cavem0nkey

Sorry I didn't feel this was scolding but I look back and see it may be taken that way.

The nature of the comment was that we should strip the narrative about this being a non-profit from the discussion and apply what is left to ourselves. It acts as a warning that we should really evaluate and consider our trust relations with a vendor who has control over everything that we do. And make sure we don't make the same mistakes.

Sorry if the tone was off but I'm trying to peel off the layers of narrative on this and get to the real story. And that is the all too common story of a combination of poorly defined and enforced policy by a vendor and a strategy of hope and ignorance from a customer.

The non-profit part of it is moot. This could happen to anyone. I'm more than a little annoyed that "non-profit" and "charity" is used to shape opinion. Having worked for a charity before, they aren't necessarily the bastions of moral virtue even when claiming non-profit status. I've seen cash efficiencies so low that there's almost no point in them existing. Not that it matters, again because this problem applies to non-profit and profit organisations.

Thus this should be a warning to people here to make sure that you have an exit plan and a strategy if you use the services regardless of who you are or what you do. Not hatred of the vendor. Because every single vendor out there can arbitrarily cut you off from a service at their will through automation, incompetence or malicious behaviour and there's probably nothing you can do about it.

Microsoft wouldn’t have a business if there weren’t so many fools around.

No Microsoft is not to blame. Whoever sells themselves into an all encompassing ecosystem with no exit plan or backup is to blame. It’s absolutely stupid thinking even if it’s the norm these days.

The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot.

This is a warning to everyone else. Heed it.

Realistically companies just start an outsourcing operation if this happens and employ people who live in fear for pittance.

Yep. We’re tribal apes. This is just a foot on the accelerator.

Well it’s a little more complicated than that. It doesn’t just manifest itself. People create it. And people do that for a reason. So there is intent. And that means it’s not naturally inert and consequence free and “ok” in a social construct.

I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :)

I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.

Couldn’t agree with this more. Stuff I wrote 25 years ago for NT4 still actually works on windows 10 without a recompile.

The Linux situation reminds me of unix back in the 90s even across distributions.

NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.

No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.

I have a large and varied experience of “developers”. The majority aren’t any more morally virtuous than a brick. They wake up, get down to the sausage factory and make sausages.

Again this is mostly our biases playing us. Within HN and similar communities there are a lot of above average and caring developers. Those who don’t care aren’t going to be here to look like they do.

I think there’s a genuinely huge divisive opinion on AI companies. We don’t see this due to our particular industry echo chambers but really the majority of society has bigger problems and this offers them no solutions and threatens to take their lifelines away.

Divisive technology leads to hate. Flock as well which is an us and them. Same mindset.

We are not as popular as we think we are. I know which side of the fence I want to be on.

And both have been damaging to society. And are getting fined and chased out of certain countries.

Why would you throw investment in this unless you’re just leveraging the growth in the time it takes for regulatory issues to appear? Which is terribly unethical.

Wall to wall bastards. I’d rather die poor than contribute to the further decline of society.

You can shit on TUIs but macOS isn’t the panacea of GUIs. This really compromises the argument. In fact I’d argue it’s one of the worst platforms for GUIs.

Sure it looks pretty but it’s impossible to drive from the keyboard without mutant hands and savant level of memory for arcade combos. That means the entire OS relies on being able to drive the UI from a positioning device and thus you have to have the coordination to piss on an ant off a moving train. Which is terrible when the input devices are a touchpad, which varies so utterly frustratingly depending on whether it’s in the laptop or over Bluetooth. That and a mouse which is designed by a complete psychopath. That leaves you with third party options which require apps to not suck and they still suck. Scrolling on Logitech options anyone? Even LinearMouse can’t fix that shit.

Compare windows which works absolutely fine from any keyboard or any mouse and is discoverable and consistent. Also no mutant hands required.

TUIs are closer to windows than macOS. And that’s a good thing.

I did the last ten years on a mac and decided I was just hurting myself. Give me windows or a TUI. I notice Linux desktop environments tend to copy windows with respect to keyboard and discoverability too.