I think this is premature and a big mistake for Linux.
The costs of distros and the kernel steadily dropping older x86 support over the last few years never causes an outcry but it's an erosion of what made Linux great. Especially for non-English speaking people in less developed countries.
Open-source maintenance is not a obligation, but it's sad there is not more people pushing to maintain support. Especially for the "universal operating system" Debian which was previously a gold standard in architecture support.
I maintain a relatively popular live Linux distro based on Ubuntu and due to user demand will look into a NetBSD variant to continue support (as suggested in this thread), potentially to support legacy 586 and 686 too.
Though a Debian 13 "Trixie" variant with a custom compiled 686 kernel will be much easier than switching to NetBSD, it appears like NetBSD has more commitment to longer-term arch support.
It would be wonderful to develop systems (eg emulation) to make it practical to support architectures as close to indefinitely as possible.
It does feel like a big end of an era moment for Linux and distros here, with the project following the kind of decision making of big tech companies rather than the ideals of computer enthusiasts.
Right now these deprecation decisions will directly make me spend time working at layers of abstraction I wasn't intending to in order to mitigate the upstream deprecations of the kernels and distros. The reason I have used the kernel and distros like Debian has been to offload that work to the specialist maintainers of the open-source community.
Debian's tagline is the "universal operating system". It's a distribution with active ports on a very large number of architectures [1], even incredibly obscure ones.
The goal of universal compatibility that separates the Debian project from commercial software and even other open-source projects.
The legacy x86 architecture is still far more popular than some that platforms that Debian advertises as having official support for and there has been x86 based processors manufactured for niche applications until recently, eg, AMD Geode and others.
I find it really unfortunate Debian Project is removing official support for new x86 installations. The silver lining is it seems like they'll be an unofficial port and it's likely niche distributions like MX Linux and AntiX will maintain their own builds.
It would be ideal if open-source can develop stronger mechanims to keep support for the large numbers of these relatively niche architectures (eg, through increased usage of emulation over real hardware).
It's worth doing so on older kobo readers in my experience because it turns pages faster, and it also correctly displays embedded ePub fonts that the native software doesn't. I don't know how many of you will ever read books that feature APL glyphs so I don't know how relevant that last bit is, and I can't speak for more recent models.
stock kobo has two epub readers. trash one from adobe used for drmed files and stock epubs, and an actually good one for use with KEPUB files. There's a calibre plugin to make the conversion upon push to the device.
I was actually trying out KOReader (on Android via F-droid) last night and it... looks promising... but better than the Kindle app, really? It doesn't have a dark mode which is basically baseline for me reading at night. Or am I missing something?
E-ink screens usually don't want dark mode, because of the weird way they have to refresh[0]. The effect of that is much more visible with white text on black background compared to the opposite.
There's however a dark mode still if you need it; go to the gear icon, screen, auto warmth and night mode. Tap the mode line to switch it from automatic settings (either on time schedule or coordinates) to manual.
[0]: Basically, E-ink displays have to fully "reset" their screen by repeatedly toggling the pixels on and off, since they can't fully toggle themselves off normally; doing so will leave them with a bit of grey. Because this isn't very friendly on the eyes, most displays usually do this every couple "page changes" (actual pages when reading or moving in a menu.)
I've been reading at night for years on my Kindle, and dark mode works very well. During daytime you don't want to use it.
When you're using a device actually for reading, you don't care about minor defects on the page, just like you wouldn't care about some stain on the page of a paper book when reading it.
Thanks, I must have missed it, so that's the task when I go to bed tonight.
I hate the idea of my book collection being chained to Amazon by DRM, absolutely hate it. This whole DRM mess is one reason I haven't bought a dedicated e-reader.
Though, to be frank, it's not the only one, I spent a jaw dropping amount of money on a really good hardcover copy of The Lord of the Rings recently, and I feel like no ebook will ever come close to the reading experience of that thing. There is something about this immense, weighty, hardcover tome that just commands your attention and I still find that print on good paper causes less eye strain than even the e-ink screens I've used (though they are pretty good).
Yes, I also tried it on Android to see if it's worth jailbreaking my kindle and honestly the UI is a bit of a mess. It takes a lot of tweaks to get a nice looking layout to start with, out of the box it's just tiny text filling the screen with no margin.
For translation of more than a couple sentences on demand, you'd more likely translate the epub before you put it on the device, like with the Calibre plugin https://github.com/bookfere/Ebook-Translator-Calibre-Plugin . There are better solutions that have a dictionary for consistent name translations, too.
According to WMT 2014 benchmarks, GPT 4o and Gemini Flash 1.5 are acceptable. I think Gemini Flash 1.5 8B is the most used right now due to price. In my experience, it is pretty good except in name translation and consistency across text which is why pros use translation dictionaries. It will mostly translate idioms which is nice.
Oh finally! I have a Kindle Scribe, and it's really amazing hardware, but it's unusable for reading websites like Wikipedia and sending links to it using the Amazon bookmarklet is a pretty bad experience.
The biggest issue is the web browser doesn't have pagination, ie a next page button. *It only supports smooth scrolling using the touch screen*. Which on an e-ink display is a completely awful, insanely frustrating experience that I can't believe they ship it (and the Scribe is an 11th generation product).
Using a web browser to read pure text is a blurred mess that's takes several painful seconds to slowly scroll to the next page.
Since I bought the Kindle Scribe (big mistake due to the above issue), I've wanted to jailbreak it to install a non-terrible Wikipedia browser.
Eg the one available in the KOReader project -- the open-source alternative eink-optimized ebook app that is widely-supported across the eink ecosystem (including older Kindles).
Thanks for heads up that a jailbreak is finally available!
Covering doesn’t do too much (in the moment) to stop a building coming down, but it def helps stop heavy objects from concussing or worse. For those in the Bay Area, Cal academy of sciences has a nifty simulator exhibit. For everyone else, just watch a few YouTube videos of how violently and abruptly everything not bolted down becomes a projectile.
It’s been so long since we’ve had strong seismic activity in the Bay Area that I’d wager most that have moved here in past two decades (hi!) don’t have all their bookshelves/etc bolted to the wall, breakables secured with quake-hold, shoes under bed, etc… not to mention proper supplies for significant infrastructure damage. I know I caught myself being complacent earlier this year after I reorganized all of our stemware and whisky/etc to a glass cabinet next one of our two exit paths. It would have been an a guaranteed 20-30 lbs of glass shards thoroughly blocking that path. But hey, I’ll admit I have cinema-induced-paranoia about two things: 1) being trapped barefoot with glass covered floors, and 2) potential for velociraptor ingress.
The only people who believe this advice haven't been in an earthquake or government workers who have to justify their existence by coming up with such nonsense, you know, like all the "don't do drugs" messaging and whatever they hand out at the DMV.
The last large quake I experienced was the Northridge quake. I lived very near to the epicenter at the time. It was 4:31 AM. I remember exactly because stayed up all night coding. I felt a strong tug. I immediately thought "this is a big one".
Next image I have in my head was me floating four feet up in the air and all my books up in the air with me (I had bookcases full of books on three walls). The lights went out, we fell to the ground and the powerful shaking started. When it all stopped, books covered the entire floor, it was a mess.
Floating four feet up in the air?
Yes!
The quake had a very strong vertical component. As it pushed up, it compressed the air cylinder right under me (part of the desk chair). That cylinder and the reversal of motion was enough to launch me vertically. My cars were launched into the air and collided with each other...on the driveway. The whole thing was insane.
"Drop, cover and hold on"? Yeah, right.
Don't get me wrong, running around like a maniac isn't smart at all. Keep your wits about you, stand under a doorway or something with decent structural support and assess from there. That is, if you are able to. Sometimes, as was the cased with Northridge, you don't have time for anything. People had entire buildings collapse onto them while in bed.
Question: An earthquake can be dangerous because it is long lasting or because it is short and especially violent. So my question is, are earthquakes usually a consistent intensity? Or can they be moderate intensity for 45 seconds and then flatten me with a pulse that makes me experience 3x my body weight?
They are generally not a consistent intensity during the event. Yes, it can be moderate for a bit and then more intense shortly later. There are several different waves that move at different speeds from the earthquakes epicenter and which decay at different rates relative to distance from the epicenter. One categorization is P, S, and surface wave. The time of arrival of each wave and their intensities depend on many variables. I think it is possible for the later arrival to be much larger and more destructive than the first, but I'm a bit hazy on the details.
Anecdote, I was in a small earthquake in Tokyo, the initial thump woke me up and I rolled over under the dining table (sleeping on the floor as a guest) then the bigger vibrations arrived a few seconds later. The building was well designed for earthquakes, but in the moment I figured that, not knowing how big the rest of the earthquake will be, it was probably best to get cover anyway. I think cover is just about increasing the probability by some small amount that you could end up alive under the rubble if the building were to collapse.
I really do not understand how creatures like humans who can understand and plan for things build cities in flood zones, wildfire zones, earthquake zones, below sealevel, etc.
It's not like the death of the sun or heat death of universe where it's a billion years outside of your lifetime, it's going to happen in your lifetime.
The "oh well what can you do" response leads me to believe we aren't going to do a damn thing about runaway climate change.
Your commute happens about 250 days every year. A big earthquake happens maybe once ever 30 years. Buying a house takes 30 years to pay off. There's a limited supply of land; if all the houses in safe zones are taken, it may be worth it to some people to roll the dice on a house with natural hazards that's cheaper yet still close to everything. They're optimizing for the common case.
I’ve lived in blizzard territory and tornado alley. I have friends in hurricane zones. Parts of the US want to cook you alive. There’s nowhere in the country without something or another trying to kill you.
Michigan is pretty safe. We get tornados but that's about it. Not much poisonous or dangerous wildlife besides bears - just stay out of the wilderness.
...and surprisingly non-lethal, at least for the M6.5-7ish earthquakes in developed countries, similar to what would hit SF.
Loma Prieta killed 63 people. Northridge killed 57. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake killed 185. By contrast, about 30 people die every year from cold, 134 from heat, 44 from being hit by lightning, 85 from flooding, 69 from tornadoes [1], 103 from mass shootings, 21K from gun-related homicide, 26K from gun-related suicide [2], 70K from fentanyl [3], and 280K from obesity [4]. For completeness, excluding 9/11 about 15 people die per year from terrorism [5], with median 2 and mode 0.
Note the 3-order-of-magnitude difference between headline-worthy deaths like natural disasters and terrorism, vs. slow dangers like homicide, suicide, overdose, or obesity. You're about 7 times more likely to die from being struck by lightning than an earthquake.
Don't forget high deserts! You can get snowed in, drowned in a flood, cooked alive and then run down by a 30 mile an hour fire storm all in the same day if you're lucky!
San Francisco has a reputation for being cold. It’s just that we have the air conditioning running all the time. It’s basically sunny, low of 55°, high of 72°, year round. Twice a year it’ll get cold. A week a year it’ll get hot.
It’s the best weather anywhere to show off your nice jacket.
Some humans do, at least. I've read about there being stones in lakes or rivers that basically say "btw if you see this stone, you're as fucked as we were in the year 300AD" or something.
And in Japan there's those old stone marker monuments telling people not to build below them because of tsunamis or floods or something to that effect.
But I mean I guess when it's as desirable property as the SF Bay Area, the fact that you lose the building on it every hundred years or so is a small price to pay?
It seems everyone in this thread is forgetting humans only live 100 years.
If an event happens every 250 years on average - thats 10 generations of humans.
There are stories told by old Indigenous peoples in Canada and the Western USA about the Cascadia Fault which will wreck the PNW west of Interstate 5, estimated to happen every 500 years, last happened in 1700s. But they are just that - vague stories. Who is listening to them?
If 10 generations of a family can live in one spot for 250 years with no issues - it might be pretty hard to convince them they have to leave.
If you’re bored, checkout renderings/maps of California during the Great Flood of 1862! My favorite trivia about that event was that the native Americans warned the settlers and relocated their villages to the hills just prior to the atmospheric rivers. If memory serves, Meteorologists / Atmospheric Scientists didn’t even have a name for them until the 1990s.
With the increasing frequency of “100 year storm”, “200 year fire”, “250 year flood” … it’s pretty unfortunate we’re so terrible at contextualizing event types that haven’t already directly impacted our own lives. Of course paranoia-prepping isn’t really useful, but it’s dumbfounding that preparation isn’t a given.
It is pretty unfortunate, but I don't blame people. Imagine your grandfather telling you stories about his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather dealing with a great flood... they would just be legends.
Some of those zones aren't static. Some of those zones are discovered after people have made a life there and getting people to leave an area where they've made a life is hard.
If you live somewhere with strong earthquakes on a regular basis and enforcable building codes, chances are most of the buildings will withstand a pretty good earthquake, but a really big one will cause trouble.
Areas without regular strong earthquakes are likely to be caught by surprise, although newer buildings are likely to do ok, if they enforce international standard building codes; IBC is good for reasonable earthquakes, but not for extreme earthquakes (earthquake prone areas have additional requirements). Areas without enforcable building codes unfortunately aren't going to be well prepared, it costs more to build buildings that won't fall over in a nearby 4.0, especially if they're taller than one story.
Person is good at planning for abstract problems, because person controls their income, expenses, and priorities.
People are terrible at planning for abstract problems because it's collective resources and collective solutions requiring agreement from multiple parties who, inherently, have different and often conflicting priorities.
In other words, until the planet crashes and kills a vast, vast majority of us, we are going to carry on like we always have. It's depressing.
There's really two scenarios there. Either the earth is moving enough that run as fast as you can is zero mph, because the earth is moving a lot or you could move rather quickly and so there's not much need to move.
If you're in an immediately hazardous area, you should move to nearby safety during the earthquake (getting away from kitchens, window, things that could fall on you, etc), but exiting a building during an earthquake is probably riskier than staying inside it.
Certainly, use the time of the shaking to plan your exit, but no sense in falling all over the place and risking avoidable injury.
If you're in the bay area, chances are the building you're in is fairly earthquake safe. Building codes have improved over time, and many of the most unsafe buildings were destroyed in previous large earthquakes. Small buildings tend to be fairly safe even if not up to current codes, and large buildings tend to be targetted by inspection and retrofit requirements.
SpaceX and T-Mobile are starting a trial in late-2023
to use unmodified handsets for text (and later, voice and data) with the Starlink V2 network to remove cell coverage dead-zones. [1] [2]
It's achieved by "dedicating a slice of T-Mobile's Mid-Band PCS [1.9 GHz] spectrum, to be integrated into Starlink satellites, launched next year", with each Starlink V2 satellite hosting two 5-6 meter long cell-spectrum antennas, in addition to the existing Ka- and Ku-band antennas.
They're aiming for the US with the trial, and growing to global coverage by entering into reciprocal roaming agreements with the international carriers who hold licences to the relevant mid-band spectrum.
Elon Musk says "this won't have the kind of bandwidth that a Starlink terminal would have, but it will enable texting. It will enable images. And if there aren't too many people in the in the cell-zone, you could even potentially have a little bit of video."
Musk claims 2 to 4 megabits per cell-zone, 1000-2000 simultaneous voice calls per cell-zone, with the cell-zone of course being much larger than a terrestrial cell-tower.
> Splashy announcements of satellite-cellular connectivity from Apple, Starlink, and T-Mobile in the third quarter of 2022 promoted the idea of anywhere, any-kind connectivity.
Apple's stuff is probably orders of magnitude more reliable, the system they use has been battle-tested for decades.
Both Starlink's sat-cells and Apple's Globalstar link will be a real benefit for people who get stuck in a bad situation unprepared, but if I were a serious rock climber or similar, I'd still prefer a full-scale Globalstar, Iridium terminal or EPIRB device, then an iPhone with Globalstar, and only then Starlink's offer.
Globalstar with an iPhone is not battletested at all. A huge chunk of the complexity of a sat system is in the ground side and the iPhone form factor is new.
TMobile/SpaceX proposed service does sound better than the one Apple currently provides. Apple's works right now though and T/S's doesn't which is a notable difference. I also haven't read anything about the T/S service that says they will exclude iPhones. As an iPhone user, I would love to have access to both services! It's unlikely I would switch to a different phone manufacturer to get access to this service if it isn't available to iphones, but i might switch to TMobile from my current mvno to get it on iphone.
I think they’ll def come up with a paid plan for extra features. Same way T-Mobile only basic features are going to be free. Same way Starlink residential is orders of magnitude cheaper than marine edition.
My previous comment was flagged so let me add some more context around "Musk claims".
Remember Musks claims of FSD being X months away (for years), and SpaceX will be cheaper by orders of magnitude, and Twitter will be open to all free speech, and the cyber truck, and new roadster, etc etc? The point is, Musk has shown himself as unreliable and we can hardly trust his claims.
I'm passingly familiar with the old Keyhole/Hubble optical satellites, but I didn't think we launched any of those recently after the Shuttle shut down. The more interesting tech is probably sigint-targeted radio analysis, where antenna and LNA design is more important than physical aperture, I wouldn't be able to tell anything about those with a physical dimension. What would the new satellites launch on?
NRO Orion sats are probably the largest antennas ever in space (100m).
"These satellites at geostationary orbits collect radio emissions (SIGINT) and act as replacements for the older constellation of Magnum satellites. The satellites have estimated mass close to 5,200 kg and very large (estimated 100 m diameter) radio reflecting dishes."
This is such a tired take. Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets. Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk excelled at this, and just because they're not doing the low level engineering work doesn't mean they don't get any credit.
And by all accounts Steve Jobs was extremely involved in the UX design of the original iPhone, and Elon Musk is often involved in engineering decisions at his companies.
That's not to say they both don't have flaws, but it's intellectually dishonest to deny their accomplishments because you don't like them.
It's much better that commenting is open, so that people thinking these things can express themselves, and be exposed to different viewpoints, resulting in more thinking and shared knowledge.
Without that, an opinion can fester in someone's mind, becoming worse since there's no way to release it and no visible counterarguments.
In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
> In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
I know precisely what you mean, but I'd argue that you were in a position to consider multiple perspectives in the first place. A lot of people are not. They have determined their position ahead of time, and regardless of new information, they will not change it.
This. Long forum flame wars taught me a lot about the subjects bur also about discourse as such. These days the top comments are quickly moderated, like they have been here, and the only thing you are left with is headless conversations about how shallow takes are bad - without having an opportunity to react with said supposed shallow takes for youself.
> Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets
talking about tired takes...
The real refreshing take would be acknowledging that these things would exist even without them and that the cult of personalities is such an antiquate way to explain the success (or the demise) of companies (looks like Americans have learned nothing from the fall of Stalin).
Anyway: Steve Jobs did not give us smartphones and for sure Musk did not invent electric cars or reusable rockets.
They are (were?) good at marketing what other people made and other people still built.
In the case of Steve Jobs he died before turning full Elon Musk, whose contribution to the companies he's been part of has been mostly bad PR and egomaniac stunts.
Not that it hasn't worked more than a couple of times, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Psychologically wise, they are both visionary tyrants, emphasis on the second trait, which is the prevalent, the most evident and the one other people had to deal with.
As Psychology Today has put it "Steve Jobs success sends the wrong message to aspiring leaders" because "while Jobs was a successful leader, entrepreneur, and visionary, he fell considerably short of the qualities possessed by the very best leaders"
In tech everything is still muddy and it's hard for people outside of the field to differentiate between the genius and the impostor, so to put it in terms that are easier to understand for the general public, Musk and Jobs are Kanye West, the people who actually designed the things you mentioned and then built them and made them work, are Frank Zappa.
edit: to prove the point.
Who can name, off the top of their head, the strong leader who gave us the Nokia 1100 and the Nokia 1110 that are as of today the two best selling mobile phones ever in human history (250 million units each)?
Or the strong leader responsible for Mario franchising, almost 800 million copies sold, or Pokémon, 450 million copies sold?
Countless inventions were inevitable, like the automobile or powered flight. The most obvious sign for this are inventions that happened independently in quick succession, or where there's debate who was first.
You could also reasonably claim that the iPhone wasn't so much a "product invention", other phones with similar functionality existed, the genius was making a great version and targeting it at consumers instead of business people. But that's still an invention of sorts.
Tesla is a bit like that, but Musks real achievement is SpaceX, which came into a stagnant space where each rocket was some upgrade of an upgrade of an ICBM, and showed that a startup can compete in the space, and even disrupt it. And now two decades later the space launch provider market is full of startups with fresh ideas. Without musk this won't have happened
Musk real achievements has been convincing people that he is better than he actually is.
> and even disrupt it
disruption should lead to jail time in modern democracies.
it is an euphemism for "break every possible rule until they catch us"
> Without musk this won't have happened
Without the nazis Wernher Von Braun won't have happened and consequentially the v-2 rocket engines and the "now working for the Americans" Lunar landing.
Without Musk we would not have Musk, which is a net benefit per se, if you ask me.
- Nov 21, 2022 - The Twitter boss laid off the workers late Sunday, further trimming a staff that has lost almost 5000 workers since Musk took over
- 07 Nov 2022 - Elon Musk Fires More Than 90% Of Twitter India Staff: Report
- Nov 17, 2022 - SpaceX fired 9 employees who organized an open letter describing Elon Musk's tweeting as a 'distraction and embarrassment,' report says
- May 20, 2022 - A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.
- In December, former SpaceX engineer Ashley Kosak published an essay meticulously detailing alleged sexual harassment at the company
- in June by a group of SpaceX employees releasing a statement saying Musk’s frattish behavior was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” and asking Musk to stop being, well, a creep
- ‘How Many Women Were Abused to Make That Tesla?’
Seven women are suing the Elon Musk-led company, alleging sexual harassment
the last one is particularly interesting as a story, the billionaire frat boy pretending people to love the company, love him, never openly criticize what he does and says, like he's an Egyptian Pharaoh (actually they were more tolerant towards their people)
And wear the S3XY Tesla pants, because Tesla is S3XY I guess... (－‸ლ)
How much more should we endure from someone who's clearly a sociopath before something really bad (O.J. 's style) happens?
of course he's saying that it's only a political campaign against him.
I'm not honestly convinced.
I will never understand the tendency to idolize bad people just because they had enough money to pull together something of dubious usefulness at best for the general public.
I often read heavy criticism against China here, but China is actually solving problems by manufacturing their affordable EVs, without having to rely on a billionaire deus ex machina to sell to the people as a savior.
it's not about infinite monkeys and sheer law of the large numbers, it's simply about progress.
Japan had smartphones in 1999.
Nokia had already made a few mildly successful attempts, they were very good on the tech side, they lacked the marketing strategy.
There's not much to re-discover, we all know how things went.
Nokia had 50% of the global market, but only 10% in the whole North America.
Americans have always preferred homemade products and iPhone is an US product.
Before that they preferred BlackBerry, which was North American.
Sometimes for Americans if something does not exists there, it does not exist period.
I, personally, was doing a-ok with non-smart phones and a different device to do the computing stuff and I strongly believe computing in general is in a worse place than in 2007.
Besides, people are still working for Elon Musk at Twitter, who is clearly a very bad boss, and the ones who are not anymore, are complaining for being fired and very few left on their own, literally no more than a dozen, which shows that people mostly do their job because they are paid to do it, not because they like the people paying them. They care about the salary, which is not worng.
I don't believe many people love Zuckerberg, yet Facebook/Meta has more than 80,000 employees working there and making the things Meta does possible.
Not because of strong leaders but because it's their job and they are paid (often times well, sometimes very well, sometimes awesomely well) to do it. Full stop. There's no need to romanticize the worker/employee relationship.
It's actually pretty bad for worker when people start believing that the you need leaders and the need to be strong (which usually means arrogant pricks, not emotionally and psychologically mature).
We are going to work, not to war.
The iPhone idea in Jobs mind was an iPod that could make phone calls, to sell more music to people. Then after many iterations with people who actually know what they are doing, it became the money machine it is, by incorporating the app store and the ads/apps selling business, which is the only true technical innovation iPhone brought to the table.
The consequences of those choices were easily imaginable, but were discarded because: making money over everything else.
So we now have kids depressed by the constant external pressure of having to fit in a model that is completely made up by rich people pretending that an infinity pool from the rooftop of a 5 star hotel in Singapore is the normal way to live and that promote beauty standards that are unnatural and unreachable.
If I had the power to chose, I would have chosen the infinite monkeys over Jobs and Musk every day of my life.
Please bear in mind that it's not just Jobs and Musk, it's not personal, the same is true for every so called strong leader a definition that their PR office attached to them and made it stick. A façade thoroughly crafted by people expert in rebranding other people. For money of course, not because they actually like their clients. On the contrary, they probably hate them. When these people are free to roam they act like Bezos going to space with a cowboy hat, while forcing Amazon's employees to pee in bottles, because that's who they really are.
Have you noticed the new likable, nerdy do-gooder Bill Gates public image?
And why is Bill Gates bad and Steve Jobs good? They did the same amount of unspeakable things, they broke the same laws, they evaded the same corporate taxes, they killed competition the same way, they sued individuals just because they could and had an infinite amount of money at their disposal.
At least Bill Gates is trying to defeat malaria, isn't he?
It's not a statement on how much he has to do with the achievements. It's a just one example of how the man lies almost constantly, and nothing he says can be trusted or relied upon.
Another great example would be the "$35k" Tesla, which existed only on paper for years, then was very difficult to order, then was pulled.
edit to add more detail: given Musk's history of unilaterally cancelling some individual's tesla orders, publishing car telemetry to dispute autopilot crash news stories, deciding when, how, and where Ukraine can use Starlink, and now plenty more examples of banning / censoring / downranking people as he sees fit on twitter, I'd prefer not to use a service he provides if i can get comparable capabilities somewhere else
Can you provide details of the order cancellation? That’s a new one.
Wasn’t the car telemetry only published because it went to court? Why are you upset with Musk when someone tries to defraud Tesla and they prove them wrong with data? No one else’s telemetry has been published. Meanwhile Uber have “god-mode” and can track every driver globally in realtime… and it was abused to stalk people.
SpaceX donated starlinks to Ukraine, and they did it ridiculously fast… Meanwhile Globalstar did nothing. And you’re upset with SpaceX for having some conditions? What were they that were so egregious?
What are the examples of banning? That are vastly different from pre-musk twitter. Do you mean the part where he banned people for releasing his real-time location? (After warning them, explaining it would get them suspended, and then doing it… and then reinstating them).
This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
- The other space companies are way worse than SpaceX and no one said anything
- The other car companies are way worse than Tesla and no one said anything
- Do we all remember Cambridge Analytica? But Musk cost cutting, and exposing internal workings of twitter is terrible for man kind.
It honestly feels like some kind of explicit narrative in a “Manufacturing Consent” kind of way. Why has the world turned on Musk?
“Why has the world turned on Musk?”. You seriously don’t know? He behaves like a dick. In public. Maybe the other space companies and car companies are worse, but Musk flaunts his dickishness. They do it on the quiet, with PR companies to whitewash their actions. Just because he does it in public doesn’t make him less of a dick though. Just makes him a very easy target.
Bezos acts like a dick too. His space company is materially worse in every way. Amazon is famous for being a shitty place to work. We don’t even know what influence he has on the Washington Post, because he does it in secret.
It’s weird you prefer it to be PR-whitewashed rather than just see it for what it is.
But pretending Elon is deserving of this attention is just lazy journalism… like he’s screaming from a megaphone what he’s doing… and journalists aren’t even looking at other billionaires/space companies/car companies that are up to worse activity than anything Elon is responsible for. (I’m not saying it excuses it, but it’s wasted attention)
He, and his companies deserve every bit of attention. You could argue others deserve just as much (and I'd agree). But no harm in exposing him for being a bigoted man-child, who control unproportional amount of wealth.
Amazon is shitty in shitty contexts, if you take Italy then every employee is unionised with benefits, in US you have this thing where you don’t want the government to be able to regulate but then expect companies to be good samaritan and foot the bill for maternity, sickness, public health, without paying taxes for it. Amazon is a good place, just need to regulate it
Companies aren't people. Companies whilst run by people are not acting in the best interest of people as a whole only a small subset of people(stakeholders). Just like criminal gangs and how they lead to some small subsets of people requiring policing(criminals), the same applies to companies(some companies and how they act towards the societies they operate in if regulations were better made and policed adequately would certainly be classed as criminals).
Just giving you some more info on that order cancellation, it's been a few years but from what I remember, a blogger/columnist complained pretty strongly about something that I can't remember like build quality and I think he did it in a way that bothered elon personally so he had the columnist's order cancelled.
> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
For me it came from Musk downplaying COVID for financial gain.
Other than that, he's become proficient at discrediting himself as a reasonable, trustworthy person and presenting himself as a detached from reality lunatic who doesn't know when to stfu and how to behave.
When people like this have a lot (too much?) power that's when the super-villain vibe comes in.
Downplaying COVID was the only thing Musk was right. See Sweden not following WHO orders had small bump in excessive deaths. Also average age of dying with COVID was 84. There are no factory workers at Tesla that old.
I agree with everything you said but the reason people have turned on him is because he tweets like a dick too often and is really wealthy with lots of media exposure, not a small amount of it anti-Musk. Anyone that wealthy is going to get dragged in the media and when you mess with very powerful people's profits (Russia, defense contractors, American car manufacturers, and gasoline producers), you're really going to get dragged in the media. Plus the tweets.
Musk runs his businesses like a dictator. Well, OK, it's no secret multi billion companies is not where socialists go to hide. But he can't have it both ways: if he chooses to run his companies this way, he can't complain we pin the bad stuff on him. He is not only responsible, also clearly involved in making those choices and decisions.
I think part of my point is: In the context of each of his businesses, there isn’t really much bad stuff, in fact his businesses are much better across most metrics than his competitors.
Twitter might be the exception here because its early days.
I don't think it is the company CEO/Exec side that is drawing the heat- it is the " over-exposed, not behaving like an adult in public " part that is getting him in the cross-hairs.
And he seems to have disarmed the folks around him from helping with this.
I'm 99% sure I would dislike larry ellison more in person than Elon Musk, but the latter is on social media doing attention seeking stuff most days of the week. So I know more about what I dislike of Musk and any bad actions are front of mind.
> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
That's easy: people who disagree with his recent political shift. It's extremely obvious, because I see it primarily among the progressives in my circle.
The Republican party is a Fascist party (Support for a Fascist President and supported a failed Coup) and Elon has voiced support for the Republican party, thus, Elon is a Fascist (AKA, Super Villain). It's does not take much to draw a line between the two.
> Yeah no, you don't get to dismiss half the population as "fascist".
The Republican Party isn't half the population, and, even if it was, it is quite possible for half or more the population of a country to support fascism. Popularity isn't a rebuttal to accusations of fascism.
I would hazard a guess that the billionaire class’s political views are not the same as regular people.
I don’t agree with what I understand Elons politics to be, but I can empathise. Tesla got screwed over by Covid restrictions in a completely arbitrary way in the US, which to me explains some of the anti-covid/right-wing-in-US stuff.
The US is caught up in a bit of polarised political environment that makes little sense from looking outside in.
The CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS, GRU, FSB, DIA, MI5/6/7/8 and most every other three-letter agency on the planet. They at least act rationally, are not prone to personal grudges, and care more about keeping secrets than protecting their shareholders.
Its your phone. You can control if it automatically connects to roaming. So you can opt out in the normal already existing way in your phone's settings.
Yeah, AT managed to gather good non-spammy ratings somehow—even though I do sometimes suspect that certain high ratings are artificial, but those are isolated cases. The site also clearly prioritizes open-source software, raising it even among higher-rated proprietary apps.
Since AT is crowdsourced, perhaps instead of discussing yet another list of alternatives, fellow HNers could go upvote software that they already use. Though this does require registration, of course.
Two houses helps prevent tyranny of the majority. Consider the United States. Each state gets 2 senators no matter what, but the proportion of House of Representatives seats each state gets is calculated based on the state's population.
This quirk means that even small states like Wyoming have equal Senate representation as the populous states like California, Texas or New York.
This arguably undemocratic over-representation gives the smaller states much more power in certain areas, but this is by design. It provides incentive to keep large rural states part of a single nation. Compromises like that makes a country as a whole stronger.
Another interesting aspect is US Senate terms are long (6 years), with a third of members up for reelection happening every TWO years. Compared to the House of Representatives which has 4 year terms, and half up for reelection every 2 years. The net effect is it requires several election cycles to have a big impact on the passage of laws. This contributes to stability.
But don't you end up with tyranny of the minority? Small states, that fit a very niche demographic, end up being pivotal in decisions that affect the lives of millions of Americans, often due to the intense lobbying that is targeted at these senators.
What you call a 'tyranny of the minority' is in fact an equal representation of classes... that the rural proletariat is represented in government rather than yielding all decisions to the urban bourgeoisie. The American form of government was designed specifically to ensure a balance of interests rather than allowing one class to run roughshod over the other. It's a design feature, and a good one at that, no matter how much it distresses imperialists who'd prefer to simply dictate the course of affairs to the working class.
"What you call a 'tyranny of the minority' is in fact an equal representation of classes..."
Arbitrary geographical lines don't define classes. Every state has both rural and urban segments. Is the "rural proletariat" of California better represented than the "urban bourgeoise" of Rhode Island in this system? It's an 18th century compromise where the justifications where invented after the fact. This seems to be true for a lot of things about the founding of the United States. Lots of mythology around the motives of the founding fathers and their supposedly great designs that don't really hold up to any scrutiny.
No, but urbanization does, and some states are more suitable to dense settlement than others.
> Lots of mythology around the motives of the founding fathers and their supposedly great designs that don't really hold up to any scrutiny.
Likewise the jabs aimed at the founding fathers by people who have an obvious axe to grind (namely an imperialist one). You'll forgive me if I prefer not to reject constitutionalism because it conflicts with someone's preferred method of exploitation.
It’s not. Rural voters work the same types of jobs that their urban counterparts do. Rural doesn’t mean agriculture because that is a tiny fraction of the workforce. Poor rural voters work the same jobs that poor urban voters do (largely service or manufacturing).
The urban “bourgeoisie” isn’t big enough to dictate anything as a voting bloc, but the “equal representation of classes” angle is a great way to justify suppressing urban political representation.
Lol, tech and finance is not the majority of workers anywhere, even in San Francisco or New York.
In rural and urban areas, the split between service and manufacturing is pretty similar. Obviously, agriculture makes a bigger contribution but not by much.
What are you talking about suburbia? The suburbs of every major city are full of white collar workers in high finance, or tech. Even in New York, people commute from Westchester or Greenwich to their finance jobs in Manhattan. Most of the tech industry in Silicon Valley is literally in the suburbs. What a weird thing to say.
unfortunately such situations often degenerate into a tyranny of the minority, the UK house of lords as a mechanism for the aristocracy to keep holding power with a veneer of democracy is a good example, which is why it has steadily lost political legitimacy through time.
I don't think there is good evidence that the senate has in fact made the USA stronger as a nation, the only thing I have ever seen on the topic is how it theoretically might be the case, but history has shown it to long be a blocker of reforms that end up happening anyways, with a great deal more political bullshit than necessary.
I'd argue Joe Manchin (Democratic Senator of West Virginia) has single-handedly changed an eye-watering $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill into what appears to be a slightly less eye-watering $1.5 trillion package. The lower number (and thus lower taxes) makes it much more acceptable to a broader fraction of US society. Assuming the bill passes, it's an example of compromise working (but within negotiations of a single party).
The key thing is if one party wants to be able to pass the larger number without that pivotal vote, they need to appeal to a greater fraction of society and win more seats so they don't require that particular vote.
Well, that first of all depends on whetehr the budget cut is a good thing for the US and the world. From what I understand, this package is about fighting the climate change and investing into infrastructure and economy. Yes, government spending always bears the risk of taxes, but the idea behind government spending is to get neccessary things done. As an outsider, it is not obvious to me, that this resistance was a good thing. Neither for the US nor the world, as we are facing an existential crisis.
Also, as the sums are spent over many years, the numbers appear higher than they might be. Like people calculating how much money it costs to replace every single car in a country with an electric car. That numer is eye-watering too. What often isn't told, is that this amount of money is spent on new cars in the same time frame anyway. Choosing an electric instead of a combustion engine car the next time you buy a new car has actually little extra cost.
And you should sum up just the military budget in the same time frame :)
The costs of distros and the kernel steadily dropping older x86 support over the last few years never causes an outcry but it's an erosion of what made Linux great. Especially for non-English speaking people in less developed countries.
Open-source maintenance is not a obligation, but it's sad there is not more people pushing to maintain support. Especially for the "universal operating system" Debian which was previously a gold standard in architecture support.
I maintain a relatively popular live Linux distro based on Ubuntu and due to user demand will look into a NetBSD variant to continue support (as suggested in this thread), potentially to support legacy 586 and 686 too.
Though a Debian 13 "Trixie" variant with a custom compiled 686 kernel will be much easier than switching to NetBSD, it appears like NetBSD has more commitment to longer-term arch support.
It would be wonderful to develop systems (eg emulation) to make it practical to support architectures as close to indefinitely as possible.
It does feel like a big end of an era moment for Linux and distros here, with the project following the kind of decision making of big tech companies rather than the ideals of computer enthusiasts.
Right now these deprecation decisions will directly make me spend time working at layers of abstraction I wasn't intending to in order to mitigate the upstream deprecations of the kernels and distros. The reason I have used the kernel and distros like Debian has been to offload that work to the specialist maintainers of the open-source community.