pmontra

If one thinks that "Security work is not productive."

By the way, I think that even without safety concerns seat belts are productive because they anchor the driver more firmly, so we can brake harder and turn faster (a lot of roundabouts here) and get to our destination in a shorter time. Of course this is against general road safety.

Yes, they are. The first generations of HP ZBooks had both the ThinkPad stick and the touchpad, so they had two rows of buttons, one below the space bar to be used with the stick and one below the touchpad to be used with the touchpad. ThinkPads usually have both the stick and the touchpad but only the buttons for the stick.

I planned to install Debian in 2009 and in 2014 but the installer was too hard to use, the desktop in 2009 was ugly (maybe in 2014 too), I could not get a running system that I could use to work. Fast forward to Debian 10, same laptop from 2014, and I got a desktop identical to Ubuntu GNOME.

The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.

The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.

By this line of thought building nice and usable UIs is not productive too, because users can learn cli tools (they did, DOS) and it costs less to develop them. And all the work in TLS/HTTPS has been wasted because HTTP is enough. And ssh vs telnet.

It becomes productive only once your business stops for days because somebody brought it to a halt by breaking into the servers and deleting them.

Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.

I confirm that it redirects to YouTube. Some weird A/B testing or per region content selection?

I totally agree: having several different input devices is the best scenario.

Personally I would not use the touchscreen very often, but I would use it sometimes to press buttons and maybe even to scroll. Maybe the resize handle in the bottom right corner of the text area I am writing now is a large enough target for a finger. On a laptop: raise a finger, drag and go back to the keys? Probably. With a desktop computer with a keyboard far away from the screen? Well, the mouse is also far away from the hands so who knows.

I never have a real use case for a mouse but sometimes I follow a link from HN to a game in which a mouse would be better than a touchpad: move move move click click move click is great with a mouse and terrible with touchpad of all kinds. My mouse is in a drawer somewhere.

I am a fan of touchpads with physical buttons. I think that only HP is selling them anymore, on very few ZBook models (maybe a 16 Fury?) and Lenovo still has them in laptops with their stick in the middle of the keyboard. However the Lenovo buttons are at the top of the touchpad, where the thumb rests if the index finger operates the stick. The thumb rests below the touchpad when operating the touchpad.

Thinkpad fans will tell me that those buttons are close to the space bar, were thumbs rest all the time and they are right. Their little stick is very conveniently placed but I never manager to operate it as efficiently as a touchpad, which required zero training. My old ZBook has both the stick and the touchpad and two rows of 3 buttons, and I've never learned to move the pointer with the stick, both Windows and Linux.

Oh the horror. However Thunderbird 115 was from 2023 (or 2024?) I am on version 159 now and I am still using the old UI. Either the new one is opt in or I opted out of it and forgot about the issue.

If the author of the post is reading this, what is the setup for the work on nouveau? I expect it to cause a number of issues with the display driver so it could be hard running the AI agent on the same computer. Hence my curiosity.

I can't answer for another person but 30 to 25 years ago it was kind of Google vs Microsoft. The Don't be evil times.

I've been using Thunderbird since I don't even remember when and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface, unless when they broke manually sorting folders and fixed it years later. It's got the UI that a mail client has to have. GMail does have a bad UI. Sometimes I don't understand where a message ends and where a message starts. Luckily I don't have to use it.

I am not familiar with Macs so I might have been wrong from the very start, but if the owner put the key in the secure enclave then the same user should have no problem at putting the same key in the secure enclave of another Mac. If the user can't write into the secure enclave, then the Mac is protecting the data against the very same user that is supposed to own those data. It is protecting against wrench attacks too but what's the most frequent scenario?

I give you an example on this page of comments, so you can check if my informal results apply to you too.

I am moving my finger on my touchpad to move the pointer to more or less match what I am reading. I am always close to a Reply button or a vote one. There is no point reaching for the screen with my hand and touching those links. Furthermore they are way too small to be pressed with a finger. They are probably too small for a pointer too, but that's another issue.

Hoever, when I open an empty tab, type new in the URL bar and FF completes it to the URL of this site, and I press return, I usually end up with a Login link in the top right. If I reload the page (ctrl-r) I am logged in. For some reason either FF is not sending the session cookie or HN is not doing what it should on a cold session. This is also another issue (sorry) but let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it? My laptop does not have a touchscreen but when I used a tablet with a mouse and a keyboard I reached for the screen many times. Of course a mouse is less efficient than a touchpad, except for games, but I also miss the touchscreen sometimes.

And I would use if to press the reply button below this line I am typing. Let's see where the pointer ended up while I was typing... At the top right corner. Moving it to Reply and clicking is slower than touching the screen.

Some person, yes. The owner, no.

Why? My SO has a Windows laptop with touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard and mouse. She uses the mouse but sometimes pushing a button by touching the screen saves time. If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster. She is missing that on her work laptop.

I had virtual desktops on UNIXes with X11 well before Linus started working on Linux. They came for free to Linux because they were implemented by many window managers.

And the owners of the computer can't get the key in the secure enclave? Are they part of the threat model?

I don't know anything about Israel politics and who pollsters are affiliated to, but either that Fiber pollster is a genius or it picked a very biased sample.

It depends on the definition of superhuman. For example my car is superhuman as it allows me to get in one hour to a place where it would take me ten hours to go by walking, and can I walk ten hours non stop? However it is not superhuman enough to carry me where I could not walk too. And there are places where I can walk to but I cannot reach by car. Maybe that applies to AIs as well. A plane is in the same category of superhumanity of cars, with more speed. But I could still get to Australia by walking and rowing with my hands on a log (and probably die, I know.)

However there are truly superhuman vehicles, spaceships and submarines, that can carry humans where no human could go alive.

I don't know if these AIs are superhuman in the way of planes or in the way of spaceships. I also don't know if they can do everything we can do by talking or if they have some limits.

I mean, a plane can fly but not reach a branch and stay still on it. A small drone, almost. My coding agents sometimes can't do the obvious but is it because of some intrinsic limitation or because my instructions are bad? So far my experience is that they are superhuman like cars or trains, not yet as planes.

Sand too, even when dry. But OK, metaphors have limits.

I suscribe to Le Scienze, which was founded in 1968 as the Italian translation of Scientific American. You might find that weird but knowledge of English was not common back then. Furthermore it contains local articles and other local content. However it's still mostly a translation of most of the articles of SciAm, from one or two months before. Sometimes I read them in advance in English from the links here on HN. It's run by an Italian editor, they've got a contract with SciAm but they are not part of the same business group.

It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.

However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.

Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.

Or activate reader mode. All the text is in the page. Using an extension to disable first party Javascript for that site will work too.

Probably Dessa started those demo conversations with some context, so maybe it could receive documents and speak about them. If those were random conversations started with no context, the people at Block probably recorded a lot of uninteresting chat and cherry picked the few good ones.

What prevents them from adding tool integration?

Android Firefox had that swipe gesture for a long time. You tap the tabs count to show all tabs. You can close any of them from there. A long tap opens a menu. New tab, new private tab, close tab.

Somebody downvoted you but I agree: I must use a banking app to either enter a code or use my fingerprint to authorize operations, login included. No bank is using SMSes anymore here (Italy.)

SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.

I probably never opened one of my banking apps away from home. My main use for them is to authorize the operations I'm doing from my computer. I think that I could keep an Android phone in a drawer and use it as a costly and inconvenient hardware token. By the way, for some reasons credit card companies are doing 2FA by SMS which is both stupid (security wise) and convenient (to break out from Android or iOS.)

I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.

Yes, mostly HN but conversations here dry up in a matter of hours and are usually way more civilized than even conversations with friends.

This is what worked for me, started maybe a dozen years ago and completed not long past the time of covid.

First you have to realize that it's bad for your health. If you don't, give up at this point.

Then stop posting. Only send direct messages to friends if it's a social media that allows that. It helps using a social media app that can only send and receive messages. In my case WhatsApp and Telegram. A little bit of Messenger. At this point you realized that you're still alive and you still have all of your friends that you care about and viceversa.

Then stop reading. Only send and receive direct messages. Maybe respond to birthday messages the day after your birthday, eg on your Facebook timeline (if it's still called in that way.) If you want news about the world, check a couple of news sites or google for the news you want to know about.

At this point you only chat with friends that you reciprocally care about, in DM chats or groups. You can uninstall the apps you don't use to message.

You will still receive SM content that they share with you. Open them, maybe in the browser. Most of them open even if you are not logged in.

When you are with your friends you will notice that they spend time doomscrolling. Don't say anything, let them keep doing it. Eventually they might realize it's bad for them too or they won't.

Or your company buys phones for its employees and allows only those work phones on its networks. I understand that this is an extra cost and phones are maybe more expensive than some laptops good enough for working with Office.