or the parents really just don't get along. seriously, i'd rather give up my kids than deal with a horrible partner. if i could deal with her, why even get a divorce (unless the partner pushes for it)? i am glad that my parents did not get joint custody when they divorced. it would have been a disaster.
the front page does not feature the organizers, it features links to a video and a seminar, and the seminar and the video happen to feature the speakers. featuring speakers of a seminar is what i expect, because i want to know who is talking.
on my thinkpad with fedora hibernate works fine. i use it frequently. i even use it when for an unknown reason my usb-c headphones stop working. i don't know why. but after hibernate they work again. somehow waking up from hibernation fixes the problem
steve blank is comparing relationships with institutions to relationships with people and he is suggesting that this also applies to romantic relationships.
i'd like to argue that this is not so. especially not for romantic relationships. yes, people change, and goals change. but in a romantic relationship, the relationship IS the goal. if you grow apart in a romantic relationship, then you have failed the goal itself.
of course this can happen when you discover something about your partner that you just can't bear. but most likely what you discover has always been there and is not a new development.
and that institutional relationship. it ended because it was never a strong relationship to begin with. was it maybe more a relationship with the individuals involved? is there still a personal relationship with that first director?
had they had a stronger relationship with the institution, they would have noticed the change of goals earlier.
to be honest, to me it feels very strange that i would even call on an institution without being aware of what relationship i have with them. when i talk to a company that i have worked with before about a new project, a change in personnel, specifically, a change in my contact person, would be the first thing that tips me off to reevaluate the relationship before talking to them.
because generally relationships are with people. relationships with institutions are defined by a contract. no contract, no relationship.
when a sales or support person moves from one company to another, it is possible that some customers follow, because they felt that they had a relationship with that person, not with the company.
xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told.
some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?
i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.
do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?
are we? are we not also talking about enabling restaurants to exist in order to make our city livable?
i also don't see the issue with housing support. in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing. the current rate is that 2/3rds of any new built housing is subsidized.
and it apparently works out. instead of paying higher wages so that no one needs subsidies, everyone pays higher taxes to fund the subsidies. it's redistribution of income. yes, i guess you could consider it a cloaked form of UBI. i believe the key feature is that this model makes the whole economy around housing and income less volatile.
>are we not also talking about enabling restaurants to exist in order to make our city livable?
No! Why are privately owned restaurants part of a city's "livability", as if going out to eat food made by an underpaid slave wage class of migrant workers, is somehow a god given entitlement for the western person, and not something beholden to the same supply and demand market rules of any other business? Why should restaurants get special treatment so that their owners can buy another Porsche while they exploit cheap desperate foreign labor and the taxpayer subsidies? What about plumbers, hairdressers, landscapers, web-dev shops, yoga, why aren't those businesses part of a city's livability and entitled to subsidies?
And if you expect restaurants to be a public service for sake of livability, then they should also be state run and not for the profit of the restaurant owners.
> in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing.
What about the other half who pays for those getting the subsidies but don't get to live in subsidized housing? What's their opinion? I doubt they're happy they're paying market rate rent to a private landlord just so their neighbors can pay much less subsidized rent and beat them at wealth building.
It's always nice and easy when you're the one getting subsidies to justify how amazing subsidies are. I've never met a person complaining about receiving too many subsidies or asking themselves where the money from the subsidizes is coming from and if that's fair to others.
>it's redistribution of income.
Who would agree to this if they'd get to vote on it. I mean to have their income redistributed to others, not to have others income redistributed to them.
Forced income redistribution like in the case of Austria since you brought it up, just creates a vacuum where the most talented most hardworking people leave for greener pastures abroad to escape it, and you're left with a stagnant economy of average or below average people who don't see any point in hard work and will prefer to optimize for a life on getting the subsidies rather than funding them, so the government ends up with a bigger and bigger debt hole funding all this in exchange for votes.
See the Austrian guy who developed Openclaw then left because of the way Austria treats small business success and entrepreneurship.
Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run. This only worked in the post-WW2 Europe when there were a lot more people paying into the system than receiving, but not in today's world and economy.
Why are privately owned restaurants part of a city's "livability", as if going out to eat food made by an underpaid slave wage class of migrant workers, is somehow a god given entitlement for the western person
that's the point, it's not an entitlement, it's paid for by taxes. and it is what makes a city attractive. same goes for shopping streets (as opposed to shopping malls) etc.
they make the city desireable and livable. which in turn attracts business, which brings in tax money.
you have never been to vienna, i guess. it's the most livable city in the world it frequently comes out at the top of the most desirable city for expats.
support for entrepreneurship is indeed a problem, not just in austria, in all of europe, but those are two different issues. there is no reason why it could not be improved while continuing to subsidize housing. on the contrary. subsidized housing means that as an entrepreneur i don't have to pay premium salaries in order to hire people like eg. in san francisco.
steinberger got hired by OpenAI three months after he revealed his project. to argue he left because because of how austria treats entrepreneurs makes no sense. did he say that that is the reason? i'd like to know if that's really true.
Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run
vienna's housing policy is successful for a century now. and i expect it will continue to be successful.
>that's the point, it's not an entitlement, it's paid for by taxes.
You're whitewashing subsidies. And you refused to answer my question, why should restaurant owners have their businesses subsidized by taxpayer so they can get away with more profits? Why not other businesses too?
>they make the city desireable and livable. which in turn attracts business, which brings in tax money.
Which businesses move to a city because of restaurants and the "vibe"? Why does Amsterdam or Berlin have way more tech, startups and business than vienna if the city is more desirable?
Maybe businesses investments and restaurants are a completely different things.
>vienna's housing policy is successful for a century now. and i expect it will continue to be successful.
Only for those who benefit from it. But what about the rest on the rest?
gig economy is like working as a freelancer except the pay is lower. and that's the problem. working as a freelancer only works out because i get a higher per hour rate so that i can deal with downtimes where i get no work.
gig work should have a higher minimum wage. double from normal at least. if minimum wage is $12 per hour. then gig-minimum should be $24 per hour. and there should be minimum hours of work guaranteed. these may be negotiable, but the big issue is that gig workers don't have the negotiation power and competence to work this out on their own. that's the whole reason why we have laws to protect employees in the first place.
as a freelancer i have no protection, but i knew that going in and made a choice. gig-workers don't know that, and they often do gig work as a last resort, so they have no choice. laws haven't caught up yet to protect them.
if you enter a country whose citizenship you have you must always enter with the travel document or proof of citizenship of that country. no exceptions. that is a global convention. using a foreign document is most likely a violation of the law. (there may be exceptions in some countries that don't issue passports abroad).
that waiver document is ridiculous though. what does it cost to get a new passport at a british embassy? as a german i can get a temporary passport within a day at any german embassy for about 30€ or 60€. enough to travel back home.
> if you enter a country whose citizenship you have you must always enter with the travel document or proof of citizenship of that country. no exceptions.
Completely untrue. I have done so perfectly legally.
It's not a law in either the US or UK as far as I know, but both countries always got pissed off at you if they figured it out. I know because I've been lectured by border-officers on both ends before :)
"Pissed off" here meaning that you were likely to get "randomly selected" for secondary screening.
It absolutely has been the convention that you use the local form of identity if you have one. This ETA issue is just them pushing that a bit harder.
UK citizens must now enter on their UK passport (or a citizenship certificate thing + foreign passport), and are not eligible for visa waiver programs (because they're only eligible for people using certain passports, which UK citizens obviously now can't be using).
I was announced in Nov '25, and has cause a mad scramble for lots of people as the passport office has been massively backlogged by the predictable queue of people needing passports suddenly, when they didn't need them before.
It's 100% illegal to present a non-US passport at the US border if you are US citizen.
The law is 8 U.S.C. 1185 - "it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport."
In the past, the penalty for violating this has generally just been "a stern talking to," like you said. But no guarantees on that.
the problem is that in developing countries smart phones are a massive technology jump for people who lack the education to even have a clue whats going on. treating people as adults does not work if they don't have the education needed for that.
these people aren't gullible. they are ignorant (in the uneducated sense). they are not making bad decisions. they are not even aware that there is a decision to be made.
and worst of all, this problem affects the majority of those populations. if more than half of our population was alcoholic then we absolutely would restrict the access to alcohol through whatever means possible.
it's a pandemic. and we all know what restrictions that required.
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience
this is not about moral busybodies. it's not even a moral issue. it's an existential issue. this is about demands from the population to be safe from scams. those scammers ruin lives. do you think those people really prefer to be scammed and lose their life savings?
the correct solution is of course education, but education takes time. we can educate today's children so that they can protect themselves in the future. but that's the next generation. for the current generation that kind of education is to late.
the proposed solution is a stopgap measure. do you have a better idea how to solve the problem? (maybe putting more effort into persecution, but that costs money. or making banks responsible for covering the loss. but then you'll get banks demanding the protection. tyranny of the banks then? is that any better? that's actually happening in europe now.)
not doing anything will hurt a lot of people and make them unhappy. as a government you really don't want that either.
To add to that, I think it's important to point out that the problem of people not understanding how to safely use their devices is in big part caused by technology companies racing to get widest adoption everywhere, both in terms of location and in terms of industries. I'm not against "intuitive UX design" in general, but at it's extreme, it just fuels incompetence. We shouldn't now let them pick the most convenient option, the option that just happens to also increase their powers over the users, as a way to "fix" the problem.
> how is a UI designed that doesn't fuel incompetence?
I'm specifically talking about UX ("how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service"), not necessarily UI.
> how does it do that? (i am not getting hung up on "intuitive", i just mean you argue that the currently used design fuels incompetence)
tl;dr We have a product, we want to make money, we need people to use the product. One of the things that stand in the way, is people not understanding how to use our product. We will make sure they can get started as fast as possible, and not mention how they may hurt themselves with the product, that would scare them away. Hurting yourself with our product is in the broad "don't do stupid things" category. We will never explain the "framework" (in case of an OS I mean apps, that apps can interact with each other and your data, how you can or cannot, control that), even in broad terms. Just click this button and get your solution.
It started with PCs and people not understanding how to not lose their documents. Now that every device is connected to the internet, the problem became worse.
You can now say that "sideloading" is stupid anyway, but this is not the only problem. Another thing that people still usually learn by painful experience is backups. There are fake apps, on both stores. Another thing, in-band signaling. You cannot trust email, phones, whatsapp, messenger... Even if your friend you often chat with is messaging you, they could've just been hacked.
Try to explain that you also cannot trust websites and that even technical people don't have a good way of telling if an email of a website is real.
But at least enrollment is fast and adoption metrics are growing. Since we are already in "move fast and break things" mindset, we will think about fixing such issues when it actually becomes a problem.
To be clear, I'm not saying that making technology easy is always bad, that you should always expose the user to "the elements" and expect them pipe commands in the shell. But I think that often the focus is on only making enrollment fast. "Get started"
What if we actually expected people to understand something about technologies they want to use?
What if we actually expected people to understand something about technologies they want to use?
but that's what we have now, and it's not working.
the implied question is: what if we don't allow people to use technology unless they can demonstrate that they understand it?
is that really something we want to do? this sounds like gatekeeping, elitism, and anti-innovation because if if less people are going to use a technology, then there is less motivation to build it.
remember, i think it was someone at IBM that said that the potential for computers is some small number? and then it grew beyond anyone's wildest expectations?
do you think that would have happened if we had required understanding before we let anyone buy a home computer?
besides education, i don't know how to approach this issue.
> but that's what we have now, and it's not working.
My entire point is that education is the opposite of what we have now. That users are not expected to understand or know anything about IT technologies they use. Not the case with cars, recreational and prescription drugs...
> the implied question is: what if we don't allow people to use technology unless they can demonstrate that they understand it?
It's not exactly my point, but in extreme cases, maybe. I genuinely think that nobody has even tried to educate people about computers. Like, have you seen IT classes in schools? Assuming you are lucky enough for the classes to have any content, you will probably get some lessons in Word and Excel. Maybe some programming. Maybe Paint. But actually using the computer? Dangers of the internet, importance of backups, trusting websites, applications and emails? The concept of application and difference between applications and websites? And those technologies are not "developing" like they were 20 years ago, they are probably here to stay.
> is that really something we want to do? this sounds like gatekeeping, elitism, and anti-innovation because if if less people are going to use a technology, then there is less motivation to build it.
And the alternative Google and Apple present is giving them paternalizing control over the most popular computing device. The say over what people can do with their devices. After they made sure that these devices are embedded into our lives.
I would much rather we slowed down with innovation for a second and resolved such issues first, because the way I see it, it's literally manipulation (also see: dark patterns).
As for the gatekeeping and etilism - Assuming we want a "computing license" (not necessarily what I'm arguing for), is "driving license" also gatekeeping and etilism? Or maybe some amount of gatekeeping is good?
As for anti-innovation - I genuinely think we might have had just enough innovation in the field and it may be time to slow down a little, take a step back and evaluate the results. And I honestly don't see much innovation in apps/computers/web space besides maybe AI, and governments are already working on regulating that.
> do you think that would have happened if we had required understanding before we let anyone buy a home computer?
Home computers were very harmless before the internet, but that's an aside. Assuming the tech is actually useful, not just slightly more convenient than "traditional" alternatives, then yes, I'm sure it would have still grown to sizes it has grown to today. Maybe a bit slower.
> besides education, i don't know how to approach this issue.
Same, I generally do think this whole situation needs more consideration.
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