How? I grew up with Windows, learned decent skills on that, probably as much as I would have on a Mac. The current mobile era stuff has put alot or control and grit away, for making things 'more accessible'.
Windows would do just fine. But the state of cheap Windows laptops is abysmal, and Windows as a product is in the doghouse lately because... well, I honestly don't know why Microsoft is doing what they're doing, but from the outside they certainly do appear to want to ruin Windows.
I've been a windows/linux/mac guy since forever (I do not care at all about the OS, I just care about getting shit done), and Windows is worse than the XP and 7 days, but not by much. A caveat here is that I'm assuming windows people are savvy enough to know about massgrave, and as such remedy 90% of the shit experience with vendors filling up an otherwise acceptable OS with a bunch of garbage.
The only thing in Win11 user experience wise that absolutely drives me up a wall is the new right click menu forcing me to hold shift to get the usable menu instead of the "Win 11 is smart and this new menu UI is easier to use" menu.
Other than that, it feels like win 10 (and 7 for the most part) for anything else that matters (for a normal user).
All of that being said, yes, the experience of a naive consumer buying a windows laptop is awful, but not due to the OS itself, rather the amount of bloated useless shit vendors ship with the installed OS.
Chromebooks themselves can actually be great machines for hacking (in the traditional sense, not the modern security/jailbreaking sense). E.g. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en is arguably better than a direct typical Linux install because it's an isolated environment which won't break the main function of the device as you tinker.
As the page notes though, the real problem for kids is the devices are of course locked down:
> Important: If you use your Chromebook at work or school, you might not be able to use Linux. For more information, contact your administrator.
The more common "modern" definition popularized in the ~90s lacks the non-malicious meaning regardless which side of the "did hacker originally include both usages or not" debate one sits on. That doesn't mean the original definition ever went away though of course!
They don't have an open source kernel. You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers. I'm not sure what you mean by "learning about computers", but I personally find being able to peek into the kernel source code to be more educational than anything in the mac ecosystem.
The hardware here is incredible, but it's crippled by not adequately supporting Linux, BSD, or any other properly open source kernel you can compile and install yourself. A good learning environment doesn't put up immovable barriers like "you need a kernel signed by apple", it lets you push away barriers when you're ready, like "Are you sure you want to turn off secureboot, or install your own secureboot keys"
The parent commenter said "learning about computers". Most "professional developers" don't learn about computers, they learn enough react to get a paycheck, but don't have an insatiable curiosity about how the whole computer works (i.e. the "hacker spirit").
Professional developers are not what this thread is about. It's about curious kids, about hackers, and that group does peek at kernel source code (as well as everything else).
I’m fairly confident that the Venn diagram of (a) nine-year-olds that are playing with a computer and (b) people who claim that access to kernel source code is a prerequisite to “learning about computers” is two circles that are barely touching.
It's something you never need to look at, until suddenly you do and then it's invaluable. Any time you format some data for another system and get a cryptic error code back, looking at the source code becomes invaluable.
> You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers.
I just don’t think this is what, like, nine-year-olds are looking for in a computer.
In any case, at least it’s good that they’re starting with macOS over Windows! Puts them on a good path to understanding that POSIX is the One True Paradigm and therefore makes them much more likely to compile their own kernel in the future.
My curiosity for all things computer related was boundless, but I eventually tinkered with Linux but only because I’d had been exposed to a *nix style command line from the comfort of an OS X desktop first.
By then I had started messing around with code but had only built toys and extremely basic tools and would’ve been lucky to write a moderately functional desktop program using high level libraries (which didn’t happen for several more years).
Writing drivers or poking around in kernel code was so far beyond the scope of capabilities at that point that you would’ve had better luck teaching your dog how to knit. I don’t think I could’ve had any chance at doing these things until at least my mid 20s.
> Writing drivers or poking around in kernel code was so far beyond the scope of capabilities at that point that you would’ve had better luck teaching your dog how to knit.
I get the feeling a whole bunch of teenagers have written drivers to cheat in Fortnite/whatever other game - with that being said, probably not at 9 years old.
Yes, though SSDs that can sustain 1.5G/s and an OS that transparently compresses memory before swapping yield a lot better experience than Win95 swapping.
It really depends on how much time is spent filling out the spreadsheet.
If they are collectively spending 1hr/mo on the spreadsheet then it’s not worth an SWE’s time to optimize it. If they are spending 4hr/day on the spreadsheet then it’s a prime candidate for automation.
Because in some legal systems you're required to ask. You're also required to follow fairly specific rules relates to the user's selection and data, though I can't imagine enforcement keeps up with websites breaking those laws.
How so? The law doesn't require cookie banners.
However, you could argue that tracking/advertisement cookies should have been banned completely and that the law is flawed in that it allows for tracking given user "consent".
The GDPR is theater. An effective privacy law would have prevented data collection in the first place. Data collected will be abused, and a cute little banner won't change this.
I think part of the problem is there's a lot of SEO farming type sites too, it feels like a lot of high quality content (even before AI slop was so common) is just gone. I hope Google takes this issue seriously and works on a true PageRank algo / service that fixes their search because its been bad for a while. Now I just ask Perplexity or any model for links to things instead.
I hate to break it to you, but the fake reviews are mostly all positive.
But if you find a ton of negative reviews complaining that the handle breaks after 2 months... then that's probably real. That's the stuff you look for, to see if there's any consistent pattern to the negative reviews.
I find that even this doesn't work as well as it used to. Too many sellers are using too many dark patterns at scale.
IMO this old approach suffers from the ubiquitous flooding and washing of bad reviews with sometimes thousands of positive ones that mask real numbers. Without a half-reliable denominator, it's very hard to tell how prevalent a problem is. E.g. if there are 5k reviews, 50 of which are negative (just to use any numbers), on the surface of it that looks like a pretty normal ratio you'll find in any review section. Some handles just do break off on any product, and in the end there's also always some nutjob who tried to jack his car with a pan. But how many of the total reviews are fake? There's 50 real dissatisfied customers - but out of how many? 100, 500 or 5.000? If I'm being really critical at the sight of any kind of negative review, there's really not much left to buy with a good consciousness.
Then there's grouping of very different products on the same page, so reviews get muddled. Those groupings change from time to time, so any amount of reviews on a product page can refer to an item that's no longer available on that page. Strangely, AFAIK Amazon does not provide a possibility to filter those out. So when looking for reviews on, say, a USB cable, I'm made to sift manually through lots and lots of unrelated reviews both good and bad, some of which mention a handle breaking and are obviously not about a cable at all (I'm exaggerating a bit, but the M.O. is real).
And above all, really bad products with an actual ton of negative reviews often don't last long. The listings get deleted, the sellers disappear, come up the next day with a different random letter brand name, and buy good reviews in bulk again.
Taking these (and more) factors into account, assessing reviews has become like solving a single equation with multiple unknowns. To me at least, finding the signal from the noise at this scale just using common sense has become nigh impossible.
I personally don't have any confidence in it at all anymore, let alone a vast one. The mere attempt to wade through reviews has become an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating affair. I increasingly find myself abandoning my research halfway through and question if I really need a product at all, because when I look into it, all the available alternatives seem to be shit. In a way, that's probably a positive.
If you've found a way to better navigate this mess, I'm definitely interested to know! But IMO unless Amazon starts to fight those dark patterns, which they show no inclination to, the fight against the review shadow industry is a losing one for customers.
I understand how all of those could be problems in theory. But when I actually spend a couple minutes reading the reviews with less than 5 stars, it quickly becomes apparent if there are genuine problems with the item, or just people who don't understand why their cast iron pan rusted when they put it in the dishwasher. Finding the signal in the noise is pretty easy?
If you read the reviews with critical thinking and a good bullshit detector, and stick to items with at least 100 reviews (preferably several hundred), it works great for me. It's invaluable really -- don't know what I'd do without Amazon reviews.
> Strangely, AFAIK Amazon does not provide a possibility to filter those out.
You can always limit reviews to the single item/color/size etc. It's the filter option. I do that all the time when I want the reviews e.g. just for the spatula not the masher or ladle. Or when I want photos of the item in just the one particular color.
> * More juries, and maybe something jury like for civil suits.
Juries are available for civil suits, but most parties prefer not to have them because jury results have high variability. I'm following a case, currently pending appeal, where the jury found against the defendants for breach of contract, but awarded $0 in damages, so there's no actual relief regarding the breach.
Attestation from government sounds like the ideal solution. This could actually provide _more_ privacy because we can begin using attestation for things we currently use IDs for such as “Has the privilege of driving a car” or “Can purchase alcohol”
Yes we are still talking about attestation from the government for the specific privilege part.
You get your document with fields like "can drive", "is over 18" and so on. It's valid for some time; physical ID is valid for like 10 years and then you have to get a new document, this digital one is valid for lets say 30 days and if it expires you get a new one.
Then you present only those fields you want, when you want, without anyone talking to the government at all. All the other party needs to check is "is the document valid" and "do presented fields match the document". Like checking a tls certificate for a given domain name or purpose.
Strictly speaking there is no "routing through the government" of any information. The government just "issues a certificate" valid for X days without knowledge with whom, how or when you are using it.
> Strictly speaking there is no "routing through the government" of any information. The government just "issues a certificate" valid for X days without knowledge with whom, how or when you are using it.
I don't understand how you keep claiming there is no "routing through the government" right next to your explanations that the government is the one providing the documents every 30 days.
Obviously something in the document is tied to your ID and the government has mechanisms to revoke it. No matter how many layers you put on top of that, this all has to come back to the government's control.
I understand that the salts can be sent to 3rd party websites. However there's obviously a reason that those are only valid for 30 days instead of indefinitely.
Yes, something in the document is tied to my ID. There's my name in there for example :). I don't have to share that information, because what government signed is a uniquely salted hash of my name and passed the salt to me.
If I choose to share that salt, and provide my name, someone could hash all that information and compare it to the government-issued document to verify if my name really is john smith (or if my claim "I'm over 18" is valid).
If I don't, they have no way of knowing.
> no "routing through the government"
> government is the one providing the documents
I'm also lost. I mean, this is the government issued ID we are talking about, right? How are you expected to get it if not from the government? "Are you over 18" claim is part of that government issued ID.
They don't have to know which sites or when you are visiting, but they do have to issue you the document.
(To be clear, there are also other options, it doesn't have strictly to be government; for example banks around here can provide ID documents - for their clients. There's a list of who is trusted for what https://eidas.ec.europa.eu/efda/trust-services/browse/eidas/...).
> However there's obviously a reason that those are only valid for 30 days instead of indefinitely.
It's the same reason why we prefer tls certificates with short lifespans.
Why would I allow a government to tell me which devices I own can or cannot be approved? People have a short memory of history. Government works for the people, not the other way around.
Hydrogen fuel solves a long term strategic problem for Japan, which is why the Mirai got as far as it did.
Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.
Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.
Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.
Japan has a lot of potential for wind and geothermal power. And much of it isn't too bad for solar either.
The madness with hydrogen in Japan is that they produce most of it from imported LNG. If they'd solve domestic clean energy, they'd have no need for hydrogen in transport. EVs are a lot more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. So they'd need a lot less clean energy to power those.
Japan is slowly and belatedly figuring out that physics and economics just won't favor hydrogen, ever. The Mirai is an exercise in futility. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever. It never has. Toyota at this point is grudgingly producing more EVs per quarter than it ever produced hydrogen vehicles (in total). They only sell a few hundred per year at this point. The only reason they still make them at all is because they are being subsidized to do that.
But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].
The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.
On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.
Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].
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