Gaming on Linux has never been easier and Windows is tiring (OneDrive push, Recall, Cortana and AI, Office 365 subscriptions)

« Si vous n’avez rien à cacher, vous n’avez rien à craindre »

La question est celle de la légitimité d’un pouvoir – étatique ou privé – à s’immiscer dans nos vies sans justification, sans limite et sans contrôle.

Le juriste Daniel Solove a démontré que l’argument « rien à cacher » n’a recours qu’à un seul type de préjudice : la découverte d’une activité illégale. Mais la réalité est infiniment plus complexe. L’agrégation de données « innocentes » – vos achats, vos trajets, vos recherches internet – peut servir à vous discriminer pour une assurance, vous refuser un emploi, vous placer sur une liste de surveillance. Vous n’aviez rien à cacher. Le système a créé quelque chose à vous reprocher.

La reconnaissance faciale provoque des faux-positifs: l’innocent devient soudainement coupable par décret algorithmique. Ces algorithmes sont biaisés, par exemple pour identifier le genre des femmes à peau foncée qui a 43 fois plus d'erreurs.

"rien à cacher" est donc un argument de privilégié. [...]

In the title: emojis, unicode formatting, How to boring stuff that is already known elsewhere, clickbait-y titles.

In the preview: an AI-generated header image.

The article is oddly specific but unspecific:

• there is no personal tone.
• ASCII Art diagrams when excalidraw can do the job
• Deep-dive content that’s only a few paragraphs long 🔗
• We rewrote in X lines
• bullet point paragraphs, em-dashes, emojis, short section headings

The author profile with too much publications (in one week). Does their articles are jusitfied with their position on LinkedIn, is it private on the contrary?

At least there was a cost to writing poor quality content before. Even the laziest plagiariser had to manually find the content to nick and copy-paste it into their own blog that they’d taken the time to set up. Now, all it needs is a muppet with a Medium account and an LLM. God forbid they hook it up to an agent and automate the process. Except, they probably do, given the scale of the shit that’s being pumped out.

« Le design, c'est faire des produits utilisables, limiter frictions, risques et déceptions »

« Idées reçues : pas la peine de demander aux utilisateurs, les designeurs ne savent faire que du cliquodrome, pas besoin d'UX pour le backoffice »

Intéressant, les orateurs disent bien qu'ils ne travaillent qu'avec des gens convaincus des beautés du libre. Sinon, la migration ne se passera pas bien. Il y a assez de travail avec les gens qui sont volontaires, il ne faut pas perdre de temps avec les autres. (C'était dit moins brutalement.)

The small libraries will disappear. The one function util libraries can be generated by AI.

The open source model is kind of broken because og 6 points detailed in the post. The author retails then the example of Quiet UI by Cory Laviska

The guy launched Showelace, Web Awesome and Quiet UI.

A reaction about the CEO of Vercel taking a selfie with the minister of Israel

L'IA a des résultats relatifs ou décevant et elle fait disparaître la solitude, pourtant nécessaire au développement intellectuel.

A critic against Microsoft. The Outages become frequent.

Your deployment strategy

What you need:
• A single server
• Postgres
• Maybe Redis for caching
• That's it

The costs of the cloud are big and this author relates how the HackerNews community got confrontational with him.

He switched to Hetzner, because their costs are low:
80 cores @ 3 Ghz, 128 GB of RAM and 2TB of data for 170€ a month.

In comparison, AWS costs between 2 500$ to 3 500$.

The point here is that there’s value in managing your own servers VS just accepting the cloud as a given truth.

and people trying to convince you that "the cloud" is the solution never tried alternatives.

How did we get there?

The majority of devs are clueless or have forgotten. AWS started to give credits specifically for startups only. The entry is cheap, but the costs become expensive as they grow. They are locked-in so they will struggle to migrate to another architecture.

The cloud is only an option between others. "Most businesses are and will always be small, by a simple rule of power law."

Here’s a reference point: my current two-server setup serves millions of requests a day for millions of monthly visitors.

Managing your own server is fine because there has never been a better time to get good at servers. AI are very knowledgeable on Linux.

Ne soyons pas fâchés avec l’IA : c’est un outil, et c’est l’usage que nous en faisons qui détermine sa pertinence. De mon côté, je ne me sens pas menacée par ces outils.

Ce qui m’inquiète davantage, c’est l’idée que leur existence puisse laisser croire que l’on peut, à terme, se passer de l’expertise — comme si l’outil suffisait à remplacer la pensée, la méthode et l’intention du designer.

Le souci, c’est que quand la création devient trop accessible et que le content management4 se réduit à la simple production de visuels ou de posts, on perd de vue l’essentiel. Un contenu n’a de valeur que s’il sert un objectif — informer, convaincre, orienter, faire agir. Le rôle du design n’est pas de générer des images, mais de provoquer un effet mesurable. C’est exactement la logique du Design Thinking5 appliqué au graphisme : commencer par comprendre les besoins et les objectifs, pour créer un contenu qui fonctionne réellement.

The economy is important because we don’t care enough about one another and our environment.

If we did, we would figure out how to treat each other well, how to grow individually and collectively, and how to take care of our environment in the process. With or without “the economy.”

Instead, we’ve focused so much on property and trade and money and economics and got so accustomed to money as something we can exchange into anything we want, that we've forgotten both what we need (like healthy communities and a healthy environment) and that alternatives exist.

With property, trade, money, economics having long been ubiquitous and all everyone ever worries and talks about, we have nearly fully alienated ourselves from each other.

Add to this our crisis of trust and truth, and we end up with a vicious circle: Because we’re increasingly alienated from each other, we find even more solace in money as the means to exchange it into anything we need or think we need.

The world is literally heating up in consequence.

What’s the answer?

Let’s make sure everyone is being taken care of.

I totally agree.

If you complain that you have a problem with #Windows
and are unhappy that people on Fediverse always bring up #Linux
when you come here to post your complaint, I have a question: instead of here, have you tried the #Microsoft
support or forums?

I mean at some point the "I just want Windows to work" is a fair and understandable point, but it will just be shouting in the wind if you don't bring your complaints to the people and company making it.

And I say that as an IT tech, I know how it works: if there's no support ticket about a problem, there's no feedback proof, and therefore the problem officially doesn't exist.

EDIT: to be very clear, I'm not writing all this with the intent of presenting MS forums and support as the best way to solve your problems with their products.

It's more that, as someone who deals with how tech support is handled on a daily basis, as I mentioned above, companies have processes for all that, and I can guarantee you that when it comes to handling feedback, they follow them strictly, especially when it comes to being held accountable for unwanted features or overall problems.

Users are being unhappy with ads or AI features and complain they can't deactivate them all? "Where are the tickets at our support to back that up?" is gonna be their answer. And we all know most of us, most of the overall user base never bother with that, leaving the gates full open for Microsoft to be like those aren't issues for the majority of users.

If windows is so problematic, then GNU/Linux can be the solution

To enforce accessibility.

Also can poor performance be framed as inaccessible?

Reinventing the wheel, but every time different. The author shares its experience.
Consider standards for it: they are powerful.

Some wheels I see that I think could use some new takes but which I don’t have the time/energy to do myself:

• Web browsers - probably the most significant. The browser market is essentially a monopoly right now. And Firefox is pretty much the only alternative option, somewhat of a monopoly in itself. We need to have many independent browser projects going on, not just an alternative.
• Higher education - this is probably too big a project for any one person, but I think there’s a lot of ground that needs new work and reevaluating in the world’s current higher education system.
• Task management - there are a lot of task management systems out there, but I think there’s still definitely room for more. I’m personally beginning to settle on a hybrid analog/digital task management system I’m designing myself.

You benchmark your node/ruby/python software on a fancy Macbook M4 and celebrate 500ms response time.

I benchmark my rust software on a $30 potato computer that may as well have 256MB of RAM and celebrate 800ms response time.