I've been using lazygit [https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit] which is a friendly TUI that makes selecting which lines to commit relatively painless. As a heavy user of hunk-by-hunk or line-by-line commits, I used to use tortoisehg, but on my current distro its showing some bitrot, so I decided to try something else.
I'm in a daylit room on a laptop screen in dark mode. Some of the text was literally invisible. If the site's owner is reading this, you should fix that.
If it had Ethernet ports I'd be tempted to just use my own wifi router and put the ISP's Trojan horse in a Faraday cage. All ISP-controlled hardware should be treated as just another untrusted WAN hop.
When I signed up with them, they were actually trying to withold access to the config web UI from customers and then charge extra just to enable Wifi. My response was exactly that - "fuck that" and put my own router in front of theirs.
(That was years before the other incident - since then they had dropped that idea and "generously" given customers access to the config UI)
Or you could patch the executable on disk or in memory, or probably some other hacks I'm not thinking of. I think he means that there's no Windows API or "proper" way to do it, not that it's literally impossible (it's running on a general-purpose computer, after all).
And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".
The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.
This is the flip side of the "self-made man" narrative.
It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.
I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D
(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)
If someone becomes successful, it's common to pay it back by helping out the steps that might have led to that success.
Brin didn't go to every high school: he went to the one he did.
And maybe he had a terrible experience and thought it contributed nothing to his success... but that's kind of a dick perspective at a certain level of wealth, especially if a school has needs (and they always do).
You're describing what a well designed tax system should be doing. Philanthropy is just the rich convincing us that things are fine, and we shouldn't worry that billionaires exist.
I guess the Nordic societies have to really equal then, because I can't remember ever even hearing of anyone donating anything to a single school. Like.. there's nothing in the system for a school to even be prepared to even own a donation. A school over there doesn't manage a financial fund, it runs on an annual municipal budget. It's all tax money.
The parent commenter put it well, philanthropy is just the rich convincing [America] that things are fine.
"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
These people have all set up financial constructions that will see them and their children safely into old age with the very best of medical care, pocket money to the tune of being able to just buy off the whole evening of their favourite fancy restaurant for the night for just the two of you on a whim, and owning one or two private fucking islands in perpetuity, whatever happens to their megacorps.
They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.
What they don't have is financial constructions that would leave them in nominal control when they go down that path. And they absolutely do want to stay in control, or else they would have sold a long time ago.
Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.
> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
Parts of Usenet actually mandated real names. The idea was to make discussions more civilised. It didn't. And on top of that people were now subject to stalking and doxxing. I remember a poster who had a link to a defamation site in his signature. The site was targeted at another frequent poster in that newsgroup, detailing his address and his alleged intellectual failings.
America had all the access to free information and voted in an authoritarian anyway so what’s it matter ?
I don’t care anymore about this emotive argument that you’re putting forward. The government knows everything about you because you pay for internet. Maybe you pretend to yourself you’re someone anonymous because you use a VPN but if they want to know who you are, they know.
At least maybe this ban will stop some of the idiocy bleeding into the next generation.
America has been subject to a thirty-year propaganda war by foreign actors.
Information in America is free as in speech, not free as in beer: money talks louder than truth. That has let billionaires unravel the stabilizing features adopted after the Great Depression that kept capitalism limping along for an extra century.
They can set whatever price they want. Most customers have no choice but to pay; there is no competitor with anything approaching full compatibility or a similar feature set.
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.
Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products"
There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.
I mean, they kind of are? Obviously they can't set it to a million dollars a month, but where's the ceiling? Five hundred? A thousand? Who knows? And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
They keep getting away with it, and nobody has any idea when the buck will finally stop.
Yes, that's how markets work. It seems like Microsoft understands it well or we'd be seeing mass exodus from Office products. No price increases for three years doesn't seem too bad, IMO.
> And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
Maybe. While we're at it, I'll also add a hypothetical: what if it encrypted all my files and made me pay a ransom?
On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.
Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad?
Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):
Microsoft 365 Family:
$130/year
6 people, 1TB storage per person
Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps
Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)
Let's try to buy this from someone else:
Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.
Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.
Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year
pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.
All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
Interesting, Google’s price comparison made it look like free tiers didn’t get that.
I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.
I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.
Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.
Wow that was a great read, thank you. It's funny that it is already starting to break due to all of the links and ad tracking, which is another kind of rot.
Use Linux/KDE. None of the gains from the switch to SSDs have been lost. Everything is instant even on an n100. You only need something more powerful for compilation, gaming, or heavy multimedia (like the 200 Mbps 4k60 video my camera produces, which isn't accelerated by most processors because it's using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling).
Xfce or LXQt are also great alternatives, blazing fast even on 15 year-old hardware. Old hardware can be slow for basic web browsing and multimedia (e.g. watching videos with modern codecs) but other low-level uses are absolutely fine.
> "I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio"
Was it this one? Casey Muratori ranting about Visual Studio Debugger slowness, and he shows a video of Visual Studio opening and debugging faster on a single core Pentium 4 from 20 years earlier - https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=2160
Or this one? Roger Clark developing Notepad in C++ on Windows 2000 and commenting how fast Visual Studio opens: https://youtu.be/Z2b-a4r7hro?t=491
Yeah, that's the one! And hmm, it's interesting that there's more than one video out there going "look how fast old computers were from a user standpoint". They've really been boiling the frog when it comes to terrible UX over the past 20 years.
Given the refinements to the hardware, the modern scale of manufacturing and accessible market, and the sheer amount of engineering manpower a tech company can bring to bear nowadays, you'd think standards would have risen into the stratosphere, but instead the tech consumer is cowed into accepting slow, buggy, abusive, invasive trash.
These days to get a snappy experience, one has to aggressively block everything and only selectively unblock the bare minimum, so that one doesn't get tons of bloat thrown in the direction of one's browser. Oh and forget about running JavaScript, because it _will_ be abused by websites. And then sites have the audacity to claim one is a bot.
Many websites are so shitty, they don't even manage to display static text, without one downloading tons of their JS BS.
I can't recall desktop application times, but I remember using the web in the 00s. Websites took a noticeable blip to load. Pictures took seconds to minutes to load, top to bottom, on my connection. Runescape took an hour to update on dial up.
I do remember applications like Microsoft word's UI constantly freezing though.
You can view shorts on desktop. In a browser on desktop, when you see one on your subscriptions tab (or the front page if you still use that), you can right-click and open in new tab. You can replace "shorts/" with "watch?v=" in the URL and load the same video in the regular UI. You don't have to scroll down.
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