You also have to give them achievable parameters. "You are always responsible" is not realistic. In some cases someone else is, in fact, responsible. And that's the rub of regulation, not that I think this means we shouldn't regulate, but it's going to always be true that doing it well takes effort. You can only ever reasonably expect that people are moving forwards (at best) and doing what is reasonably and humanly possible, and hopefully advancing the state of the art. Determining whether or not they are doing that is inherently complex.

That's how it used to work here in the USA. Then the subsidies were terminated in favor of forcing students to get loans. Then a US senator led a campaign to prevent those students from discharging that debt through bankruptcy. That senator's name was (and is) Joseph R. Biden.

The boomers got the handout. I don't want anything they didn't get.

I don't expect to get it. I do expect to immediately discount any bullshit from the hypocrites who got it and think I shouldn't get it.

You didn't get it, and you're insisting nobody deserves it because you didn't get it, which is sad. You're sad.

OK, how do we provide this feedback? The article is chock-full of links, but not one for that. It gives strong "get fucked" energy.

Since it's not worth putting out the effort to figure out where to submit some comments they definitely won't give a fuck about anyway: In no way is it a "first class" anything when it's only for GNOME and only in a snap. Let us know when it's ready for prime time so we can test it out and decide if we care. There's a 0% chance I'm going to use GNOME or snap.

Users do want this. Watch the final part of the recent Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge. Three of them switched to Linux for a month, and they all kept using it afterwards. Previous challenges had them going back to Windows.

The two big things that changed are Proton making games work, and AI making solving Linux problems less painful. They all commented on the reaction they get when asking questions of the Linux community. It's often hostile and unhelpful, telling them that they don't actually want to do what they want to do and should just do something else, or blaming them for picking the wrong distro, or some other off-putting response. When googling answers, often it comes down to a Reddit thread with outdated information that no longer works. AI is much more helpful and seems to check what solution is needed for their specific, up to date distro.

It makes sense to put an AI assistant in Ubuntu, for users who are coming from Windows, the biggest area of growth for them. If they properly tailor it to their OS, with relevant and up to date information, it could get around one of their biggest hurdles - the toxic community.

I see what you are saying, but also I'm not sure if I'd say it's a disability, but I certainly find typing stuff out is easier than saying it. Especially as I can edit it before submission, where as what I say is what the AI responds to immediately.

It's a lot like talking on the phone, which I also dislike. Face to face, people can see your expressions and when you look like you are trying to think of what to say or how to rephrase something, they can wait. On the phone, or talking to an AI, that isn't possible.

As long as they keep both options it's okay I guess.

Yes.

So you moved the goalposts and declared victory? Good work, clown.

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It's more than just the right of first sale; with software that is licensed via server-side communication, nothing prevents the company from terminating your authorization for any reason, and you have basically no recourse at that point, other than to sue.

There's a lot wrong with software in the modern era.

The difference is that it's not mass transit. It arguably should have been regulated more though, because and only because it cost The People money to chase after the dead.

Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.

It doesn't seem that bad anyway. They can run arbitrary code, for that boot... But the flash encryption key is in the secure enclave, right? So all the user's data is safe, the OS can't be tampered with, and since it's only in memory a power cycle or probably even just a reboot will clear it.

I'm sure some Israeli company is working on a chained exploit as we speak, but I think if you are concerned about that you probably want to avoid Apple devices anyway. They are a very popular target for those companies.

Most people had pretty crappy soundcards back then. Credit to him that he came up with tunes that sounded decent even with the naff guitar and drum sounds on a typical Soundblaster compatible card.

Could also be interesting for cold brew iced coffee.

But this is all looking at the past. Now we have renewables and storage on a scale that was unimaginable even a few years ago, and especially given that new nuclear takes at least 20 years to build in Europe, even when factoring in climate change as a risk, it still loses.