thepuppet33r

Everyone complains about one little update breaking your PC, or random things not working, but my Windows 11 laptop for work has been a nightmare, too.

I'm always terrified to let them install the latest version update as it has done everything from break all my taskbar shortcuts to make my computer blue screen on boot.

My fingerprint reader didn't work on it until I manually installed the fingerprint driver.

My friend had Outlook start deleting all of his emails on loading Outlook after a minor update for reasons that even the helpdesk couldn't parse.

I understand that Linux is rougher around the edges in some ways, but I think we are just all used to the friction Windows has (like that bizarre right-click menu behind a button on the right-click menu thing).

I've spent time on a Mac, too, and while it has way less "huh, that just doesn't work today, okay" moments, it's not perfect either. No OS is.

My hope is not that everyone in the world will switch to Linux. I don't think "the year of Linux" will ever happen. But I wish we didn't only have two poles of articles when it comes to people coming to Linux: The "I switched to Linux and it was so easy and I'm never going back and Window sux" or the "I switched to Linux and it killed my dog and ate all my food and I had to quit my job just to play Stardew Valley on it."

It's an OS. No OS is perfect. Linux is more customizable but more breakable. MacOS is less customizable, but more stable. Windows is an ad-laden AI hellscape that still works better with most software because most software is written for it.

This sort of thing has existed for a while, but it's not picked up in the mainstream for two main reasons (at least based on my anecdotal evidence).

1. The friction between a zipped file and an unzipped file isn't enough to make the majority of users take the time to build out an automation. This is especially true now that in Windows you can open a zip file by double-clicking it, peruse the files, and open them from within the zip into your temp storage. 2. It's a little bit of a security risk. Downloaders are (generally) less vulnerable to side channel attacks, but the unzip software people usually use (7-zip, Window's native utilize, WinRAR) are slightly more vulnerable. This risk goes up with any automation software as a) you aren't auditing what you're actually unzipping, and b) the automation can be compromised.

But if you want to try this out, just search for "auto unzip" software and you'll find plenty of tools. You could also set up a cronjob on your Linux machine to run every so often and just scan a folder for zip files and unzip them automatically, with the option to trigger via alias'd command.

I would pay for this. 100%.

Wasn't that an edge case, though? Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? And it was discovered and quickly corrected, unlike what would happen on something owned by a massive FAANG-style corp.

I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally administrated, store of knowledge.

I wouldn't base critical decisions off of Wikipedia alone, but it sure helps me understand things in general.

The font is hard to read. From a usability and accessibility standpoint, I'd recommend changing it.

This is amazing. Much prefer this to helping train autonomous vehicles.

We're using GoFundMe as a bandaid for healthcare, to the degree that the CEO went to beg Congress to pass more government assistance in COVID-laden 2021.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/538399-gof...

Fair point.

How much money does it take to manage and develop a web browser? Was it necessary for them to create a whole new way to deliver ads to support it? I feel like a lot of these tech nonprofits like Mozilla and Wikipedia are constantly begging for money despite their overall costs not needing to be that high, but they have this idea that have to continually develop new features and grow rather than just continue to deliver the same stable product.

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now.

It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback.

Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDrive. There are other screenshare programs that do the same thing.

The whole incentive for using it (according to the video) is to "avoid another all hands meeting." And AI is involved somehow?

I find it so fascinating how companies seem to be aware that the way many big companies work (usually in office, in meetings, sometimes on video calls) is flawed, but rather than revisit the model, we just try to map the existing structure onto new expensive shiny tools.

The only benefit I see to having someone send me a video of them reading their presentation or narrating their screen share is that I can watch it on 2x speed asynchronously. At that point, why not just send me a set of bullet points and the presentation or screenshots?

I look at these products and I get the same feeling I do when I watch a road worker paint a tiny bike lane on an existing 4 lane megaroad with no barrier. You're not fixing the problem - you're just causing new ones. The whole system has to shift somehow.

It's odd that they include the phrase "a board game invented in prison" in every photo caption. Is this an AI caption thing that repeats the same descriptor each time?

> Dana Lopez sands a wooden token for poleana, a board game invented in prison, in his workshop in Mexico State, Mexico, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Ginnette Riquelme)

> Jonathan Rulleri, the founder of Poleanas Canada Frogs, holds up a poleana board, a game he invented in prison, to be raffled off before the start of a tournament in Mexico City, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024.

> A player moves his piece in poleana, a board game invented in prison, during a tournament in Mexico City, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2024

> Dana Lopez, right, paints a board for poleana, a board game invented in prison, while her son Kevin plays in their workshop in the State of Mexico, Mexico, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024

> Residents play poleana, a board game invented in prison, in Mexico City, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024

Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.

I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by then and render my investments worthless.

A long time ago, I decided a day was successful if I helped someone, learned something new, or made something.

It's a low bar to clear, so it isn't intimidating, but it drives me to make intentional connections, be curious, and contribute stuff to my household and the world.

Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

Not if I burn them! Then they contribute to the air quality issue! Time to go cry in the corner!

I'm still not sure how they plan to enforce this. Even now, I see an age verification popup on both illicit sites and even sites I feel are innocuous. But I can just click that I'm old enough to move on.

If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They're not liable if the customer lies.

But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global identity system that is somehow inextricably linked to your real-life persona. Everything you do online is linked to who you are. And that's VERY dystopian and doesn't (yet) exist to my knowledge.

God, this thread is bleak. Not undeservedly, but...woof.

Nobody's mentioned antibiotic resistant bacteria much that I saw, so that'll probably keep being more and more of an issue.

Everyone predicted a second Great Depression during Covid that lined up with 1929... Well, Trump and his friends might drive us toward that in 2029, or earlier.

AI peaks and we can't eke out much more real benefit from it, but there's too much investment in it for businesses to admit it, so the grifters spin into high gear.

Elon Musk and the other billionaires continues to get richer.

The poor continue to get poorer.

Trump pulls the US out of every socially-good but vaguely anti-business agreement.

Russia finally pulls out of Ukraine but keeps the bits it "liberated".

China declares itself to be the biggest and most stable global superpower as America and Russia have spun off the deep end.

I have to replace my bike tires.

This was fun! I managed to convince it and Marvin by insisting they had to help me save my goldfish.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it actually accomplishes much.

I do some purple team work for my company occasionally, and if I scanned a network and got back a bunch of delayed traffic and an active host at every IP, I wouldn't think that I had 255 hosts to check, I'd think the scan failed. I'd tweak the parameters and try again. Unless you're setting your actual servers to respond differently, it wouldn't take much trial and error to filter out the noise. And once it's out that this tool exists, and the parameters are hard set by default (3 ARP calls to non-existent IPs), it'll just be another saved scan setting I can flip to if I get all the noise back.

You might be able to make this harder in the short term by varying the parameters (e.g., 2 ARP scans, only return a host for every third empty address, etc.), but then your solution is not as effective as it takes me less time to check each host for life.

Also, do your fake hosts respond to Telnet on their fake ports? Do they respond to ping? Do they show up on DNS lookups? If you're not altering the traffic at some deeper level or employing something like a custom honeypot that dynamically reacts, these fake hosts are just going to be another static artifact to filter out in the long run. The more straightforward you make the response to a scan, the easier it'll be to dismiss it as noise rather than something to investigate further.

I'm such a baby programmer that Advent of Code is still challenging for me, so it's fascinating to see people taking it and exploring all these new languages and platforms. I found (and subsequently lost) someone who had started creating little 8-bit style visualizations from the data outputs.

I do feel like programmers are a bit of a masochistic lot when it comes to AoC, though.

> The logical way to output the solution for the AoC problem is to create sprites for every digit, upload them to video memory, and arrange the sprites on screen. I'm not going to do that and instead I will use Display Mode 2...

"This body is built on the ruins of all the people I have ever been." - The Simplest Words by The Narcissist Cookbook.

Grownups aren't just big kids, but we're standing on the rubble of who we were back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8

So, I had a emoji in my original post that indicates a joke around the trademark comment, and I didn't realize HN automatically strips those out.

I appreciate the clarification in this and the comments below, but yeah, it was meant to be tongue in cheek.

> I think the OP would disagree or simply say those who want to be on the web can do it, It's relatively easy, your ambitions can be simple and that simplicity is more authentic than just sharing links from your profile on a Social Network.

I think this may be the pivotal point here: Social media drove everyone online, even without those interests and that sense of authenticity. I kept getting hung up on the idea that those people who are there only because of the simplicity and ease of use would never pivot to the effort of making their own websites. But I see your point now.

It'll be interesting to see how the new wave of social media (Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky) fares over the next few years.

> Sheesh. I can only imagine what is your interest in personal expression--seems diabolical.

Think about the older people or not tech-heavy people in your life and try to imagine them building their own website from scratch or using a hosting platform, marketing it on various socials, doing what you're recommending. It's not impossible, but people go with the lowest friction option.

I personally go through times where I try to be active online, engage with people, and share my life experiences and knowledge, both on my website and on my few social accounts. I do this largely to build my personal "brand" so that when I move jobs, I can point to my website and all that it aggregates as a supplement to my resume.

However, I usually hit a point where I realize that most anonymous online communication ends up facilitating name calling and other negative behaviors, and I get tired of people accusing me and others of things, and then I drop off the Internet for a while.

I don't know what I stated about how the non-techy people in my life think ("share now" being easier than posting a link on HN) is diabolical.

Your recommendation of using social media as just a boost/plug for your website is great if the person has the wherewithal and interest to create a site in the first place. That's not how the non-techy and older people in my life think, and not how they ever will think without some substantial incentive and training.

I did a lot of sleep hacking in college, trying to sleep as little as possible so that I could spend time with friends, play video games, and (ostensibly) study.

Now that I'm working a job where I do overnight deployments, often work 12-14 hours days, and have a couple of kids who don't sleep well, I hate my past self for not sleeping while he could. You never know when circumstances will drive you into unplanned sleep deprivation. Doing it to yourself for low-to-mid-level time gains isn't worth it imo.

Hacker News (as much as I would like for it to be) is not and likely will never be the mainstream.

Even posting a link has friction, compared to the "share now" or retweet options.

I love the format and Hacker News in general, but you're kidding yourself if you think most people will pivot from X to HN and that it is a viable alternative for them.

The biggest problem with people making their own websites is: 1) It's more effort and time than most people are willing to deal with, when instead they can create an account on Bluesky in seconds, and immediately begin sharing their opinions. This means that the slant of opinions from people who make their own websites will inevitably skew more techy. 2) Most people don't view the content they are producing to need a website. It's great if you're writing short or long-form content or obsessed with a particular thing (like the three website examples listed in the article). But for the average Joe, a website feels unnecessary.

I feel like what's missing in this discussion is that as much as I hate Facebook and Twitter (X), they enabled people who otherwise would never have been able to participate in the global discussion to have immediate access to do so. There isn't a good way to parlay that ease of use and immediate connection into individual websites. If all of my friends made their own websites tomorrow, I wouldn't visit them all daily like I read their posts on Mastodon.

Maybe the solution is to accept that most people don't need to be posting their opinions out in the ether? Other than here, I rarely post online.

It's a clever concept, but I'm leery of having someone send a letter on my behalf to someone.

You all haven't trademarked the idea, have you? I think I'll just write a few of these up myself and send them out.