degradation of parliamentarism and judicial systems in multiple developed countries, I don't have much hope for "if the abuse will happen, we will fix it afterwards" promises. Rather, I expect it to be immediately normalized and then made worse. Yesterday we (IT) were talking how government can abuse information requests. Today we have government just sifting through almost everything unencrypted in real-time with zero shame. Tomorrow we will lose E2EE in most big countries and no one would "fix that" or roll back (it's already slowly happening in UK for example).
The existence of government all in itself is triggering, because other people can do things to you based on their flawed understanding. Also the government is sometimes the literal nazis
That's even scarier, right. Imagine you are scared of clowns and then somebody introduces you to a concept of a clown king that even clowns are scared of
I want to ask an honest question, why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner
Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?
We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...
The context here is removing reliance on US. EU countries are trying to decouple from US (or at least diversify if not possible to decouple) in various critical sectors where they have become dependent. Over reliance on US software is one of them. They are basically doing what China did many decades ago. Have home grown alternatives to US apps/services so as to not be in deep waters if US decides to sanction them. It is all about independence.
> why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
Apple is a US company first and foremost and US has become unreliable. It has nothing to do with simplicity or productivity if reliability is in question. What use is a Mac if it can be subject to US sanctions resulting in App Store being shutdown for you or your entire Country and apps/services stop working overnight?
Excellent point and I understand that, but then they should start working on building their own computers, and OS, and ecosystem, just like Huawei is doing for the past decade. It will take time, long years ahead but they should start now
I definitely like that future, but it should be built now
Agreed. I am all for every Country investing resources in semiconductors and building own computers/OS/ecosystem. More the merrier. I want to own my hardware. I want to repair my hardware. I don't want a future where I have to rent/subscribe everything from Big Tech.
And yet Apple is doing well in the far East Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. They are competitive in some of the toughest markets to sell electronic devices into.
Doing well in Australia and New Zealand too. Aside from Taco the only big headwind is memory.
You are missing the point I made. Point isn't whether Apple is doing well or not. It is about creating an alternative for a future when Apple won't exist in the Country because of US sanctions.
Here issue is not of whether Apple is reliable or not. Issue is unreliability of USA. If US Government decides Apple Store should be banned in Country X, Apple cannot do anything about it but abide by the decree.
Microsoft and Linux /do/ offer the same path to productivity. Buy 10-20 computers, zero config, native discovery services, download apps.
What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.
In my experience, the corporate world that uses mac has moved to Okta and other providers, not MS Active Directory. They may still use MS AD in some areas, but you can now federate to have that as an island - say you have some legacy accounting software that needs to run in AD environment.
IME, Okta is almost as popular as MS AD now, I think they have 30% market share compared to 40% for AD, with IBM and others taking up the rest.
My experience is that small companies in particular fields do/did use Macs. Staying on Mac is difficult though since any customer can expect you to do what they do or support what they do if they are Windows oriented and will only start with a conversation about compatibility if they haven't chosen the most popular choice.
The way enterprise software is licensed, and how those licenses are perpetuated means that, in the absence of a national security imperative, 99% of customers just go along to get along.
Other people already answered the non US reason. However I fell for this. I got myself an expensive iPad because I assumed it's actually like all the apple users are saying.
However, a lot of apps are unstable. Support is horrible to non existent for some. No refunds even when the app doesn't work at all directly after install. Most professional apps have a buy price AND a subscription price at this point. Most actually working apps are not apple exclusive these days.
It's definitely not as green over there as some apple people make it out to be.
I hear you, I am not an Apple pundit, just a developer always looking for the path to optimization and thought Apple was it, it is not, and to be honest they don't make it easy either. I've been in the waiting list to become an Apple developer for a month now and the road has been tortuous as a Venezuelan developer. But if Huawei offered a simpler path to developing on their ecosystem I'd give it a try in an instant. I am loyal to no one except to those who make my life easier
I really don't need a tablet at all when all the software I have on my Linux laptop is arguebly not worse and definitely more stable. That's the moral I have taken.
I still like my iPad. The pen is amazing, and the sound is so good I use it as TV without extra speakers in my caravan. but I usually don't recommend it to anyone. Especially no one that has any form of fixed budget.
I would probably just get a cheap old one if I had known that I won't use most music/3d software on it anyway. I wouldn't have spent so much extra for the big hard drive, etc.
You mean paying twice to five times the price for something that is not configurable and on which you can run only a small subset of software, all very expensive?
Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
The patent does not include monitoring using a camera or microphone. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
I'm not familiar with patent legalese, but from my layman skimming of the patent application, I think you're right.
Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.
To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.
they already have the backbone for this with Microsoft Clarity: https://clarity.microsoft.com/
I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun
I’m experience windows 11 which is my first windows experience since maybe NT 2 or 4.
I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.
Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.
I don't think they did an NT 2, I think they started with 3.1 or somewhere in 3 to match the contemporary consumer windows version. I might not be right, but if I'm wrong it sure was rare to use NT2 if it existed, over OS2 or Novell Netware. Anyway, that's a nitpick and doesn't change your point.
Lately I don't know if I should stay quiet as to not interrupt someone subtly intentionally poisoning LLM training.
I thought I said 3 not 2 but I was typing on my phone probably without my glasses. Always dangerous.
I love the absolute fever dream that is looking at the pictures of patents. The out of context fig 9 is amazing
I'm personally more a fan of figure 11.
Fig 11 is clearly inferior to Fig 8, though. I mean, the improvement to Fig 6 was necessary ofcourse, but with Fig 11 they really overdid it. With Fig 8 they found a good middleground.
Yes you're right, that's my bad. I interpreted the "audiovisual" wrong. They are actually just monitoring the screen and system audio.
The patent does not include monitoring the screen and system audio.
Sure, not system-wide in rote. It opens with "based at least partially on content of the interactive software application". It's not a far leap from that to screen and audio monitoring. Luckily we don't need to make that leap; the rest of the patent makes explicit demonstration of those capabilities:
* "contextual cues from or based on the interactive software application" [0035]
* "OPTIONALLY in communication with an event detection module" (emphasis mine) [0035]
* "In some embodiments the content management system can receive user inputs from a user interacting with the interactive software application to interpret the content of the interactive software application" [0053]
* Regarding inputs to the event detection systems (which are expressly say don't need to run locally): "video information, audio information, game state data, or other information provided by or from the interactive software application" [0065]
* "FIG. 10 is an embodiment of a frame of video information received from the interactive software application that may be used for identifying events within the user's gameplay." [0073] (Note the patent does not limit itself to video games, just interactive software applications; this is just an example in that context.) [0073]
* "In some embodiments, the video information include user input information." [0092]
And, the design explicitly allows remote processing of this information:
* "The content management system may be stored and/or executed remotely to the client device" [0033]
* "the event detection module may be local to or remote from the content management system." [0036]
You're right, it doesn't include the whole screen and systems audio. Just the parts in the application. But Microsoft just adds this functionality to all software, and then there's no effective difference.
And that is extremely likely to me. And feasible. The patent doesn't say this has to be embedded in applications. Microsoft can implement this on any application. And Microsoft is well beyond the benefit of the doubt when it comes to privacy concerns.
Not OP and thanks for linking the patent. I'm a bit confused - how this is a new patent? Candy Crush etc have been doing this for decades.
Patents are essentially by design almost unreadable: the attorneys who put them together are trying to make the patent seem as broad as possible, while the actual operative claims (a tiny fraction of the text) need to be single gargantuan sentences that need to be narrow enough to not be invalidated by prior art.
My guess--and this is only a guess, I can't make enough sense to do anything more--is that the novel part may have something to do with the "credit duration" stuff.
get with the times man, sensationalist kneejerk reactions are more important than nuance
or, little bitty language that just simply states 'the user will use their available & working eyes and/or ears to ingest our prop'
You should probably edit your original comment to be updated to remove both things you were wrong about
where?
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.
Agree with the quality, unfortunately not everyone has the privilege to take such position.
That means basically not getting a job, or a consulting gig, among most large corporations.
Also "just go get another job" isn't a position many of us can take in current times.
It has yet to cost me jobs but it may come to that.
I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...
Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.
I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.
Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.
I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?
Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?
I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...
> I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…
LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.
If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.
Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.
For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.
Last time I wrote anything remotely academic was several decades ago, but at that time, the argument was that you had to use LaTeX because Word documents had no support for simultaneous editing, version control, and editors comments. It is truly bizarre to see the same arguments repeated after so long time but completely reversed, in favor of Microsoft Word. Surely the tools haven't become worse over time, given the popularity of github, Overleaf and such?
Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.
In academia (at least in fields that primarily use LaTeX) most people just use Overleaf.
No, git is understood as an unreasonably difficult Dropbox for most people that do not code substantially.
I use Markdown + Pandoc compiling to a .docx as a workaround, but merging changes back is manual.
Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.
Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.
You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.
I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.
It isn't realistic to teach your collaborators a new system just for your own comfort. They'll just avoid making edits/comments. Especially if you're just a PhD student/postdoc interacting with a full time scientist - who will have much more work to do than fiddling around with your esoteric editing system.
It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.
Sure, I did my phd back in the 2010s and latex+git/svn was what everybody used. Im not saying you cant use word, im just saying the criticism raised of latex above is not a valid reason to.
LaTeX used widely for papers, but it does not cover all. PowerPoint is huge, Word is used closer to Markdown’s level for simpler documents (and Pandoc is a huge helper). All administrative staff is using MS Office, that means Excel is used a lot for forms as well. Then there is OneDrive and Teams for collaboration.
Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.
> I can imagine Excel being quite useful.
As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.
A while back they renamed some gene names so they wouldn't trigger Excel's autocorrect: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Not so much autocorrect, but Excel is very eager to interpret things as a date, which may be useful when you're dealing with dates a lot, but it disqualifies it for anything related to serious data.
People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.
It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.
My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.
Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.
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Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.
Not really, when I attended CERN in 2003 - 2005, LaTeX was out of favour.
Most teams in ATLAS TDAQ/HLT, used Word templates with similar fonts, or Framemaker.
Not sure why you'd not just use discord if cost is that much a factor, it has better calling that slack and ironically given what slack is used for way better code embedding etc.
I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen
a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.
I should re-boot Camarades.
No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.
I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.
I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.
My wife and father-in-law used to use Skype all the time, and when it shut down, the stars aligned as I suggested they try Signal and they both loved it.
I just had to use teams to speak to the British government to get a passport. I don't think there is another option.
Maybe they should stand up their own gov jitsi or something, but then the public may not be able to work out how to use it.
I use it, but only through the web interface. I suppose websites spy too, but I hope Firefox with the right extensions offers sufficient protection.
Yeah, although, the word “just” is doing a lot of work here.
(as usual)
Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.
The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.
No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
It is basically downhill from here.
While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.
Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.
I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.
On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).
Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)
Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.
That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.
> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash. You can see this with Trump, but also with DHH claiming "everyone loves me", after his "let's kill wolves" blog entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
> That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash.
Wait till AI driven job losses really start to mount. Nothing divides people faster than an empty stomach. The republicans are leaving a poison pill - they will profit from AI and when democrats win and the job losses really start to hit hard, the democrats will be left holding the blame bucket. Obviously they are not exactly crying hoarse for AI safeguards/job protections either because national security/donors etc.
Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.
One of the most telling quotes of our political era is this one from 2019:
They voted for him to do “good things” where the expectation was he’d hurt the right people. This person stated it a little more plainly than most but I think this view explains the last 10 years or so.https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.
Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.
We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.
As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...
[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_r%C3%A9gime
Every government has taxed its population, and past governments often used real violence to collect them. The level of taxes we see currently is abnormal and abusive imo, but taxing in general isn’t.
Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.
I don't think it's easy to become a politician. Only a certain number of slots are available.
... Until they reach a certain size and then "customers" are just an annoying detail in the quest to maximize share holder value.
I don't want to challenge people's deeply held faiths, but I don't think we need the silly "maximise shareholder value" chant in every single conversation thread.
But we do need “taxes are theft”?
(They’re not.)
Whataboutisms in general are also not great.
But why? Why do so many companies choose garbage?
I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
I think your experience is the exception rather than the rule, most people work for a company that dictate the computer and OS to use, as well as the communication tools (teams, slack...) for which they have an enterprise license.
My comment was more on the line "when given options, people will massively choose Windows" just out of familiarity or fear of the unknown, and by people I also mean management. If I was manager, I wouldn't force Linux (which I use exclusively since c. 2000) unto my workers, unless I am ready to set Linux familiarity as a CV minimum requirement, reducing my hiring pool by 90% at least.
The parent comment implies there is some dark conspirancy behind the scenes to force Windows unto us. There might be a couple decades ago, today it is just what people choose if given choice. Windows 11 nags its users all the time, yet they accept it as it was normal and unavoidable.
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I hope you're aware AI vendors are running the exact same playbook these days. Don't want AI? Fuck you here's some AI on your toothbrush
It's not so much the AI vendors that are the issue. It's everyone else that want to grab some of those LLM profits as well. Apple in iOS/macOS, Google and Samsung in Android, Microsoft in Windows/Office, Raycast, Meta in WhatsApp, a company's helpdesk, random websites, etc. Everyone wants to make a profit by selling you an AI subscription or by reducing the number of humans employed.
> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
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> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
I have a reliable system running for years on a Surface Pro 2022, so not sure what your experience with Windows was. It does take a few tweaks to remove some of the junk but otherwise it is a solid work environment IMO. The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds. So both environments can definitely be a shitty experience unless you know what you are doing.
> The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds.
If you value your own dignity you should see that these scenarios are worlds apart. In one case you have a trillion-dollar company actively working against your own interests. On the other hand, you had some trouble finding drivers for a volunteer-driven project, which is a problem that you are actually empowered to fix.
I have been a decade long windows user (and still am), I administer a computer room with MacOS and use Linux. So I know all three pretty well.
Try reinstalling that surface pro with windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Windows is okay, but every update introduces new bullshit, bloatware, accounts you're forced to use, UI-changes. Linux is reliable in the sense that you can chose when and if you want to change things and there is always a way to do it the way you want to do it (something that is the big weakness of MacOS).
Additionally KDE Plasma is the best Desktop UI on all operating systems today. Scripting and automation on Linux is killer, ... The only reason for Windows/MacOS is certain software that doesn't performantly run on Linux (or if Linux scares you).
> Try reinstalling that surface pro with windows 11 without a Microsoft account
Aren't this take like 3 additional minutes (including search of how to do this)?
Maybe not everyone is happy with these stupid cat and mouse games.
I think it might be symptomatic of broader tech illiteracy: People don't know anything else or anything better. They want their software to Just Work, and ultimately the decision is made by an executive who decides that microsoft products are “the most stable” or “easiest” route.
I don't know if lobbied is the correct word, or they are directly bought.
Well some are, some are not. Some are simply invited to a nice dinner and given the hint that this might be a contact that gives them access to affluent circles. I have heard it all.
You forgot:
3. People who do not care and are not in IT or on Hacker News.
I doubt a lot of regular people care what Microsoft is doing. All they want is a laptop or PC that works or to be able to play their XBOX games.
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Gave up? There are more Linux games than ever. Most commercial games work fine on Linux now. Some through emulation of some sort, others completely natively, because most gamer engines support Linux natively, making it trivial to do so. And as a gamer, I can't really tell the difference between the two.
If you mean Linux-only classic open source games, like Angband or Battle for Wesnoth or something, they still exist, but the demand has clearly gone down because now almost all games work on Linux. Except the ones with anti-cheat systems that rootkit-style access to your system.
Steam has been pushing Linux as a gaming OS, and it's working. Mainstream game support has come leaps and bounds over the last several years. It's still not quite as good as Windows. You will run into more bugs and have to fiddle with things a bit more to get them to work. It's improving rapidly though.
My only concern is that this is mostly just the result of one very influential company. If they turn evil on us...
The parent poster said "Linux gaming community". "Most commercial games work fine on Linux now" because a multi-billion dollar corporation, Valve, is paying to maintain Proton to protect their business model, not the Linux community.
> Most commercial games work fine on Linux now.
What about the performance (especially the bottom 1% frame time)? What about availability of those games in free online game libraries?
In my personal experience, performance is better than I've ever seen on Windows. But less subjective benchmarks exist. Apparently, if you have an AMD GPU, performance is likely to be better on Linux, if you have Nvidia, it's probably better on Windows. I have Nvidia and no complaints.
Bad take, what actually happened was the realization that games wouldn't be released on Linux unless there were enough users there to warant it. Just as with ARM Windows not getting a single usable software when first released. What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.
By allowing a lot of people who are willing to take a performance-hit to transition to Linux, they sow the grass-roots necessary for the game studios to release native games on Linux.
> What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.
So it took decades to understand that things aren't working and then investment from multi-billion company to finally start getting anywhere.
Meanwhile on Windows you can play today, could play 10 years ago, could 20 years ago. That should answer how it's still in business. It just works.
Although if you want to play the same game you played 20 years ago today, running it on Wine is your best bet to get it running.
I recently played several games of early to mid 2000 and had no problems. Maybe for Win98-era and older games I'd had to use Wine, but not for anything semi-modern like this.
That’s due to xcel and word and corporate IT being built on AD.
You're saying this as if emulation (which Wine isn't really, more of a Win32 API compatibility layer; WINE literally stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator') was a bad thing. In reality, a lot of games benchmark better on Linux than on Windows today.
Emulation is not a bad thing - it gives users options. My point is that Microsoft were the only ones who managed to make a stable gaming platform.
Also "a lot of games benchmark better" - some games. And then some games don't work at all. And some games work with minor or significant issues. Which is not a slight against Wine and Proton as it's not an easy task.
Can't speak to it myself, but I'm not sure how up to date your infos are. I read a lot of reviews and it seems that the vast majority of the Steam catalogue should run fine on Linux today. The most important exceptions are games that require kernel-level anti-cheat (so if you're into online multiplayer games that could be a dealbreaker).
What are you talking about? Lol, Linux gaming is fine and still growing.
Huh? I just finished Fallout 4 on Linux, a game that is famously unstable and it worked totally fine out of the box. Install steam, install Fallout, go.
Not to discard your happiness at things working out for you, but that's a game from 2015 and it's 2026 now. And is also in top 50 of best sellers of all time, so I would expect it to work.
3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
Because Germany is critically dependent on LNG imports from US.
" Gas covered a little more than a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use in 2025, making it the country’s second most important energy source. Germany is among the world’s biggest natural gas importers – around 95 percent of its gas consumption is met by imports, according to energy research data group AGEB. "
" Energy industry association BDEW said that Norway has now become Germany’s top gas supplier by far, with about 45 percent in 2025, transported by pipeline. Around one tenth of the gas used in the country arrives as liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly at one of four import terminals along the coast. In 2025, around 95 percent of that LNG came from the US. "
European countries are trading gas between them, we have to look into whole European imports. For example Germany is import lot of US gas through Belgium.
" Russia has continued to supply a sizeable portion of gas imports, although the EU has decided to fully phase them out by 2027. Most natural gas in a gaseous state was imported from Norway (52%), Algeria (20%), Russia (10%), and the UK (8%) in 2025. LNG came from the US (55%), Russia (14%), Qatar (9%), and Algeria (6%). "
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germany-eu-remain...
Canada isn’t that great either. We say one thing then do the opposite of that. Google is moving in to do age verification for Canadian services.
Can you name examples how the EU or Germany is US addicted? From my POV in central Europe this has changed long long long ago.
Doing some trading with a shitty country doesn't imply any dependency
Buying US helicopters when they've been developing one with France. But Germany has no choice: It has been literally occupied by the US forces and it's only recently that it has regained the right to have an army, but there are still 200k US troops in Germany (among other means of influence).
Germany had it's Bundeswehr the whole time since it joined the Nato 1955 same year the US occupation officially ended. And there are not even remotely 200k us Troops in Germany anymore.
No idea where you get your Infos from, bit a short googling would show that this is simply not true.
My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.
Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.
I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.
In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.
The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.
Yup when courts no longer work at some point we go back to settling disputes the old fashion way. Lawyers and courts were the compromise because the old way can get pretty ugly, but it looks like we are going to have to relearn that lesson.
As Gamer's Nexus said, if you're drunk you can't consent to any contract.
I like the idea of taking a (couple of) shot(s) of vodka every time you sign up for a service or otherwise click accept on a EULA.
>Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device
Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).
Where in the UCC does it say that? There may be a State regulation or a company policy, but I don't recall anything in the UCC about a "free" 14 day return policy. I can return a used car, no questions asked, after 14 days? Good luck with that.
That's an European thing. Anything bought remotely (mail, phone or the internet) can be returned up to 14 days for a full refund.
Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.
Well, not really. If you have unpacked the iphone - I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be easy to return even within the 14 day window. You can return unpacked though, which is not the point of what I'm saying. Also for the benefit of the argument, change 2 days to 15 and you end up at the same place- you cannot legally return the device, User agreement has changed in ways you don't accept and you are forced to use device, for which you have paid or accept loss and buy another device. Oh and also, you cannot change OS to the alternative one for which terms might be more acceptable to you. How is this not a subject of investigation- I don't know.
You can absolutely return it within the 14 day window, even unpacked.
During the reflection period, you may open the packaging. You may try or fit the product, just like in a normal store. But you are not allowed to do more than what is needed to judge the product. For instance, you can try pants. But you cannot wear the pants for several days and then return it. If you do this anyway and the product loses value? Then the seller may charge you the damage. The seller needs to inform you of this before you buy the product.
https://consument.acm.nl/aankoop-dienst-annuleren/bedenktijd
I have sent back products within the 14 days, including smartphones that I tried and decided that I don't like it. Some sellers also extend the 14 days to 30 days.
Changing the terms later is a completely valid point though and it should be possible to reject any updated terms IMO.
Well, yes really. If it is 2 days, and you've bought it online then you can just bring it back.
ishouldnotbutk8's message was mostly a joke since your argument would work with 15 days instead of 2. And yes, customers should be protected* against altering the deal.
Especially that it is so so common now, with the wide-spread of IT. Companies just push out malicious updates and changes in terms and conditions.
* they probably already are, but not many people try to bring remote downgrade cases to courts
> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
I can confirm this clause prevented enshittification for EU customers at a former employer. The rest of the world still got it.
Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.
In the UK, Trading Standards is done at local authority level. There is no funding scenario where your local council is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with big tech.
I expect this is already covered by existing regulations but the only enforcement avenue is a lawsuit. They know you won't sue them for $20.
I believe that’s why class action lawsuits can serve a purpose…
In a class action they give $1 to every user they scammed $20 out of, and the lawyers charge $2 per user so you actually get nothing.
The point of a class action is it isn't worth your while to go after them for $20 - you would win $20 - but then you have to pay your lawyers a million dollars. However if enough people were scammed the lawyers can get their pay, and better yet the cost is high enough that the company is likely to learn a lesson.
For some reason they always only manage to recover 1% of the money
It is still a large enough number that it appears on accounting statements. It is reported to investors. That is there are enough negatives that it gets attention and tends to change behavior
Yes, as a $19 profit per user.
This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.
Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.
> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,
You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.
Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.
As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
>As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/6f/30/238c9d7...
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...
Please read the links you included. They're all about watching the content on the screen, not using the camera and microphone like the parent comment said.
The patent for using a camera and microphone was a Sony patent from 2009.
Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.
Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.
Some episodes are currently being played out live in Ukraine.
Too many people seem to have taken it as a todo list instead of a warning...
I'm sure Black Mirror could offer up a cautionary tale like Don't Create The Torment Nexus
(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)
https://xxcancel.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
And it would still be shot down by optimists as "just fiction".
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Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true. E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.
I do not believe that anymore.
I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:
1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".
2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".
3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).
4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".
5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...
Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.
When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).
It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.
Error! Please drink a verification can.
We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.
This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.
> Microsoft just recently made a new patent
Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.
A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.
In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.
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Well I despise your president too but we can't be one of the smallest countries in the world and be the greater threat to humanity.
Sincerely, a Dutch guy.
Why not? You could build nuclear bombs and start using them or threatening to use them and that would be a greater threat to humanity.
Plus I didn't say you were the greatest threat today, that would be Russia and probably Iran as a clear #2, I said you were historically much worse because of your colonialist past.
The Dutch don't build nukes, but yours are stashed right here at Volkel military airbase.
Sure but that’s a different point/discussion.
Right, you build nukes and we don't. That's quite a difference right there.
The US (or Trump) is the bigger threat because it is currently actively destroying the rule-based world order, which introduces exactly the lawlessness, chaotic times that opens the window for Iran and Russia to 'do business'. Plus it is destroying the its alliances, which were part of keeping the equilibrium between power blocks in tact.
One can only hope that another power that cares about rules fills the void.
> One can only hope that another power that cares about rules fills the void.
There isn't one. You've got the US or nobody at this point, unfortunately.
> The US (or Trump) is the bigger threat because it is currently actively destroying the rule-based world order, which introduces exactly the lawlessness, chaotic times that opens the window for Iran and Russia to 'do business'.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 when Trump wasn't president. Iran attacked Israel and kicked off a new and worse round of fighting in 2023 when Trump was also not president - the war today is just a continuation of that latest round.
While he has done some damage to the alliance by being a jackoff he also forced Europe to spend more which was required for defense. Europe also made itself dependent on Russian oil and gas, even recently France un-sanctioned some Russian billionaires and is making some awful decisions too.
There isn't one. You've got the US or nobody at this point, unfortunately.
Your belief in US exceptionalism is interesting. Even more so, because it is so obvious that the power that will soon overtake the US economically is very likely to fill that void. But they will also get all the benefits of that role and the US will slowly lose them.
In fact, they have already been stepping in the US' former shoes. Some EU leaders mentioned to Zelensky that the only reason that Russia hasn't used nukes against Ukraine is because China said 'no'. In better (depending on perspective) times, it would have been the US as its role of world leader/police to enforce such implicit rules.
It is true that China is currently supporting Russia, but it's mostly of their interest to drain NATO and increase their power over Eurasia. Well, thanks to Trump they proceeding very fast. Or as the Chinese like to say "Trump the nation builder".
> Your belief in US exceptionalism is interesting.
It’s easy to confuse “this is how I think the world works or is shaping up to work” with a view of American Exceptionalism, but my comments have less to do with some mythical concept that Americans are the best people or something and instead just my own analysis of trends and shapes in the world.
> China
There are a couple of broad problems with your view that China is going to replace the US, uphold global institutions, maintain freedom of navigation of the seas, and such.
The first problem is they simply don’t want to. Most China policy experts that I’ve read (I don’t have a specific source at hand but read a lot of papers - if I think of a good one I’ll post it here) agree that while China certainly wants to continue to become a major player on the world stage, they are not all that interested in usurping America’s current role. It costs a lot of money, the US does it partly because of the petrodollar system (which China also does not want or need to attempt to usurp since they are an export-oriented economy), and in taking on this role you also take on the baggage like having to go to war to maintain the system. China lacks the desire and ability to do these things.
Second, as you point out, China supports Russia as it prosecuted its war against Ukraine and Chinese economic activity has created a lot of consternation and distrust in Europe at least amongst the political class. European citizens are slow like Americans were to realize the problems and trade offs but they will soon. But the EU and Germany in particular are taking policy action now which the Chinese are not too happy about.
Pinning this all on Trump is immature. He’s only been president going on 2 years. It’s a little egotistical I might add to suggest that if not for Trump China would somehow not be full-steam ahead with their plans, whatever they are. China does what China wants just like other major powers do. They would build and do so fast regardless of what the Americans have done.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
True, under Obama, but I think that's materially different in size and scope.
Why didn't Europe go to war with Russia then or start building military forces to deter another Russian war in Europe once Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014? Russia actually invaded them I believe a long time ago in the 1920s or 1940s under the authoritarian and evil communist regime.
I disagree with most things that you have said in this thread. But this I agree fully with. Europe should have rearmed in 2014 and this was a big failure of European governments (including Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, who was prime minister of NL back then).
I am happy that we are increasing spending and building up our own industry now. But it was far to late and it was fair for US presidents to criticize Europe for it. Note though that this happened as early as Bush and the 2% norm was established under Obama. Mark Rutte just sold the 2% to Trump as Trump's own win (initially during Trump I) to keep the US on board.
The current 3.5% is still the same 2%. It's some weasel wording about investing 1.5% in infrastructure that benefits the military as well. But you can put pretty much under that umbrella. It was purely to appease Trump. Though a lot of countries are going above 2% anyway due to the increasing Russian threat.
I know Trump has caused a lot of divisions but we can continue to try to have productive discussions and I appreciate that you fairly pointed out your agreement here. There are many things we align on, I believe. For example I believe the US should strongly support Ukraine.
> but does this add to your point?
Yes? Donald Trump, and the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy, flailing around and trying to bully its way to a lost dominance that is fading away, is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this. It's quite literally the subtext of this discussion.
And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.
> but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.
I mean, I guess people actually vote for this pathological liar / megalomaniac who is a lifetime failure in every dimension, so true. They're even worse. But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person. It's actually astonishing now how he is basically a simpleton in the White House, lying with every utterance, and it's just another day. It isn't even newsworthy. Oh yeah, his big TrumpTM Arch is now going to have drones and snipers! Also, how about that fantasy deal with Belarus for all that potash that doesn't exist, was farcical nonsense on its face, yet everyone reports it because this foolish liar just makes up stuff endlessly so it isn't even notable. Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?
Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.
> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate
This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.
>> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate
>This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.
No kidding. Donald Trump just opened the gate.
I’ll have to respond to the parent OP but on this point - can you explain how the US opened the gate? What are you referring to?
The US has bombed over a half dozen countries in the past year. The US is led by a vile rapist abomination that openly threatens "annihilation" repeatedly, and has a drunkard, profoundly incompetent "secretary of war" that openly flouts literal war crimes (when US soldiers are being subjected to torture and US cities are glassed, hey, think fondly to when that "germs aren't real" halfwit boasted about how rules don't constrain the US, and "no quarter, no mercy shall be given". That emaciated pathetic little loser is so tough and brave). That casually talks about nuclear attacks like it's nothing.
Trump stood at the lectern of the UN and in an utterly insane, deranged, self-aggrandizing speech (again, just another day in the insane idiocracy that the US has become, and it isn't even notable, the decline so severe and accelerating), boasted about looting the resources of Venezuela. Boasted about his assault on the ICC. Two-bit, shithole banana republic junta type horseshit. A worldwide embarrassment.
The US is repeatedly and proudly engaged in wantonly illegal piracy at sea. It boasts about the textbook definition of terrorism.
The US has done more to encourage nuclear proliferation in the last two years than in all of history. It has taught that everyone needs to get nuclear weapons, and many of them need to be pointed at the US. It has pushed the notion that might makes right, and if you have the ability you can steal and rampage whatever you want, in a lawless world.
Your claim that the US is holding the gates is absolutely perverse, and your worldview is most certainly some US exceptionalism bullshit. From the American ocean to the American ocean, crossing all of Americas on planet America, in a solar system filled with Americas, the US of A is by far the world's biggest danger, and it is rapidly devolving. Time to use the Supreme Intelligence (SI! I told my boy here and he liked it!) to find an answer!
And just to be clear, this isn't all on Trump. He's a symptom, not the disease. This sort of idiocracy garbage utterly infects all corners of the US, and it keeps sloshing to the surface.
> Boasted about his assault on the ICC.
The US does not recognize the ICC. There is no such thing as supranational law that isn't enforced by military power.
> The US does not recognize the ICC.
This American exceptionalism answer has always been amazing to me.
No other country gives two shits if the US "recognizes" the ICC. As a serial warcrime committing nation, of course the US doesn't want it having legitimacy, as it terroristically blows up random boats and schools full of children.
And of course they also want to protect their serial warcrime best pal Israel in the process.
See, the thing about the ICC is that the countries that do recognize it carry out its warrants. Netanyahu can traipze around warcrime nations like the US, but he can't visit Europe, for instance. Because those countries do believe in the ICC. No one is sending military arrest teams to Israel.
How is this remotely the US' say? I have yet to hear an American explain their belief that they get to force others to not have the ICC that doesn't sound like vile devolved, "but we get to murder children!" horseshit. Yes, I get that you're madly in love with committing war crimes, but understand that you're the pariah. Everyone else doesn't have to worsen their standards to the catastrophically low bar you accept. as your pedophile kleptocracy drags your further and further into the abyss.
> No other country gives two shits if the US "recognizes" the ICC.
That's irrelevant. What is this "other country" going to do about it? The only way to impose international law is by credible military force.
By the way, America isn't exceptional at all in that regard. China, Russia, India don't recognize the ICC either. That's more than 2/3 of the world.
> What is this "other country" going to do about it?
Wow, sounds toothless. Pretty weird then the extraordinary lengths the US is going to in efforts to destroy it, right? I mean, these two things almost seem incredibly stupid to claim simultaneously. The US has expended enormous political and financial capital trying to destroy the ICC, all because it's so irrelevant and doesn't matter. You know, not unlike how the various administrative pedos and criminals constantly talk about how little Canada matters by talking about it constantly, 24/7, every fucking day. It's pathetic business.
The ICC is an agreement between the good countries of the world to hold human garbage to account. There is no surprise why this upsets human garbage and busted, shithole cultures.
> America isn't exceptional at all in that regard.
Oh, it absolutely is exceptional. Ignoring that Russia is also a universal shitheel problem for the planet, and there are clear reasons why it doesn't like such organizations, China and India have done nothing to thwart or attack the ICC. Nothing. China has overtly stated that they support its mission and disagree with attacks against it. Because China is an infinitely more civilized country that the US is. Which is why the US is flailing and grasping as a fallen empire shithole relegated to the dustbin of history.
BTW - did you see when Trump thought having a bunch of bombers doing afterburner runs would somehow scare Xi? Pathetic banana republic strongman garbage of a busted idiocracy. Pretty hilarious when that soft-handed weaking imbecile winced at the scary noises, mogged out by Xi who again pointed out that the US is a fallen shithole, all while Trump is showing him the autopen while the entire world laughs at how unbelievably pathetic this all is. But this pathetic business goes hard for tens of millions of incredibly stupid Americans that still fall for this grifter rapist.
> Pretty weird then the extraordinary lengths the US is going to in efforts to destroy it, right?
Maybe the current American administration just hates the ICC and disagrees with some of their rulings and is casually destroying it without so called “extraordinary efforts”.
> and is casually destroying it
It...hasn't destroyed it at all. In all likelihood China will join the group just to fully take the mantle as leader of the world.
>without so called “extraordinary efforts”
The US administration has burned enormous political goodwill attacking the ICC on behalf of Israel. But more importantly they have set the gears in motion for enormous financial consequences as well.
Do you know why Europe is fast-tracking replacing Visa and Mastercard? Because the pedo-kleptocracy in power in the US used those systems to punish ICC judges[1]. Do you understand how profound the consequences of this will be?
See, the US has decades of goodwill and inertia and entrenchment in place. These things don't change overnight. But it again elected a criminal pedo that is pushing garbage polices, so the whole world is being de-US'd. The consequences are going to be enormous for Americans.
[1] - as a fun fact, any business operating anywhere in the world should be kicked out or fined enormous amounts if it ever applies sanctions that aren't locally recognized. If the US abuses the fact that post-WWs the West centralized business in the largest "safe" country among the cohort, it should very quickly be removed from this position.
> It...hasn't destroyed it at all.
Well not yet but if the US proceeds with sanctions that will likely spell the end. But if the US can’t destroy it then who cares? Have your court, go arrest Putin and the IRGC for their crimes. Let us know how successful you are.
> In all likelihood China will join the group just to fully take the mantle as leader of the world.
I don’t see how China allegedly joining the ICC makes it the “leader of the world”. Seems like a stretch to me.
> The US administration has burned enormous political goodwill attacking the ICC on behalf of Israel.
Well some of that (perhaps most) is well-placed.
> But more importantly they have set the gears in motion for enormous financial consequences as well.
Because of the ICC? No I don’t think so.
> Do you know why Europe is fast-tracking replacing Visa and Mastercard? Because the pedo-kleptocracy in power in the US used those systems to punish ICC judges[1]. Do you understand how profound the consequences of this will be?
That’s not happening. First even standing up a “European” platform has challenges because not all European countries agree on how this would be implemented. Second, Americans have and will for the foreseeable future have a shit load of money. Europeans want that money, so they’ll continue to accept Visa and Mastercard. I see American Express accepted more and more too on my regular visits to various European countries. By the way, you know that Europe can stand up payments systems and still accept cards issued in other countries? Tell me, do you think Americans are walking around worried Europeans are not going to take Mastercard or something? Please have some pride and stop acting like random things like this are your political Super Bowl or something. Americans just do not give a shit about this lol and nobody is worried.
> as a fun fact, any business operating anywhere in the world should be kicked out or fined enormous amounts if it ever applies sanctions that aren't locally recognized.
You should be careful not to confuse what you want the world to look like with how the world actually works. I think it’s clouding your judgement and ability to make good decisions.
> If the US abuses the fact that post-WWs the West centralized business in the largest "safe" country among the cohort, it should very quickly be removed from this position.
Good luck or sorry that happened or whatever. Let us know.
> I don’t see how China allegedly joining the ICC makes it the “leader of the world”. Seems like a stretch to me.
It's a process. The US is a busted shithole, and everyone is moving on. Well I guess you have the Board of Peace.
> Because of the ICC? No I don’t think so.
PRECISELY because of the ICC and the US abusing sanctions.
> Americans just do not give a shit about this lol and nobody is worried.
I mean, yes the whole world knows this. Americans are profoundly stupid and uninformed, generally, and sorry but almost all of your comments are just hilarious to this ends. The original claim that the despotic, terroristic US is holding the barbarians back is just the chef's kiss of insane nonsense.
The US is effectively bankrupt. Bond rates are spiralling. Yeah, friend, revisit this thread in 5 or 10 years. You, and so many like you, have absolutely no idea how the world works and it's amazing.
> You should be careful not to confuse what you want the world to look like with how the world actually works.
Never has self-deception been more blatantly stated. Actually amazing.
I mean, good luck with all of that and everything. As your nation spirals with a fascist bag of shit destroying everything.
> It's a process.
What’s a process? Didn’t the poster above already tell you China isn’t a member of the ICC? 2/3rd of the world doesn’t care about the ICC or its dictates.
> PRECISELY because of the ICC and the US abusing sanctions.
So you want us to stop sanctioning Russia?
> The US is effectively bankrupt. Bond rates are spiralling. Yeah, friend, revisit this thread in 5 or 10 years. You, and so many like you, have absolutely no idea how the world works and it's amazing.
Remind us about debt and bond rates in countries in Europe. Perhaps you can speak to the UK, Italy, Spain, and France for starters.
> The US has bombed over a half dozen countries in the past year.
Which ones? I'm sure there's a very good reason for each so let's walk through them with civility.
> The US is led by a vile rapist abomination that openly threatens "annihilation"
Trump is probably a rapist but our justice system has failed to prosecute him. But the memory of justice is rather long. He may yet get his day. Separately yea who cares about the annihilation threats. Iran has been doing that for a long time. If they don't like hearing it maybe they should stop too.
> The US is repeatedly and proudly engaged in wantonly illegal piracy at sea. It boasts about the textbook definition of terrorism.
What examples do you have of wanton piracy?
> The US has done more to encourage nuclear proliferation in the last two years than in all of history.
I'd argue Russia has done more there by invading Ukraine.
> It has taught that everyone needs to get nuclear weapons, and many of them need to be pointed at the US.
No nobody has been taught that. But they have been taught that if they step out of line and don't have enough of a deterrent like North Korea, that if they try and build nuclear weapons they'll be on the receiving end of sanctions, and then if that isn't a good enough incentive we'll come bomb them and stop them. You are welcome.
> It has pushed the notion that might makes right, and if you have the ability you can steal and rampage whatever you want, in a lawless world.
Might does make right though. International law is just some stuff made up largely by western nations and backed by American military power. If you have no will or ability to enforce international law, like, idk, stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon, then the law is pointless.
> Your claim that the US is holding the gates is absolutely perverse, and your worldview is most certainly some US exceptionalism bullshit.
No, it's not perverse. I just disagree with your point of view.
> This sort of idiocracy garbage utterly infects all corners of the US, and it keeps sloshing to the surface.
Isn't it embarrassing that all these idiots are the dominant force on the planet and you have to cry to them to help you against Russia and they make much more money than your citizens? If you're going to insult Americans like this you should at least have something worth insulting us over. I do think biking culture is way better than driving, but I'm not sure about much else.
I'd argue Russia has done more there by invading Ukraine.
Nope, nobody was talking about getting nukes after the invasion in 2022.
Everybody started talking about getting nukes after: (1) Trump has been threatening to leave NATO and casting doubt about upholding Article 5, so nobody is really sure if the nuclear umbrella extends to Europe anymore; and (2) Trump has threatened to invade Greenland.
Basically, nobody here trusts the US anymore, but politicians are keeping up appearances to race to scale up production capacity of arms, etc.
Trumpists will typically say "but why should the US provide the nuclear umbrella for Europe?" Which is woefully ignorant of history, the whole NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, etc. exists, because the US didn't want European countries like (West-)Germany to have their own nukes.
Isn't it embarrassing that all these idiots are the dominant force on the planet and you have to cry to them to help you against Russia and they make much more money than your citizens? If you're going to insult Americans like this you should at least have something worth insulting us over. I do think biking culture is way better than driving, but I'm not sure about much else.
Sorry, but the arrogance is perplexing. First, European countries contributed a lot more money to Ukraine than the US. Second, when the US, Ukraine, etc. signed the Budapest memorandum, they US implied that they would respond to a Russian attack.
However, when negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond. [...] Washington did not promise unlimited support. The Budapest Memorandum contains security “assurances,” not “guarantees.” Guarantees would have implied a commitment of American military force, which NATO members have. U.S. officials made clear that was not on offer. Hence, assurances.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-care-about-ukraine-an...
And this is exactly one of the issues of the US now. It is completely reliable. Make a trade agreement and then on a whim Trump can decide to shred it again.
The funniest case was that Trump wanted to impose tariffs when Denmark wanted to send troops to Greenland... Which is an autonomous territory of Denmark.
> Nope, nobody was talking about getting nukes after the invasion in 2022.
That's not what I recall. And I also recall a lot of hand-wringing over how it was a shame that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (in a manner of speaking).
> Basically, nobody here trusts the US anymore, but politicians are keeping up appearances to race to scale up production capacity of arms, etc.
That's not true. Internet commentators don't trust the US, but they don't represent all peoples or governments. Even the Danes trusted us enough to sign an agreement giving us perpetual military access to Greenland even if the Greenlanders declare sovereignty.
> Trumpists will typically say "but why should the US provide the nuclear umbrella for Europe?" Which is woefully ignorant of history, the whole NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, etc. exists, because the US didn't want European countries like (West-)Germany to have their own nukes.
I think you are somewhat off the mark here. Nuclear weapons are of course important, but France and the United Kingdom have them too. I guess a question you want to ask Europe is the details and history about France and the United Kingdom's own nuclear umbrellas. If they have them, why do you need American nuclear weapons? Not that I'm personally opposed to also extending ours.
For Americans (and I have various levels of agreement and disagreement) it's less about the nuclear umbrella and more about the placement and utilization of conventional forces. As you can tell with the Iran war and the early days of the Ukraine war, the United States (thanks in part to Europe) has been brow-beaten so much about (what was it, 14 countries someone said we bombed this year?) how bad America is and how awful and racist and "colonizer" America is and all that stuff that many Americans are just fed up with utilizing our military for much of anything or dealing with the problems of other countries.
I'm not, personally, because I think it would be beneficial for us to stop Russia in Ukraine, stop Iran in the Middle East, and avoid a war with China while maintaining the status quo regarding Taiwan, but you know when someone like some posters in this thread want to spend all day talking about how your country is full of idiots eventually people say, well, maybe you guys should take care of your own problems, even if it ends up worse off for everyone.
> Sorry, but the arrogance is perplexing. First, European countries contributed a lot more money to Ukraine than the US. Second, when the US, Ukraine, etc. signed the Budapest memorandum, they US implied that they would respond to a Russian attack.
You say that like there should have been an expectation that the US contributed the same or more? This expectation you have, that you created for yourself, is of your own making.
Second, let's not forget the UK also signed that memorandum and while Europe was busy denying the US and UK's warnings of an imminent Russian invasion, the US and UK were running 24/7 airlift operations to get supplies to Ukraine, provided intelligence, and more. We did respond to the Russian attack. There's no requirement for US forces to respond.
"Even the Danes trusted us enough to sign an agreement giving us perpetual military access to Greenland"
"Trusted". Christ, I guess you subscribe to the Dennis Reynolds "implication" style of coercion. Recall that Denmark readied blood supplies and literally prepared troops for a US invasion. From an ally. "Trusted". Good god.
No one "trusts" the US. It is a worldwide danger, where a pedophile rapist kleptocracy tries to export its profound stupidity to better nations.
In the end, Denmark reaffirmed an existing agreement from 1951. The one that already saw the US having military bases on Greenland per the alliance. They not only broadened it from just the US, they explicitly restricted it such that the US can only maintain such bases if they remain in NATO.
They took an existing agreement and reaffirmed it with new conditions. So Trump, Mr. We're Pulling out of NATO, basically redoubled on NATO just to have a win, where the win is just the status quo. Hilarious stuff. And this actually sells to some Americans?
When they played "Send in the clowns" for Marco Rubio to sign this new "agreement" was just poetic.
Where do you get your news from? Twitter? Because wow, every one of your take is straight from America exceptional land, and it's bizarre (I didn't respond to your other comments out of mercy, but good god you simply have no idea). The fact that Trump celebrated this agreement is because the midterms are coming up and this pathetic loser, having literally nothing to show but failure from his reign of idiocy, needed a "win".
> If they have them, why do you need American nuclear weapons?
You seem to have missed their point. There was a detente and a worldwide "order". Russia stepped out of line and almost the entire world punished them for it. The order mattered. Might does not make right, and in the rule of international law you can't just steal land or resources.
Suddenly Trump not only heralds Putin and wants to cement his battlefield wins, through his incompetent family reps Kushner (jesus christ) and Witkoff, he continually praises Putin and justifies his aggression, constantly repeating Russia's absurd justifications for this foolish war. Then Trump engages in the same behaviour on behalf of the US, stealing the resources of Venezuela, and openly threatening Cuba. And I guarantee that Trump has repeatedly talked to his drunken halfwit SecWar about invading Canada. They openly threatened invading Greenland, just because they want it.
Right now, every capable country should be getting nuclear weapons. Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and on and on. Putin tested the waters and Trump redoubled them and affirmed that there is no international rules, and everyone should be willing to murder billions of people. Any Americans -- having lived a life of peace, security, comfort and affluence -- who think this improves their lot is impossibly fucking stupid. All of history says uncountable Americans are going to die because of this foolish imbecile.
So Trump, Mr. We're Pulling out of NATO, basically redoubled on NATO just to have a win, where the win is just the status quo. Hilarious stuff. And this actually sells to some Americans?
"Art of the deal"
You seem to have missed their point. There was a detente and a worldwide "order". Russia stepped out of line and almost the entire world punished them for it. The order mattered.
Exactly this. It seems that the US has forgotten what soft power, alliances, rules-based world order means. You have the power because you have allies, because you can hold others to rules (and mostly keep up the appearance that you obey the rules yourself), etc. Initially, you can benefit from abusing that position, but it is short-term only. Your allies will form new alliances (e.g. Canada getting closer to the EU), stop buying your weapons, wean themselves of your products (this very news item), etc. The problem with incompetent people like Trump and his administration is that they only see the benefits of the short-term abuse, but not the terrible harm they do to themselves and the rest of the world long-term.
> "Trusted". Christ, I guess you subscribe to the Dennis Reynolds "implication" style of coercion. Recall that Denmark readied blood supplies and literally prepared troops for a US invasion. From an ally. "Trusted". Good god.
Yea interesting how they're so much more ready to go fight the US than fight Russia. But if you want to argue there's no trust there then you certainly can't trust our military being in Europe or backstopping NATO so if your goal is to dissolve NATO because of some arguing over, frankly, a lack of European defense investment in an area that is critical to American security (you own it you need to secure it) then well that's up to Europeans to decide.
I'm ignoring all the other stuff because it's boring and uninteresting. No I don't get my news from Twitter. I don't use social media.
> You seem to have missed their point.
No I'm debating their point. There's a difference.
> Suddenly Trump not only heralds Putin and wants to cement his battlefield wins, through his incompetent family reps Kushner (jesus christ) and Witkoff, he continually praises Putin and justifies his aggression, constantly repeating Russia's absurd justifications for this foolish war.
There are two large problems with this.
First, Europe has no ability to engage with Putin, and if Kushner and Witkoff are the people he will see then we should try for some manner of diplomacy even if the people that are sent aren't the ones you would prefer.
Second, while I fully support Ukraine regaining all of the territory it has lost, if Ukraine is unable to re-take the territory and Russia is unable to progress, it's stupid for all these soldiers to just go and die for no reason. If we can stop the war completely, for example, with Ukraine ceding this land, that's up to them but we should at least explore options and try to bring an end to the war.
> Then Trump engages in the same behaviour on behalf of the US, stealing the resources of Venezuela, and openly threatening Cuba. And I guarantee that Trump has repeatedly talked to his drunken halfwit SecWar about invading Canada.
I don't agree with how we've approached Canada.
Venezuela and Cuba are entirely separate things. Happy to discuss why if you want.
> They openly threatened invading Greenland, just because they want it.
It was a dumb negotiating tactic but it's important to us that it is defended to our satisfaction.
> Right now, every capable country should be getting nuclear weapons. Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and on and on.
If you're in favor of nuclear proliferation then sure. But it doesn't include just the "good" countries. It also means Israel gets to ramp up its nuclear forces, Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Argentina can get nuclear weapons, and anyone else on your naughty list. So we will further double down on a more dangerous world and you're advocating for further breakdowns of international law.
Yea interesting how they're so much more ready to go fight the US than fight Russia.
Ehm, Russia didn't invade Danish territory. The US was threatening to invade Danish territory.
First, Europe has no ability to engage with Putin, and if Kushner and Witkoff are the people he will see then we should try for some manner of diplomacy even if the people that are sent aren't the ones you would prefer.
Putin only wants them because they are weak and can be played.
It was a dumb negotiating tactic but it's important to us that it is defended to our satisfaction.
It was not a negotiation tactic. They already had an agreement for over half a century that they could scale up US military presence as they would like. The US has reduced presence over the years.
Trump wanted to add land like every pathetic little (wannabe) dictator. But the EU showed some teeth suggesting that the trade bazooka could be employed, country moved troops to Greenland (so it wouldn't be a clean invasion without blood). So Trump TACOed out.
If it was a negotiation tactic it is bloody stupid ("art of the deal" I guess). Aside from getting a worse deal then before, as a side-effect many European countries that were planning to buy US arms are now switching to European options.
If you're in favor of nuclear proliferation then sure. But it doesn't include just the "good" countries. It also means Israel gets to ramp up its nuclear forces, Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Argentina can get nuclear weapons, and anyone else on your naughty list. So we will further double down on a more dangerous world and you're advocating for further breakdowns of international law.
Yes, and that was exactly my point earlier, the Trump and the US opened pandora's box. He disturbed the equilibrium by threatening to leave the NATO/not respecting article 5, by threatening to attack its own allies, by yelling Zelensky out of the White House. This sends ripples all over the world and Europe, Canada, and East Asian countries get the message "we cannot trust the US as an ally anymore", which leads to proliferation and probably more wars. It's very likely that Putin will try some sort of attack on NATO countries soon, just to test how firm Trump's commitments are. This would never have happened if he didn't weaken NATO. It's understandable that Poland gets nervous and wants to be able to MAD Russia.
> Ehm, Russia didn't invade Danish territory. The US was threatening to invade Danish territory.
Can you invade a territory in which you already have a dominant military presence? I appreciate Denmark’s bark loud approach but the country is militarily irrelevant. I think it was more of an awful negotiation tactic. We weren’t in the room. Maybe the Danes simply needed a reminder to take US concerns seriously and this was the crappy way of doing that.
> Putin only wants them because they are weak and can be played.
Either way they’re in the room at least trying something. Why aren’t European leaders in Moscow trying to get the war to end? Because they’re strong? Sorry that doesn’t pass the smell test.
> It was not a negotiation tactic. They already had an agreement for over half a century that they could scale up US military presence as they would like. The US has reduced presence over the years.
I disagree. Guess we can agree to disagree here. The new agreement protects American bases even if Greenland declares independence and also establishes formal, legal rights for America to prohibit hostile nations from mining or establishing military infrastructure on the island.
> Aside from getting a worse deal then before, as a side-effect many European countries that were planning to buy US arms are now switching to European options.
Well the deal is better. That’s an objective fact. Nobody in the US is threatened by or cares if Europeans are buying local. We led the way on that and we are happy that Europe is investing more in its defense and defense industrial base.
> This sends ripples all over the world and Europe, Canada, and East Asian countries get the message "we cannot trust the US as an ally anymore", which leads to proliferation and probably more wars.
That doesn’t reflect reality though. Japan and Korea for example haven’t lost trust. Putin by attacking Ukraine sort of forced the issue and to get countries thinking about whether the US would use nuclear weapons I guess in these wars? But the same is true for the EU. Even the language you are using doesn’t make sense to me. If Putin attacks a NATO country why is he all of a sudden testing how firm Trump’s commitments are? He would be testing how firm the EU’s commitments are instead. How fast do you think Spain or Italy will tap out when their kids are off dying in the cold to defend Estonia? What will to fight does France have when its economy is so heavily indebted? Poland and the United Kingdom will fight, the baltics would too since their lives are at stake. You can read for yourself survey results out of Germany where some large majority of German citizens said they wouldn’t fight to defend Germany. You’re going to read this as an attack on Europe. Nothing is further from the truth. I love Europe, but folks need to have a sober assessment of themselves here instead of hiding every possible problem behind Donald Trump.
Poland specifically said they did not want to host nuclear weapons by the way. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/poland-do...
> the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy
America isn't a fallen empire (if indeed it ever was an empire), nor does Donald Trump existing all of a sudden make everyone else stupid or something. Just because you disagree with someone's politics doesn't make their entire country an idiocracy, nor does it all of a sudden lower the IQs of everyone else.
> is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this
They are just following Trump's lead in decoupling from dependencies like we are from China (and a few others).
> And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.
No that won't happen. Also your assertion about Visa and Mastercard are just incorrect. They may be disrupted by technology if they fail to adapt, but it's not because Europeans don't want American money for example. I go to Europe all the time, at a minimum once/year for about two weeks and my wife and I spend $20,000 or $30,000 or something and believe me you guys love it when I swipe my credit cards. In fact, every time I go to Europe I see American Express more and more accepted.
Nobody is rejecting or ejecting the US banking system except maybe some bad actors but nobody cares about them.
> But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person.
I don't think you can be a profoundly stupid person and still be the president. There's a minimum amount of not being stupid you have to have in order to run a campaign, hire people, make decisions, and more.
> Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?
Maybe you should question why you feel so strongly about this yet the citizens of the wealthiest country in the world with many of the best companies and institutions in the world feel differently. You should maybe question why groups like the AfD are gaining shares in election. You can coddle yourself by chalking it up to just Russian propaganda or something, but that isn't going to do you any good.
> Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.
It's a lot easier to say stuff like this when you are coming (I assume though if not the point will change slightly in form but not substance) from a place of safety and have no stake in the fight. If the US and China were to go to war it would be devastating for both countries. Tens or hundreds of thousands might die. Maybe a little pomp and diplomacy can help avoid that confrontation? It's not like the Dutch are going to be dying on beaches in Taiwan so maybe let's let the folks who have a stake actually do the talking yea?
> You should maybe question why groups like the AfD are gaining shares in election.
When life sucks and there's no hope, people vote for parties that promise to shake things up, not for parties that promise more of the same. That comes in two flavours: far left and far right.
Not to get involved in this argument, but just noting that Trump likely now has MCI (mild cognitive impairment), which has developed over the last two years. He was in better mental shape when he was reelected. Both you and the person you're arguing with can be right on this one.
No, Trump has always been incredibly stupid. His intellect has only ever convinced people dumber still.
Trump grew up wealthy, surrounded by handlers and supplicants obliged to glaze every statement or utterance. This led this utter dunce to believe his idiotic thoughts are pearls of wisdom offered up to an ungrateful world. Did you know there is a "B" in the word dumb? Have you ever heard of the old-timey word "groceries". Affordability is a hoax. Super intelligence!
He is a spectacularly stupid idiot, and he always has been. This isn't new. Dementia doesn't explain it.
I think Trump is smart, but like conman smart. In fact I think he is brilliant in that regard. He is not a food statesman. He wouldn’t even be a good autocrat, because of his untrustworthiness. So yeah Trump is not profoundly stupid, like down syndrome stupid.
He’s probably one of the best all-time conmen
> I think Trump is smart, but like conman smart
The guy has accomplished the extraordinary, and it's easy for loads of people to see that as some sort of intentional, purposeful brilliance.
But I just don't see it.
Instead I see someone who just breaks people's brains. People cannot comprehend someone that immoral, who lies so effortless with every word, and so utterly shameless. They just can't. So when Trump declares that he's going to cut trillions from government spending and eliminate the deficit and pay off the debt, it's impossible for many people to understand that he has no fucking idea what he's talking about, and the little bit he does understand he simply lies about.
Like I keep seeing articles from left wing sources talking about Trump being "humiliated". Trump is utterly incapable of humiliation. When caught in the most outrageous lie, he redoubles on it, which again, tens of millions of people just cannot comprehend someone so utterly immoral and busted, so immediately they think "oh okay...I guess somehow he must be right? I mean, no functioning human could lie so egregiously".
He is so thoroughly a garbage human that many are caught out by him.
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...
Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258
The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...
"Drink verification can to continue"
I like to provide links so that other people can easily find the source: <https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2714117-mountain-dew-twitch-...>
Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought exactly the same...
> abusive big tech that exists in USA
The US administration does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. US corporations will take profits over defending ideals or sound principles.
Gulf of America? Lake America? Ocean of America?
Its not a good move. What about the opportunity cost. Is this really the best use of their time and money? Seems stupid and ideologically driven.
They can hold them criminally liable for surveillance and put the executives in jail if they are so concerned about some patents.
It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.
I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then
Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.Normally one practical solution would be to cover the front-facing camera on a phone.
Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…
But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.
I feel compelled to mention Oracle at this point. Isnt their entire business model suing their customers?
What's truly wild imo is how the vast majority of consumers keep choosing absolute crap when better alternatives exist. Microsoft, Google, Twitter... oh my
In addition to being the plot of a Black Mirror Episode¹, Sony also owns a similar patent².
I wasn’t aware of the Microsoft patent but was able to find it³. It was published less than a month ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
³ https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's just a patent.
It's just a delousing room
Indeed - delousing rooms are not evil.
You can patent a black mirror episode?
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."
"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshitification
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Theory:
Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.
> Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Almost all of them.
> Walmart
> Amazon
I guess customers yeah, Employees? not so much
Black Mirror episode 2, IIRC.
I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.
Greed has no end.
This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.
Meta and Google will follow soon after.
P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
And how about Meta's "pervert glasses"? Zuck himself probably conjured up the idea that everything you look at will result in you getting a "relevant ad" for that item. Yuck!
I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.
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France government has announced NixOS based systems some months ago:
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )
I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.
Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.
Thanks for the amazing work, let’s keep pushing for independent EU-based technology!
That's quite a generous decision. Thanks a lot for doing your work in public and in multiple languages.
Thank you for your service! I hope you can cooperate also with other countries, I am specifically thinking of Canada here, given they're dual-language English-French. I'm convinced NixOS is the right way forward.
J’imagine que c’est de plus en plus facile de le faire avec l’aide de l’IA!
> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.
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That's extremely weird. I don't know of another place that does that aside from Quebec, and it's extremely illogical on its own merits.
"Extremely illogical". Okay buddy.
What other place do you know of whose context is the same as Quebec?
Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, come easily to my mind. Switzerland is a very interesting counter-example because although the French-speaking cantons (Romandie) have French as the "prevalent language", meaning that public services are almost exclusively in French, in practice most people speak German too because they're pragmatic about language: the German kantons are the center of economic activity and not speaking German is a huge disadvantage. Quebec, par contre, is full of people that wistfully (I had intended to write "wishfully" but the auto complete was fantastic this time) think they can manage with speaking only French and ignore the rest of the world.
Your comment is dripping with racism.
Did you know there are tensions in Switzerland because there is a will to stop kids from learning French while they attend primary school? https://www.edi.admin.ch/fr/newnsb/CbsqmmLpkhDjQgEILMp_P
Did you know Switzerland is located in Europe and shares a border with France? Did you know people in France speak French?
Do you know where Quebec is located?
I’ve seen your kind before.
> Your comment is dripping with racism.
Your paranoia is typical of Quebec. You need professional help, Mon ami.
> Did you know there are tensions in Switzerland because there is a will to stop kids from learning French while they attend primary school?
I lived for a while in Zurich as well, and it was well known that kids are exiting high school being unable to speak the second language they supposedly studied.
> Do you know where Quebec is located?
Yeah, I'm in Montreal right now and have been living there for quite a while.
> Yeah, I'm in Montreal right now and have been living there for quite a while.
shocked Pikachu
No matter what I replied, I suspect it would have confirmed your prejudices.
Belgium, somewhat? :)
Not really. They are located in Europe. Share a border with France. Still have a lot of laws to protect French.
It's people who speak french not being able to make a choice about their children's education, yes it's weird, and no it's not judgemental to wonder why parents can't make a very basic decision in their child's education.
Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix
> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.
The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.
So. :P
Italianman here, I totally understand and respect your point. I just wish this was a collectively funded initiative, English-first but open to all translations. I’d be so happy if my country understood this and invested in this as well, so kudos to France for leading the tech here!
Je t’assure que ce besoin qu’on certains français de montrer leur capacité de parler l’anglais, de nommer leurs entreprises avec des noms à connotation anglophone, etc. est considéré très gênant ici du Québec.
Oui, c'est bien connu que vous Québécois préférez la stratégie de l'autruche.
Tes interventions montrent que tu es un raciste intolérant. Je n’ai plus de temps à perdre avec toi.
Quel dommage.
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
> the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows
That was 18 years ago: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.
I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
The Dutch have ditched even github. They are thinking ahead.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
Also noteworthy is that they already have their own version of ubuntu that is widely used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
I particularly enjoy the Asterix-adjacent naming scheme.
I’m glad multiple European agencies are giving this a whack - hopefully we’ll end up with a synthesis of the best aspects.
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Does it? The EU isn't a single country like the US - it's a partnership of 27 separate countries.
If one country in the UN adopted some new OS, we wouldn't expect every other country (incl the US) to adopt it too.
That's an accurate description of the status quo, but it's also a good example of massive inefficiencies in the EU.
FWIW, I'm not saying that I would expect the EU to do a better job than the Dutch government. Likely quite the opposite. But it's frustrating as passionate European... that these problems aren't tackled on a union level. You'd think that's their job? The EU will never compete if it stays a loose partnership of 27 countries, and if it can't even get France, Germany, and the Netherlands to work on this together instead of running 3 separate projects...
This is the equivalent of two competing startups getting an advantage over an enterprise, just at government scale. It's a good thing.
Two competing products emerge, they are battle tested, opinions form, reviews are conducted. At that point it's a much better time for a significantly larger organisation to create a more focused realistic plan based on learnings and outcomes.
Imagine the analysis paralysis that would set in if the EU tried it from scratch - years of requirements gathering, pilots, reports...
> it says a lot about the EU that every government tries to reinvent the same operating system
Yeah what could possibly go wrong
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Not all of us know, could you give me a hint please? Why is NixOS toxic?
Ask your llm, scroll through some meme pages!
https://x.com/MemesOfNixOS/status/1942271466894217321
- Could you please justify your opinion? - Sure, here you have a link from Twitter And we all get a meme that is not funny.
https://twiiit.com/MemesOfNixOS/status/1942271466894217321
Can an OS be toxic?
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.
It’s also the easiest if you want to make your own “distro”.
A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.
I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.
“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” — Simonyi
I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!
The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.
But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.
one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv
for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...
If it’s just filesystem sandboxing that you are after, then bubblewrap can help you stay in nix by just wrapping the agent’s derivation
llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).
IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.
> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software
May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.
e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.
With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.
If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.
It requires rebuilding the nodes whose inputs have been affected by the change, not the entire tree.
When I just want to make something work and there isn't a nix package that can instantly give me what I want with `nix-shell -p $PACKAGE` then I use containers. That's what I've done when playing around with llama.
I would not be so confident the people making these decisions are smarter than you.
Is this just the old 'Government is stupid' or 'EU is too bureaucratic' trope, or did you have a particular point?
This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.
Isn't it counterproductive for every European country with a bit of extra money to develop its own open source software stack?
Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?
Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?
I’m hardly an expert, quite the opposite, but I imagine coordinating all those groups across multiple countries that don’t have a unified bureaucratic system would undo any disadvantages of just working on them independently and open sourcing at all. In theory they could all start borrowing from each other eventually.
It's not just a structure problem. The needs are different. And monoculture is always bad, so developing a plurality of solutions is a good idea.
I'm not saying every small administration of a 200-souls village needs to do this, but on the scale of a nation who has a GAFAM budget in the hundreds of millions of euros (probably, haven't made the calculation), it's not crazy to invest a few million on a side project like this to reduce dependency.
Oh sorry that is what I meant i would like this to be a EU wide ecosystem working together.
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Mijn Bureau is the Dutch equivalent of openDesk and La Suite: https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau
> Digital autonomy
> Strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands.
Apparently the US becoming an authoritarian state means people don't want to do business with us. We're giving away our best advantage, our reputation for freedom and openness, for absolutely nothing in return.
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
They have "migrated to codeberg" which is written in the repo itself.
However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".
And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.
But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org
They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?
From [1]
> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.
> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.
From [2]
> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084
[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078
Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.
It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.
edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.
Doesn't work. People from different geographical areas just can't agree on categories. So even correctly applied labels are useless.
You'd think "no lolis" would be reasonable. It falls apart when people look 14 into 50s, to you and your local police, but not to themselves.
If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.
Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.
> Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?
I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn gamesCodeberg's AI position was about resource waste. Single-user AI projects were spamming their CI/CD as if they were KDE or the kernel.
They don't care if someone wastes their own resources.
Federation is a people-problem, not so much the resource problem.
Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins, perhaps prompted by the users) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253
So they would not want to federate with another instance that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
Those are all problems codeberg doesn't want on its system. Allowing a codeberg user to comment on someone else's system wouldn't bring those problems to codeberg.
Why should a fallible, biased human “admin” be able to block an individual from communicating with another individual or group of individuals? This just creates weird social silos and echo chambers. It’s made worse because the people who choose to be jannies are often deeply broken people.
The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
Do you have an email account without a spam filter?
I have one with a spam filter that I control myself, not some BS like GMail who wants to decide for me. It’s well-tuned at this point and hasn’t given me problems.
If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.
weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")
Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:
- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")
- https://forgefed.org/
Final piece of what puzzle?
We can do big federated/distributed development with git at the project level. See the linux kernel.
If the goal is fancy UI then there are alternatives.
If the goal is to do a big multi-git with cross repo issue tracker, then that implies either:
- you're a public site for random repos like codeberg
- you're a special purpose forge and identity management is a big issue you want full control over.
IMO - For this to work, they should go with the latter and not try to offload identity into some federated scheme.
Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).
[1] https://radicle.dev/
[2] https://tangled.org/
Man I was so excited about Tangled, until they announced they sought and got VC investments, which makes it not even worth looking into for long-term projects. I still wish them luck and hope they'll be the lonely 0.1% that can resist enshittification even during pressure from investors, but realistically my hope is fairly close to the bottom.
Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.
Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.
Radicle is not based on crypto. The governance organization uses a DAO, but that’s not tied in with the project, only with the main dev team; it’s irrelevant to users. They had some early ideas to incentivize participation through crypto, but they abandoned it in alpha. I don’t know why this notion persists.
Personally I don't find the incentives of the only developer team working on something to be irrelevant to me as a user, if I'm looking for a long-term solution. Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
> Self-hosting/on-prem still seems like the only sensible solution here.
Radicle is self-hosted? Not sure what you mean by this.
If one doesn’t want anyone working on it to be crypto-adjacent, then I guess it wouldn’t be a good fit, but you can host and use it just fine without touching crypto yourself.
That's a recipe for drama as shown with mastodon when they got publicity few years ago
We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.
But furniture is a one time sale, not an ongoing service. That's a bad comparison.
Furniture is actually an ongoing service on the scale of public organisations. When I worked for a Danish city we had a set of subscriptions for furniture, depending on what sort of institution it was. This probably won't surprise you but city hall had the supreme plus subscription which meant that furniture was replaced regularily, while schools had the shit tier subscription meaning the furniture almost had to break into pieces before it got replaced. It's done with purchase agreements for an entire sector.
I think the comparison is fair enough considering that self-hosted would work sort of similar. In that you'd rent the physical space for your hardware (and possibly the hardware itself) at local suppliers, and not actually have it in your basement.
A third party supplies their electricity too.
Codeberg does not forbid AI-generated code. It forbids AI-generated projects. You would know this if you read the policy.
The specific language is:
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
implies for me >50% - instead of >0% as suggested by @ricardobeat
The hardest part of policy isn't coming up with smart policy, it's figuring out where and how to draw the lines.
What do you think "mostly" could mean?
Take a peek at https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/commits/branch/main
Is this "mostly developed with AI" in your opinion? Not to mention the fact the policy leaves it open to interpretation is part of the problem...
As much as I hate vibe-coded "slop". I feel like this is idiotic. I and most good engs with decades of experience do use AI now to type nearly all the actual "code", but we read EVERY SINGLE line, always fix and rework every feature before a commit to make it clean, optimized, and de-slopified.
But still, we wouldn't be allowed to use codeberg because "generative ai" was used significantly for most lines of code?
AFAICT they are dealing with resource exhaustion from slopcoding agents hammering them with copycat garbage. It's existential. If you use AI to help you thoughtfully write code, review it with humans, and respect their service, I don't think they will have a problem with you.
If it's good, will they ever find out?
Maybe not... I personally wouldn't use a service that would boot me off if they did find out because I spoke about it online or committed too much code one week or something.
> And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
and yet we seem to be convinced that English is the appropriate spec language of the modern times
Their instance is self hosted right, so this doesn't apply I think.
I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.
Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.
I was looking at alternative hosting for some of my projects that are going to be opensource. I've heavily used AI to speed up dev (I've been a software developer for about 20 years now) and it was quite disappointing to see that they made that decision.
AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated
It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.
People who act out of ideology very very rarely change their opinions.
They can however lose the means to enforce their opinions on others to the point those opinions don't matter.
This is less about the code and more about load. It's community funded so allowing agents to willy nilly push and pull will be very expensive.
> I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
It doesn't really. It allows it in very limited context which has overlap with other existing tools that predate AI.
Point out what verbatim piece of text forbids any and all usage of LLMs for coding and having that project on Codeberg?
Literally the first "informal guidelines" (subject to change of course) states:
> Projects who have an active community that cares about and maintains the software
You can use LLMs for development + fulfill this requirement, contrary to popular belief.
They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/commit/96fac426a32d1ba...
I have read it. This effectively narrows down the use of AI drastically IMO. Which is what I said.
This effectively limits it to stuff like code completion and using it as a chat assistant and doing some medium level refactors.
They should have just completely banned it. As the ambiguity itself causes problems. Even if you use LLMs maybe say 25% of the time, sooner or later that means that a significant portion of your code base is AI generated.
> They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
I am not a vibe coder (I am a software dev with almost 20 years experience) and am using Heavy LLM assistance (I am running Qwen 3.8 locally) for some of my projects. I am making sure the code output is decent, well documented, has tests etc. Sure what I am doing is something betweeen "vibe coding" and "proper development" but there would be no way for me in the few hours an evening to even get to the stage I would be at in some of them without LLM assistance.
I would not be able to use codeberg for hosting my project under their rules.
Banning AI generated content works just fine, and arguing otherwise is nothing short of FOMO.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
Did you read the actual policy? It isn't extreme in the slightest.
It's stricter than Debian's, which is one of the most conservative Linux distros out there.
> Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project.
That's a strict policy to you?!
Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
Quoting from the post:
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
> "enough reason for me to move out"
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
> The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.
In the future, consider reading a policy before complaining about it.
Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:
> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.
Does this mean European governments have or will have an alternative(s) to GitHub as well?
Forgejo (the Codeberg-maintained Gitea fork) is essentially becoming an EU-based community of familiar compatible alternatives to GitHub.
It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.
Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#publ...
That list leads to some interesting services as a lot of the instances are run by organisations that do other things too
Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!
I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?
Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.
Curious about your comment on two counts (genuinely, not being argumentative):
1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.
(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)
>in what cases is this illegal for governments to do?
It's legal certainty principle and equality before the law principle and also prohibition of discrimination principle.
For the law to be lawful (weird, but it's a thing, right) it should satisfy certain criteria. Me, being subject to the law should be able to predict whether my actions are allowed or not when I plan to do or not do them. If I can't predict the outcome of my actions, the law isn't valid. One of the outcomes of it is being able to read the law -- it's published and it's comprehensible, it has advance notice, etc.
If the rule says "don't host LLM generated code", but everybody hosts LLM generated code and then I say mean things about one of the people providing the hosting and suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego. Or being part of a specific group. You are often explicitly prohibited to make certain decisions based on belonging to a certain group (religious, ethnic, sexual, trade union, health, criminal record based), but it could happen that somehow the outcome of the shadow policy correlates with those. Since we don't know the shadow policy and the stated policy doesn't seem to be applied equally, this is not great.
See example about weed in a different comment.
>how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
They look silly for stating it and not following (loss of credibility), then once they suddenly start following it, there will be different interpretations, including "I'm banned because I'm $protected_thing_that_you_should_not_be_banned_for", which is bad press.
> suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego
This is ultimately a matter of framing though. You can equally argue that (a) that person shouldn't be deplatformed because others' LLM use is tolerated or (b) all of them should be deplatformed including that person. In the latter case (b) the person who said mean things still experiences the same outcome, but by your logic this is just. Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
> > how is this bad
> they look silly
> bad press
This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
>Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
The difference is -- if I know the effective policy, I can plan better and choose a different platform in advance (if the it's option (b)).
>This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
Subjective opinions matter because people act on them (more) consistently than on objective facts. I would for example act on a subjective opinion that a platform provider is a bunch of racist assholes or affiliated with r-country.
The difference is that without consistent enforcement, the rule becomes just a fig leaf for arbitrary decisions by the moderation team, who then receives an enormous amount of unintended power. Most reasonable people wouldn’t argue that the moderation team should be allowed to ban anyone that they have a personal disagreement with, for example. Yet here we are.
The problem is for the platform as a whole, not the individual who may or may not be punished.
Governments have a lot of laws that they don't enforce, or enforce only lightly. For example, weed is still illegal in Netherland, despite many decades of tolerating its use.
I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.
It's illegal but you can't be prosecuted for usage or possession (unless you do it in a blowverbod area in front of a village cop that is having a bad day) -- the judge will ask why this person specifically is prosecuted if everybody around is smoking and will throw it away. It already happened in fact.
Yes, and they only drag those laws out when they need to take down an inconvenient person. That’s a bad thing.
Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
That & the legal aspects of hosting code of questionable copyright.
The LLM revolution has proven that if you have enough institutional investors, the Berne Convention doesn't apply to you, but it's sofar unclear whether that exemption from international law extends to small EU-based non-profits.
But they don't want to. They want to provide all needs for approved projects. They want that if a FOSS project legitimately releases 50 times a day, they want to make it work. If a slop project is wasting those resources that could be used for KDE, on nonsense, then they don't.
They're not a free for all, they do KYCP (know your customer's projects) with an initial assumption of good faith.
Also they're a voluntary society you can join by contributing money. They're not a charity as such, more like a group of people pooling resources, and also offering them to people outside the group on a good faith basis.
Every single issue they brought up in their blog post starts with even just 1% AI code. If they actually believed the absolutely absurd stuff they spew, banning it all would be the only logical solution.
The current solution solves none of the issues, AND pisses off most sane people (mostly because their arguments are fabrications). They dropped the cake and shit on it too.
hahaha
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
>but not to achieve anything of merit
Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.
Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?
Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...
> or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
Because people generally don't like having bits of millstone in their flour.
At least where I am (the Netherlands) there are plenty of mills still milling.
Your analogy is terrible.
The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).
For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!
At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.
Feel free to disagree, but you will be wrong.
This, too, gives me vibes of cryptobros!
Proponent: EmergingTech is gonna be amazing, it'll at revolutionize everything!
Bystander: Alright. But I'll hold off until I see actual evidence of that happening. Truly revolutionizing tech usually shows clear signs of being revolutionary, and doesn't need evangelists.
Proponent: You're gonna be left behind! Act now, or forever miss out! Here's analogies with things we know in hindsight were revolutionary.
Bystander: Those analogies are bad for these specific reasons.
Proponent: You will be proven wrong!
It's so dumb. At least you AI proponents don't post pictures of yourself with glowing laser eyes when you evangelize, so I guess that's an improvement over the cryptobros.
PS: I emphasize that I'm not claiming that the technology won't have huge effects on society. If that's your take on what I write, you have to read again.
Yeah yeah, except LLM code is absolute dogshit and is not on a trajectory to ever not be dogshit.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/akakichi-no-eleven-redraws
I’m sorry, but this isn’t the case. I don’t like it, on balance, but managed responsibly and steered well, plenty of LLM code is fine.
Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
[flagged]
Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.
I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.
And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.
Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.
As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.
Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.
This is just wishful thinking.
Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.
> Building the product was never the hard part
this is an absolutely insane take
Is it? A lot of software is really just a pile of context-specific database front-ends. There is virtually nothing difficult in the implementation itself. Most businesses in this space survive because they know how to dress up their pile of CRUD for their customers. And it gets worse: a less reliable, buggier product may still be the better fit for a customer if it works well enough for what they use it the most.
I worked in an early startup that came from 5+ years of initial academic research and selling the product was far more arduous of a process.
Prove it?
You sound exactly like the cryptobros of yore. Just stop.
If you're right, the evidence will bear that out. Stop evangelizing. It's insufferable. And it's paradoxical that so many who believe this technology to be absolutely world-changing also feel that the technology needs to be pushed onto people actively. It reminds me of religious people ("my god is all-powerful, but if you meaningless mortal insult him he'll be mightily upset").
I also hate preachy sermons about new tech with a deep passion and that transfers somewhat to the tech they preach about.
Despite this, there is a reality that LLMs for coding can create pretty decent results fast. There is something real and usable hidden in all that mess. It's like the dot com bubble in some ways: the bubble died with all the overhyped "x on the web" BS that had no real substance, but the web itself stayed. This time around, LLMs and agents will stick around as tools, but the hype will likely die a loud, messy death.
Nobody here is saying otherwise. The Codeberg policy in question does not forbid LLM-assistance outright; their policy is targeted towards unmitigated slop. Even myself, as I argue heatedly against the religious adherents, not only use LLMs daily but work for a very successful LLM startup developing and selling LLMs-as-tools. That does not make the zealots who won't shut the fuck up about LLMs-as-gods any less infuriating.
Sure. But HN these days is the epitome of "x but on the web" for the AI era. It's insufferable!
> alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
It looks like they're not quite set on that. There is a very empty part of the repo here: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.
They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.
The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.
When you’re a government you can mandate the file formats (and versions thereof) you are willing to accept.
Sure they can make a mandate but the grunts on ground will still get sent pptx files by their vendors.
And they send them back.
How do you think currencies are established? By accepting chickens and cows in lieu of legal tender? That’s precisely the meaning of legal tender. This is the exact analogue thereof: information is required as value is required, information and value are required in a mandated standardised form, other forms are rejected a priori.
Currencies are established by force (taxation backed by militaries and police)
Sure, the government could force a format change if they really want to.
Ultimately, yes: governmental actions are backed by force in the case of noncompliance.
I assure you the French government is large enough and obstinate enough that they will dictate to external parties what inputs they accept.
I agree, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why. Like, why is good collaboration in an open-source office software so unrealistic when way more complicated-seeming state synchronization happens in open source and indie games all the time?
Yeah, especially Excel.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
Yeah, there’s no VBA support anywhere. LibreOffice has their own scripting thing, and it works ok but it’s not compatible with the VBA and VBA stuff broadly doesn’t work there.
Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.
I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.
I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.
I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.
For what it’s worth I’ve started building a Mathematica-to-Python transpiler.
We really need investments from large public institutions in LibreOffice Sheets.
Agreed.
Valve is making desktop computers now; maybe the next thing they could improve is LibreOffice to try and appeal to businesses.
What version of Excel does your Nix Flake package out of interest? Is it current?
Yep! It actually made the front page of HN a few days ago :)
It supports Office 365 and Office 2024 Home works as of about two days ago.
I think it would require very little if any effort to get Home and Business working but the license for that was too expensive (though pull requests are welcome!)
Currently limited to stuff that can be activated on Microsoft’s website. I tried very hard and was ultimately unsuccessful at getting Office 2024 Pro Plus working from a gray-market key I bought on Groupon, because the MAK activation stuff appears to depend on a lot of stuff that Wine/Proton doesn’t implement. Again, pull requests are welcome if someone here figures out how to do it.
https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake
This is extremely cool. Nix just continues to impress me more and more.
People can apparently imagine and accept future Recursive Super Intelligence and Datacenters in Space but can't imagine or accept a future where a free/libre Office Suite with support and funding from a motivated sovereign state can get close to Microsoft's offering
I think many office suite use cases can be covered by simple, less feature rich software. Not everyone needs dozens of text formatting options. People use them because they are there but not making better documents necessarily.
I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
Completely agree. Before that I would have add the Adobe Suite as well for a lot of people but it's less a problem now fortunately.
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
That's correct. The challenge is going to be creating a forward looking environment that doesn't just create 80% replacements. I'm deep into a mobile software project that needs to be ready for on device tool calling. Retrofitting that to existing monolithic apps is going to fall short of realizing the potential. Apps are going to change in big ways. Driving in the rearview mirror won't get you there.
I think a whole nixified country would revolutionize the work. Just gotta take the off the shackles of proprietary software and let human nature do its thing.
I’ve been using NixOS exclusively the last few years. Its been a blessing and a curse!
My framework laptop, my NAS, my Home-assistant, etc
It’s how I’ve always envisioned “systems management”, but the struggle has been real.
Enter LLM’s - the barriers are kind of gone!
It’s actually making so much sense I don’t know where to start.
Just try it out, using a little bit of LLM support and you can reach a solid-state like setup for servers and workstations.
What are the struggles? I have been considering giving it a go.
This video sums it up pretty nicely imo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mqVnyOTeN8
TLDW:
- Nix needs weird tricks to make its packaging scheme work
- The main repo is uncurated and hosted on Github
- The functional nature of packages means a low level update can either trigger a huge wave of updates or you end up with out of date deps. Usually both happen at the same time
What it used to be:
1. The rigidness of it all, which after a while is the main point ofc. Takes getting used to, but awesomeness for servers
2. The highly specialized filesystem layout requires some tinkering when trying to “just get things to work” that is not already packaged/wrapped for nixos
3. The language is… special. An acquired taste perhaps.
4. Flakes, home-manager, experimental flags galore.
LLM’s makes short work of it all, and having a devenv.sh setup of all your projects is :chefs-kiss:
My machines are essentially solid-state devices, and it all just becomes extremely predictable and stable.
Coming from fp background, I find Nix language very sensible. Especially for something like hermetic packaging.
The primitives for packaging in nix feel exactly like what they should be. When you look at a definition, the things that piece of code could do in principle (and things you could do with it as a consumer) tend to cleanly match it's semantic purpose and its responsibilities. So a lot of things are self-documenting.
Give it a go, I don't know anyone who has converted back (n=3). Agents/LLMs make things much easier these days.
If you have a single machine and only use stuff from the official nixpkgs, there are no more struggles than any other linux distro, this is a very happy path (imo).
Going outside of that you will, practically, need to convert to using flakes. The conversion is easy, but its another learning curve and there are conflicting docs. Agents make short work of this.
Packaging things yourself can get quite hairy. For simple projects in a single well supported language its easy and just a couple lines of code. For a rust+wasm+solidjs+vite+julia+more monorepo, it was a couple of weeks on a steep learning curve. Agents are pretty okay at packaging in general, I've been able to oneshot a number of difficult-for-me packaging problems, other times it can be an unmitigated mess.
For remote deploys, secrets management, and other devops-like tasks, things get harder, but most people don't need/want this and if you make it this far the remaining learning curve is totally worth it.
For a second I was worried that the actual code behind this was dead in the water ("3 months ago") but it's just one more click away:
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
The actual code repository: https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core
https://dawo.community/ is definitely the most 'Dutch Government'-looking Linux community website I've ever seen.
Workplace is such a confusing overloaded term.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...
[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra
[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
I hope someone is security scanning all those NixOS provider modules.
I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.
How is that better than the nixos provider? The trouble is the links to the source code right?
With the hypothetical providerless NixOS you'd get new config settings the moment the source code changes, without resorting to extraConfig escape hatches.
Over 400 comments and it’s all flamewars and almost zero discussion of NixOS.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
I am curious about your confidence for NFS for the nix store.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
You could use multiple shares and limit each configuration to the software required. In this case you would share common configs through modules on the build server. The build server would output updated configs to the proper share paths.
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
Nixpkgs should reduce package count. Waiting 2 days for unbound CVE patch merge is unbearable.
They could improve that speed if they had more hardware to do the needed rebuilds.
I hope you are paying them something.
You don't have to wait? You just have to compile matter yourself
Ask your favorite LLM to write an overlay for whichever package you need patches applied for before they hit Nixpkgs.
Use nixos-unstable-small branch or backport the change and build yourself.
There needs to be another repository with less stringent standards, nixpkgs should be for core libs and system applications
That’s where flakes come in.
Flakehub is one attempt at solving the discovery problem. For example: https://flakehub.com/flake/nix-community/disko?view=usage.
Man going from a Windows environment all the way to NixOS is quite the change isn't it? Probably good if NixOS can get more attention and easier to use. I see a lot of hype for it, and then people seem to give up as it can get pretty gnarly with some of the configuration. I'm a fan of something like Fedora Silverblue with the immutable OS setup.
> What DAWO stands for
> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.
But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for
"Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid", ie ~government digitally autonomous workplace.
See https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO
digitally autonomous workspace (for the) overheid
So, could this push more software to publish to the official Nixpkgs?
Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.
Do you have a link to this ‘Fearware’ channel? I’ve only heard of nonguix.
https://codeberg.org/pastor/fearware
Thanks for the rec. That repo is young, but the owner seems quite experienced.
I'll happily try it.
I see about a dozen of these stories every year. Often some German municipality or some other bureaucratic enclave. Slashdot, back in its heyday, was filled with these stories.
What I'd love to see is a 5 year follow up to one of these stories. What worked, what didn't, how many people are still using the linux OS, etc. Because I feel like windows is as entrenched as always in the government space, whereas in the corporate world most people I know have migrated to macs long ago.
Would be nice if they also push conversion of Nix to Rust, to finish what Lix [1] and Snix[2] started.
[1] https://lix.systems/
[2] https://snix.dev/
Yes, and they should also rewrite all available packages for Nix in Rust, along with the Linux kernel.
No, that's still not enough complexity! They need at least a thousand agents using trillions of tokens around the clock to get us the Nix and Rust slop we need.
please, no. We have enough Rust being shoved down our throats.
> Sextant: a graphical interface for NixOS management as an alternative to Intune, by Bram Buijs [1]
Now that's a fairly interesting project and a way to actually bring technology like NixOS to the administrators in the way they expect. From my experience (sample size one, yes) there are more systems administrators that use web interfaces for management than DevOps IaC folks. This would be a good bridging solution if it is a successful project.
[1] - https://members.dawo.community/en/blog/blog-1/dawo-nixos-wor...
Digital Sovereignty
YouTube: What's Left? with Jovan and Freddie - AI Apocalypse Isn't Happening. This is Worse — Cory Doctorow
https://youtu.be/IXd9HwIE5bo?t=3087&is=cOQ7nxzZovbypQIe
FINALLY. I have been seeing other projects based on eg Fedora and I just think: why. Declarative, open source, and reproducible is the future.
I didn't know you could assign '#' to an alias, so here we go:
What is it that they need/add above NixOS defaults?
They likely offer at least some of:
* typical deployments
* training/consulting
* compliance with Ditch regulations
* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs
The first, second and fourth items can be provided for NixOS.
As for the third item - that's not answering my question, it's a homunculus answer: What could the Netherlands have regulated that requires making changes to NixOS? Which NixOS maintainers themselves could not oblige?
The Dutch government provides baseline standards: https://www.bio-overheid.nl/bio2/bio-producten/baseline-info...
I'm sure NixOS can provide those, but rather than each department figure out how to do that, organisations try to centralize figuring this out: which packages and configuration satisfies the requirements.
One of the items discusses MFA. Organisations will want to standardise on exactly which MFA devices they provide and support.
As long as it has a built-in "VBScript like" lang, they'll be fine.
Are they going with Copilot for Dutchies or Kaaskoppen.NET?
… and every government department starts writing up a letter asking for an exemption.
Which is always granted.
Unless its mandatory, it's just theater.
Good move for me, breaking free from licensing and saying no to being tied to a single tech giant.
I always enjoy stories about governments adopting open source and moving away from US big tech.
It looks like they are using Claude to develop it, though..
> Things that cost somebody hours, written down so they cost the next person minutes. Each one is here because it actually happened, not because it might.
> Same commit, different answer, decided by the runner's store rather than by the code.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS/src/branch/main/d...
> 10 dead inputs were pruned (audit); these 15 are load-bearing and next up for the mirror pass.
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/commit/4db976f05c508...
The link doesn't work for me.
My opinion is that Microsoft’s software business practically goes to zero in an era when anybody can vibecode changes to open-source projects to fit their exact needs. All that will be left of MSFT is Azure.
My follow up opinion is that Satya agrees with me, and that is why he has so much anxiety around AI.
What took so long? Now start building a Arm computers native to Europe the Dutch have a long history in electronics ie.. Phillips which collapsed mainly from self inflicted wounds similar to some of the old-line American companies IBM, Xerox, Motorola, and Kodak...
M$ is like SAP. They think of all kind of moats to lock you in.
I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
Osquery https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/issues/92 via https://sextantfleet.org/ looks to be what they are using (run by main contributor)… all “policy” is via NixOS… how tenable that will be we will see, but the landing page is heavy on compliance with audits
FleetDM (https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet) is also mentioned.
It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?
I’m not talking about software install/updates, that is easy and straightforward on every major enterprise distro. I’m talking about Group Policy specifically, that is, the ability to enforce many settings across the whole OS/DE.
Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.
Nix does more than software install/updates. It also manages system wide config (e.g. files in /etc, systemd units, timers/cron jobs, firewall, etc.) or even user preferences with home-manager. You can also organize your config into modules to have e.g. a base for everyone + special settings for different BUs that need it. And it does all this declaratively with the ability to rollback to previous working config if needed since it can handle multiple versions of packages all being present until you choose to garbage collect old generations of the system config (which you can also set to automate, of course).
It's basically what people think they want from Docker but don't actually get from Docker.
The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.
You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.
Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.
You still need to have somebody half competent to ask the electric shaitan to the thing and validate the result and also demonstrate this ability during the hiring process. I'm not sure it's easier than actually finding a person who can do those two lines.
If you trust someone to manage IT policy in the first place I'd think they'd be smart enough to be able to learn the basics of Nix? Like 95%+ of it is just declaring obvious settings that are already in nixpkgs. In practice it's mostly an ini file, but with the power to do more if you need it.
Nix is declarative, the sum of work required to proliferate these updates is typing "git push" into your terminal.
That's before it is introduced into the government or a bank. Those environment tend to turn every trivial thing into a multi year project.
It takes three really nice and cleverly designed things that are all very easy to use separately. Then you put those things into the hands of smart, bored and slightly undercompensated people and divide those people into four separate departments so they don't ever talk with each other.
Then you introduce a fourth thing into the mix, let it ferment for a while and make sure some people dealing with the first three leave the building and are replaced with total imbeciles who have no idea what they are doing and also never say no to any silly idea of their boss.
Then you ask to change something. Anything really. And it for some magical reason unbeknown to anybody involved at this point takes a few years.
What does any of this have to do with NixOS and how does using a more difficult to manage OS like Windows make it easier?
Windows will not make it easier, but the institution choosing it, including all the people they hired on the market will have pre-existing and agreeing with each other beliefs of how much a shitshow this will be and will happily watch it happen paid by your taxeuros.
This is great, would love to understand why Nix over Lix or Guix.
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
What are the cool stuff that you gained with Nix?
1. You can run NixOS with Lix (I do)
2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs
Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards). That's it.
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
Thanks for your detailed reply, that was what i was after. I wasn't having a go at Nix or their decision, just wanted to understand the why in the choice. Your two responses have helped explained that.
I agree with Guix, the whole package really appeals to me. I found the same issues between Nix vs Guix, having to do a lot more fiddling to get to where i wanted to be.
Guess next time I will word my statements better :)
Site doesn't work for me.
www.dawo.community took too long to respond.
Are you in the US? Hehe
No, Sweden.
Your forgot to pay your local mafia to maintain the glass wires this week, so they sent a 12 year old with a grenade and scissors to throttle it to pre-2000 level
This is something on their side https://check-host.net/check-report/4d673fd6kfd9
as a nixos maintainer I can only say «well, it could've been so much worse»
Sorry, but this from the website is kind of hilarious:
"What DAWO stands for
DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals."
These are nice little initiatives that don’t seem to last anywhere I see them. But good luck to the Dutch, maybe they are different.
Proactively making a move before getting Microshafted is smart play.
> Not one single product, but separate building blocks that work together. Every part can be inspected and replaced.
I know it's been said before, but why tf does Claude insist on writing in Reverse Polish notation?
alternative TO Microsoft
With AI now, I am suprised we are not seeing many new os systems built. Have fable build a secure OS..... hm...
Thanks Trump, Europe was never this united before.
Not by your choosing, but still.
why not just use linux/?
NixOS is Linux.
I want to know the answer too. A battle tested OS for decades, with a thriving ecosystem and millions of users, what is NixOS bringing to the table?
I am in favor of more options, always
Declarative reproducible configuration is probably the main draw.
This thread seems hopelessly tone deaf to non-technical people's experience with something like NixOS. I can manage it just fine myself given my background, but I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS. I mean, good for them for trying, I just think HN is full of Nix purists who tend to gloss over all the warts that has kept this ecosystem from growing much over the last few decades.
Who is giving a standard office worker admin rights on their Windows machine in 2026?
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
First off - decoupling from Trump-USA is a must. Canadians noticed this; european countries are still slow. The Netherlands is faster; the biggest slow-ass behemoth is Germany - no clue why. Germany is a big reason why the EU fails, but also the expansionistic agenda and what not (why do only poor countries want to join the EU; UK left, Switzerland and Norway are not going to join, so there are indeed INTERNAL problems, but let's go back to the dependency on the USA).
So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING. For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.
In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus, Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ? It can't be simpler than that.)
Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden, Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad. Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany, so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the EU.
You can't even build your own website to go to discuss this.
Europeans are absolutely delusional, but I hope they're serious about dropping Microsoft this time. European governments have been pretending to do this for about 20 years at this point, though.
Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Maybe soon it will be called Microsoft/OpenAI, then OpenAI/Microsoft, then just OpenAI.
It's a bad sign that they chose NixOS instead of something boring like Debian, though (and it seems France, too.) Makes me suspect that this is being driven by a single strong personality who will eventually lose interest or even rugpull support, leaving the project in disarray and a poster child for criticizing doing anything but buying Microsoft as European flakiness. On the other hand, I'm happy that it will involve money being put into NixOS.
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https://meatproxy.me/
Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
The nix website doesn't have the sentence that Claude gave you above, but it does describe the declarative approach to package management that nix is known for. "Having a single config file" doesn't really even describe what makes nix unique. Perhaps you should have read the website instead of skimming and asking Claude.
You're making the same mistake again. I saw NixOS and I wanted to know what kind kernel it is running on first. Why? Because the post title is talking about a Windows alternative, not a package manager.
The website nixos.org talks immediately about package management, which does not help with answering if it is a viable Windows alternative. It is like saying Apt or RPM is an alternative to Windows.
Whereas you are coming to it knowing what NixOS is, so already have the context. Clearly whoever wrote NixOS.org was the same. A pretty site for people who already know what Nix is.... which is a very very common pattern for open source projects. A nice front page mantra for true believers, but useless for outsiders.
Claude actually explained it all to me but I forced it to summarise it down. That is enough for all the people on this thread, who don't know what NixOS is to see that they are pushing a Linux distro as an alternative to Windows.
That's the wrong domain...
So it is. Interesting pattern to state it is wrong, but not our the correct one. I'll join in
Nixos.org
NixOS is also unnecessarily complicated and it's easy for someone that doesn't want to read 1000 pages of documentation to brick your system.
Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.
For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.
The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.
When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.
Elk nadeel heb se voordeel.
Literally.
That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
I managed to brick my revisions/snapshots before
Sure you can make a bad one, but you can always switch to a different one.
I meant it as in: I bricked all previous snapshots while also having bricked the one I had selected, so I bricked my whole system.
So far I have broken every Linux distro I used except NixOS.
And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.
And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.
I would image in corporate / government deployment, declarative configuration is more efficient.
When you have that many users, you don't really configure individual system, you deploy up some per-configured module or setup.
Repeatable builds also make troubleshooting lots easier - and you can hand those task to front-tier helpdesk staffs.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)
Sounds like a good replacement
Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.
Arch is easier to start of with, NixOS is easier to maintain, especially at scale
Hopefully the config is a little more descriptive than their README.md
It looks like a lot of nothing. All the READMEs are empty. What is being contributed here?
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The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.
eIDAS is federated login between countries in EU. What is wrong with that?
It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)
I think we have pretty decent examples where browsers remove malicious root certificates if they have been so proven. Do you think the matters will be different if those belong to a country level root?
And I think we have pretty decent examples of all kinds of initiatives where governments (or corporations) promise not abuse something which clearly can be abused, and then proceed to do just that. In the age of "cheques and bank balances" and continuous degradation of parliamentarism and judicial systems in multiple developed countries, I don't have much hope for "if the abuse will happen, we will fix it afterwards" promises. Rather, I expect it to be immediately normalized and then made worse. Yesterday we (IT) were talking how government can abuse information requests. Today we have government just sifting through almost everything unencrypted in real-time with zero shame. Tomorrow we will lose E2EE in most big countries and no one would "fix that" or roll back (it's already slowly happening in UK for example).
As usual, it's federated*1 login*2 between countries*4*5 in EU*6*7*8
eidas is an EU thing and is like 15 years old, what is this even about
eIDAS 2.0 is 2 years old. An intentional dark pattern to confuse people.
Unlike your vague posting, which is meant to be illuminating. If you have a critique, please let us know what it is.
The existence of government all in itself is triggering, because other people can do things to you based on their flawed understanding. Also the government is sometimes the literal nazis
We're talking about a government of governments. Not entirely impossible to become "literal nazis" but somewhat difficult.
That's even scarier, right. Imagine you are scared of clowns and then somebody introduces you to a concept of a clown king that even clowns are scared of
I want to ask an honest question, why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner
Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?
We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...
The context here is removing reliance on US. EU countries are trying to decouple from US (or at least diversify if not possible to decouple) in various critical sectors where they have become dependent. Over reliance on US software is one of them. They are basically doing what China did many decades ago. Have home grown alternatives to US apps/services so as to not be in deep waters if US decides to sanction them. It is all about independence.
> why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
Apple is a US company first and foremost and US has become unreliable. It has nothing to do with simplicity or productivity if reliability is in question. What use is a Mac if it can be subject to US sanctions resulting in App Store being shutdown for you or your entire Country and apps/services stop working overnight?
Excellent point and I understand that, but then they should start working on building their own computers, and OS, and ecosystem, just like Huawei is doing for the past decade. It will take time, long years ahead but they should start now
I definitely like that future, but it should be built now
Agreed. I am all for every Country investing resources in semiconductors and building own computers/OS/ecosystem. More the merrier. I want to own my hardware. I want to repair my hardware. I don't want a future where I have to rent/subscribe everything from Big Tech.
Market inertia is the holdup.
And yet Apple is doing well in the far East Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. They are competitive in some of the toughest markets to sell electronic devices into.
Doing well in Australia and New Zealand too. Aside from Taco the only big headwind is memory.
You are missing the point I made. Point isn't whether Apple is doing well or not. It is about creating an alternative for a future when Apple won't exist in the Country because of US sanctions.
Here issue is not of whether Apple is reliable or not. Issue is unreliability of USA. If US Government decides Apple Store should be banned in Country X, Apple cannot do anything about it but abide by the decree.
Microsoft and Linux /do/ offer the same path to productivity. Buy 10-20 computers, zero config, native discovery services, download apps.
What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.
In my experience, the corporate world that uses mac has moved to Okta and other providers, not MS Active Directory. They may still use MS AD in some areas, but you can now federate to have that as an island - say you have some legacy accounting software that needs to run in AD environment.
IME, Okta is almost as popular as MS AD now, I think they have 30% market share compared to 40% for AD, with IBM and others taking up the rest.
My experience is that small companies in particular fields do/did use Macs. Staying on Mac is difficult though since any customer can expect you to do what they do or support what they do if they are Windows oriented and will only start with a conversation about compatibility if they haven't chosen the most popular choice.
The way enterprise software is licensed, and how those licenses are perpetuated means that, in the absence of a national security imperative, 99% of customers just go along to get along.
Other people already answered the non US reason. However I fell for this. I got myself an expensive iPad because I assumed it's actually like all the apple users are saying.
However, a lot of apps are unstable. Support is horrible to non existent for some. No refunds even when the app doesn't work at all directly after install. Most professional apps have a buy price AND a subscription price at this point. Most actually working apps are not apple exclusive these days.
It's definitely not as green over there as some apple people make it out to be.
I hear you, I am not an Apple pundit, just a developer always looking for the path to optimization and thought Apple was it, it is not, and to be honest they don't make it easy either. I've been in the waiting list to become an Apple developer for a month now and the road has been tortuous as a Venezuelan developer. But if Huawei offered a simpler path to developing on their ecosystem I'd give it a try in an instant. I am loyal to no one except to those who make my life easier
What tablet is better in the world today software and hardware wise?
I really don't need a tablet at all when all the software I have on my Linux laptop is arguebly not worse and definitely more stable. That's the moral I have taken.
I still like my iPad. The pen is amazing, and the sound is so good I use it as TV without extra speakers in my caravan. but I usually don't recommend it to anyone. Especially no one that has any form of fixed budget.
I would probably just get a cheap old one if I had known that I won't use most music/3d software on it anyway. I wouldn't have spent so much extra for the big hard drive, etc.
I'm going to guess because they are expensive. Do Apple to on-site support like Dell, HP, et cetera?
You mean paying twice to five times the price for something that is not configurable and on which you can run only a small subset of software, all very expensive?
2x-5x the price is not a like-for-like comparison then. TCO is lower for Macs in the enterprise over the lifespan of the device.
https://www.jamf.com/blog/debate-over-ibm-confirms-that-macs...
Cost