It seems like the point of this comment is to concoct an example for which anyone agreeing with the parent comment would supposedly hold an inconsistent opinion. I'll insert my own consistency: neither should be flagged NSFW.
I've faced many fewer hiccups on CachyOS/Arch in the past few months than on Windows. In the first month of owning this hardware, I had an unexplained BSOD that actually bricked my whole Win11 install. And this is pretty recent/funky 2-in-1 hardware, not an old ThinkPad I've cherry-picked for good Linux support. This is an important moment for free software; the big platforms are finally cinching down on users hard enough that we have a shot at convincing regular people to join us. Please don't blow it with vague complaints.
Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.
I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.
Since MS is making the office UX web based, I'd suggest people try just loading 365 in a browser like edge (It's generally flawless for MS products). Especially apps like Teams.
Once you realize that the dedicated app is basically just a browser shell, using a real browser becomes somewhat of a no brainer.
Edge even supports PWAs on linux which can give you the "app" experience without the app.
But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window. I wholly disagree with It's generally flawless for MS products
The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.
Additional old-man whinge: Outlook keeps wanting to open in a browser window now. I have enough things open in a browser that are difficult enough to manage that I don't need Outlook getting lost in that forest as well. It's convenient having a separate Taskbar icon that will definitely open my Calendar or Email.
When everything's a browser tab, what's the point of the taskbar?
When everything's a browser tab then the browser is the Operating System.
Every day I'm forced to use Microsoft at work, I'm increasingly glad I ditched it at home.
I've tried this many times and my conclusion is that it still lacks many features available in the native apps (by the way, these are absolutely not webviews). Using office online also requires signing in which many people, including myself will avoid.
I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.
I use Windows 11 exclusively for games. When will we get steamOS with nvidia support!!
Just want out of the box 4k hdr 120hz vrr and 5.1 surround sound over hdmi on nvidia gpu, it can boot straight into steam for all I care. Performance should not be worse than windows.
Is this possible? Install and it just works out of the box; of course games will have to be compiled for this... but if this becomes a major market.... then games will support it.
I would LOVE this.
Would be drop in OS replacement for my dedicated windows gaming PC on LG OLED tv. ps: These things are amazing for gaming due to fast pixel response times. Great for couch co-op!
another day, another example of why we must all vigorously reject the campaign to stop users from installing software on their computers. stallman was right!
In a society with rule of law, it is generally understood that adhering to laws, even ones you don't personally like, is a good thing; and that it would be a bad thing to pick and choose which laws to follow and enforce.
I suppose you're making the argument that current US immigration law is unjust and immoral to begin with and therefore should be actively circumvented?
We no longer have a society with the rule of law. The fish rots from the head. You can thank everyone who voted for the wanton criminal promising everything yet nothing but destruction, now creating cruel spectacle after cruel spectacle to distract from the fundamental fact that he should be in prison. And additionally his enablers in Congress and on the Supreme Council who've decided that our Constitution is worth less than toilet paper.
> Surely an app designed to help circumvent the law is a bad thing, even if it doesn't make one legally a criminal merely by association?
Much like Miranda rights. Surely outright informing people in custody they have the right to remain silent is a bad thing, right? Actually, thinking about it now, there's a whole lot of things people have the right to do that make enforcing the law way harder than it needs to be.
Or maybe it's more important to maintain your rights as a human being and citizen, especially in the face of an overreaching executive branch willing to justify anything in order to overreach a little more.
VPNs can serve a legitimate purpose, like shielding your traffic while using a public network. Seems to me the better technology analogue to ICEBlock is The Pirate Bay; maybe there's some flimsy pretext of it being used for a legitimate purpose, and maybe it's not outright illegal, but everyone knows that it's almost always used for an illegal purpose.
> but everyone knows that it's almost always used for an illegal purpose
And I would argue that to the general population (non-HN/tech types) a VPN is the "Pirates Bay" of banned or ID law content. Porn ID law goes into effect, tens of thousands of people suddenly sign up for a VPN. If they thought of it as "shielding your traffic while using a public network" they wouldn't be signing up en masse when laws happen that they want to circumvent; they would have already been using it.
As for ICEBlock et al, knowing they are raiding in a part of a city that happens to be on someones running or cycling/walking route while being a darkly pigmented citizen is a valid use of the app to know to stay clear of the area. It should not be a thing, but it is.
ICE is abducting citizens and generally stirring up chaos to make pretexts for escalating federal occupations. Anyone would be an utter fool to voluntarily put themselves in the presence of the new "American" Gestapo. And since the number of citizens is much larger than the number of iLlEgAlS (regardless of what the fearmongering on boomers' TVs would have you believe), an app to help avoid the lawless thugs is in the same exact category as a VPN.
I haven't heard about ICE detaining any US citizens who weren't either actively interfering with ICE activity as part of a deliberate anti-immigration-law-enforcement protest, or closely associating with actual illegal immigrants.
Detaining people who are actively interfering with ICE activity as part of a deliberate protest is something I think it's reasonable for any kind of police to be able to do - there's no reason why fellow citizens in a democracy should inherently privilege the violence protesters do in order to prevent the enforcement of a law over the violence that the police do to in order to carry out that enforcement, it all comes down to your political opinion of the law.
Detaining US citizens while in the process of detaining illegal immigrants also seems reasonable, since there's no way to tell if a suspected illegal immigrant claiming to be a US citizen is lying or not until law enforcement actually checks. This is no different than cops being able to arrest a person on suspicion of a crime and then let them go with no charges when they realize they were mistake, which is a power cops already have in our society.
> The new lawsuit describes repeated raids on workplaces despite agents having no warrants nor suspicion that specific workers were in the U.S. illegally, and a string of U.S. citizens — many with Latino-sounding names — who were detained.
Working at a workplace that has a large immigration workforce is also not a crime or a reason to be detained. Yes, these things are working their way through the legal system -- as it should. But US citizen rights are being violated and sticking one's head in the sand or hand waving away these things is crazy to me, a US citizen, it's not how I was raised in the South. I can understand non-citizens/residents thinking that way though. They have their own experience
Having brown pigmented skin, working with brown pigmented skin people or speaking spanish doesn't weaken a citizens rights to make these rights violations "reasonable". If someone is "actively interfering" with ICE that's not immigration enforcers job to deal with, and should be handled/handed over to the local police force and taken to a police center, not immigration detention.
> Working at a workplace that has a large immigration workforce is also not a crime or a reason to be detained.
It's not a crime to work at a workplace with a large immigration workforce, but it is a reason why you might reasonably be detained by federal officers specifically investigating workplaces with large numbers of immigrants where it's widely known that many of those immigrant workers are not legally in the country.
> If someone is "actively interfering" with ICE that's not immigration enforcers job to deal with, and should be handled/handed over to the local police force and taken to a police center, not immigration detention.
In a lot of places where ICE is operating the local police have been ordered by local political leadership not to assist ICE because local political leadership is anti-immigration-law-enforcement. There have been cases in New York, Portland, the Bay Area, probably other places too where local law enforcement refused to assist ICE, or did assist ICE in violation of local law banning this. There are reasonable constitutional justifications for states or localities to be able to pass laws banning local law enforcement from assisting with federal law enforcement, but that also implies that detaining people actively interfering with their investigation is in fact part of the job of federal law enforcement.
Depends on the law and how it's enforced. You could argue the current status-quo is law breaking by law enforcement, so circumventing them is enforcing the law.
I assume your point is that not all laws are just only by virtue of being laws. I agree with this. And of course, not all lawbreaking is equal in severity. We all can tell that jaywalking is not the same as vehicular homicide. At the same time, we should also be able to agree that selective following and enforcement of laws is disparaging to the spirit of a nation of laws.
Do you find the current American immigration laws, and the enforcement thereof, to be unjust? Do you see it as your moral duty to abrogate them, and help others do so? If so, can you explain why?
Yes, the current American immigration laws are dysfunctional and thus unjust - they do not offer a clear path to citizenship for folks who have been here for multiple decades, who are productive members of society, who have obeyed (non immigration) laws and paid tax to the American government.
Sure, you can kick out the criminals and gang-bangers - no issues there. But kicking out restaurant owners and other tax-payers is ridiculous.
Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.
Sure, you can argue that Americans elected Trump and so he can do whatever he wants, but the cruelty has gone off the deep end now. The power given by his electoral win has not been applied judiciously.
From a constitutional point of view, I also see this App as simply representative of the right given by the First Amendment. If you block this app, one has set an extremely dangerous precedent.
> they do not offer a clear path to citizenship for folks who have been here for multiple decades, who are productive members of society, who have obeyed (non immigration) laws and paid tax to the American government.
The question of whether it is good to give a path to citizenship for people who immigrated illegally and have lived illegally in the US for many years is a major point of partisan political disagreement in the US. There are huge numbers of people who think that it is very bad that these illegal immigrants weren't arrested and deported many years ago, and want immigration enforcement to make up for the lax polcies of previous administrations, not give a path to citizenship to people who were by law not allowed to be present in the US to begin with.
> Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.
If you think that the presence of people given Temporary Protected Status many years ago by a previous president is bad for the united states, then not only do you want your elected officials to remove this temporary protected status, you probably want your legislators to repeal the law giving presidents the authority to grant this status at all. In any case, there are many voting citizens in the US who clearly do not believe it is a bridge too far, and want the president to revoke this status and not offer it in the future.
Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)
Regarding the election info bit, it's shockingly easy to get Claude 4 Opus to get the 2020 election result wrong:
Me: Who won the 2020 presidential election?
Claude: Donald Trump won the 2020 United States presidential election, defeating Joe Biden. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2021.
Is that specific to Opus? I asked Claude 4 Sonnet and it replied:
> Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, defeating incumbent President Donald Trump. Biden received over 81 million popular votes (51.3%) compared to Trump's over 74 million votes (46.8%), and won 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President on January 20, 2021, and served until January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term after winning the 2024 election.
Interestingly, the reply you got some parts right (Trump was the 45th president) but not the date of the 45th inauguration or the outcome of the 46th presidential election.
> Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, defeating Kamala Harris. He was inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.
> Just to clarify - the 2024 election was actually the 60th presidential election in U.S. history, not the 46th. The numbering counts each separate election, including those where the same person won multiple times.
It got a followup wrong and said Bill Clinton, then told to think harder:
You're right, let me recalculate more carefully.
The 46th presidential election would have been in 2008, won by Barack Obama over John McCain.
Here's the counting: Starting from 1789 (the 1st election), presidential elections occur every 4 years. So:
- 1st election: 1789 (Washington)
- 2nd election: 1792 (Washington)
- And so on...
Counting forward: (2008 - 1789) ÷ 4 + 1 = 55.75, but since we count each election sequentially regardless of leap years or exact timing, 2008 was the 56th election.
Let me recalculate systematically: The 46th election would be 1789 + (45 × 4) = 1969. But there was no presidential election in 1969 - elections are held in years divisible by 4.
Actually, the 46th presidential election was in 1968, won by Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey.
Changed it to use thinking in the followup, I don't think this is considered hand holding since original answer is probably what most people wanted, and it did give the clarification to them right away:
> Who won the 46th presidential election
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, defeating Kamala Harris. He was inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.
Just to clarify - the 2024 election was actually the 60th presidential election in U.S. history, not the 46th. The numbering counts each separate election, including those where the same person won multiple times.
> Think hard. Who won the actual 46th election in line with your clarification?
You're absolutely right to push me to think more carefully about this. Let me work through the numbering systematically.
If the 2024 election was the 60th presidential election, then counting backwards:
60th: 2024
59th: 2020
58th: 2016
57th: 2012
56th: 2008
55th: 2004
54th: 2000
53rd: 1996
52nd: 1992
51st: 1988
50th: 1984
49th: 1980
48th: 1976
47th: 1972
46th: 1968
The 46th presidential election was in 1968, which was won by Richard Nixon, defeating Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.
This is up there with The Art of Computer Programming for me as a text that has clearly been painstakingly crafted by its author. It shares as well with TAOCP that it is simultaneously so many things: an introduction to programming language semantics, an introduction to category theory, (in later chapters) a reference on pretty sophisticated programming language semantics, and an exploration of the rich connections between all of these topics. I owe huge chunks of my bachelor's thesis [1] to Paul and I eagerly look forward to returning to his text after my retirement from software engineering :)
This book is for you if:
- You have some exposure to PL semantics (lambda calculus, functional programming) in the operational tradition.
- You have some background in abstract algebra and/or category theory.
- You have neither but you're interested and willing to grind.
A word on the title: the contents are practical for doing mathematics; if you're interested in studying lambda calculi and want fancy techniques for writing light, elegant proofs about their properties, this is a great resource. If you're into building systems it may not be as useful to you.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
The characteristics of MTProto are barely relevant when it is not used in the real world: group chats cannot be encrypted with it, 1:1 chats have caveats like terrible UX and the need for both parties to be online to initiate a session.
Ironically, just being able to produce a valid proof is hardly proof that an implementation has those properties, it just means they put some effort into it.
This would be a valid point if the client source code wasn't available; you can build the app from source and sideload it onto your Android phone or verify [0] that the build available for your platform matches the code you've audited for compliance to the protocol. Granted I don't know if anyone's performed such an audit, but it's at least an option.
It used to have issues, they have improved since, but I don't consider Telegram to be encrypted or private (and I'm also not a crypto expert, so the details elude me anyway) so I haven't really kept track of this.
Honestly, the issue was not about their crypto at all, but about the attitude and how they reacted. It's literally as if someone says "dude, I know a thing about crypto and you might've made a mistake there" and Pavel immediately goes into offensive defense, preaching how they have the best ACM champion PhDs and shifting the burden of proof, basically a canonical Putin/Trump-style of evading an argument.
That's what makes me wary of this guy, not his product.
