I fully agree, seems Linux is heading directly towards being a Windows Clone. So far all the windows crap can be easily avoided, but once these things are forced on me, it is bye bye Linux.
Already I use BSD on an older laptop probably 40% of the time. Linux on my main system is there due to a hardware device issue BSD still have a minor problem with it. But for me right now, Linux seems to be heading in a wrong direction.
KeepassXC implements passkeys in a respectful way. I don't see how this is "Windows crap". If they want to force attestation on passkey implementations, whether or not Linux supports it will not matter.
The part that matters is if people adopt the bait. If the bait doesn't get chomped on, the hook is ineffective. Actively encouraging passkey adoption is telling people to eat the bait.
Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie.
Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply.
Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.
It gives upper management a dashboard into what's going on that they can see and manage. They get to watch more lines go up, which to them is well worth the added costs.
That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole.
Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is.
But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better,
I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it.
Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will really change.
I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.
If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
> But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.
It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period.
Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however. Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is the most mind numbing activity a person can do.
I agree with this. At a higher level of abstraction, you’re still doing the fundamental problem solving. Low-level machine language or high-level Java, C++ or even Python, the fundamental algorithm design is still entirely done by the programmer. LLMs aren’t being used to just write the code unless the user is directing how each line or at least each function is being written, often times you can just describe the problem and it solves it most of the way if not entirely. Only for really long and complex tasks do the better models really require hand-holding and they are improving on that end rapidly.
That’s not a higher level of abstraction, it’s having someone do the work for you while doing less and less of the thinking as well. Someone might resist that urge and consistently guide the model closely but that’s probably not what the collective range of SWEs who use these models are doing and rapidly the ease of using these models and our natural reluctance to take on mental stress is likely to make sure that eventually everyone lets LLMs do most or all of the thinking for them. If things really go in that direction and spread, I foresee a collective dumbing down of the general population.
You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.
The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence
France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.
The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).
Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.
"The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell."
Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
Came to say the same, I meet him once in his shop, what a great person he was. His wife also has a great amount of bicycle knowledge from what I heard.
That is a shame, I figured Harris would be the last small shop left.
Unfortunately, I have seen a few family owned shops taken over by a "large" company, namely Trek. Others have just closed. I only know of one or 2 family owned shop left these days.
Not that it was already out that with past breaches. One example was the Experian breach, anyone who applied for a loan was already out there. Never mind all the other too many to count breaches that have occurred. Just now with DOGE we have 1 stop shopping.
Now that the US Gov. got to join that club we know there will be no consequences. Until execs from companies like Experian and now the US Gov. faces real Jail time, this will happen over and over.
I have not heard of a large breach from a Company for a while, are these so common that news orgs. no longer bother to report them ?
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