Matthew Brewer

@multilinear
3 Followers
10 Following
15 Posts

I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.

I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.

@crankylinuxuser @cstross

I had a rayhunter at the Vermont protest and didn't catch anything. Saw a post from someone in Boston that also saw nothing. NY only had a few police out, so if it was deployed there it's probably not the city that did it (FBI might though).

I'm curious. Where were folks seeing CSS on rayhunter?

the primary function of state violence is to protect capital

@eloy "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it."

Uh oh, I think we're about to get some very large single-board computers.

@dmikalova @JessTheUnstill @cwebber

I'd agree the goal can be noble.

When you get down to it "low code" is just a marketing term meaning "a DSL" or "a configurable tool". Of course those are useful. We all want to do things more easily with less code.

It's the jump to "no code" that seems to really cause problems. Coding with a clicky-button GUI by drawing lines doesn't suddenly make it not coding, and writing text isn't what makes coding hard.

@JessTheUnstill @cwebber

The core issue is specifying something precisely enough. People who aren't trained to think precisely, can't formulate a precise enough idea, much less write the idea down precisely.

Whether it's a lawyer or a programmer, it's a very similar issue.

Programmers often don't want to admit it, but fundamentally our job is to guess what vague specifications mean by understanding the use-case and human factors, and come up with how to write it down precisely.

@JessTheUnstill @cwebber

YES. Having to pay programmers is a problem they've been trying to solve since COBOL. I've lost track of the number of completely useless java-generating visual languages I've seen presentations for.

@hadon Yup, I think that's probably a big piece. More workers and less education is good for fascism.

Children and women are also often easier to exploit or even traffic - you can look into Chinese sweat shop documentaries for examples of how this works.

@briankrebs I got my orbic in the mail last week! I need to sit down and set it up. I plan to loan it to anyone going to a protest, as well as take it when I go.
@hadon Allowing child labor is part of project 2025, the deportation is just the newest excuse. Seperately, the chatter started well before Trump even entered office driven largely by the meat packing industry that already uses a lot of child labor illegally. This isn't incidental, it is part of the agenda.