Yup. Still have a BAC limit of 0.05, but hey, we’re at least out of the stone age.

I don’t drink, so it doesn’t bother me, but I have plenty of coworkers who were happy for the change. Next step, allow wine to be sold in grocery stores so you can buy holiday drinks on holidays…

I installed GrapheneOS the moment I got my phone, which should give me a few protections over standard Android.

Longer term, I intend to get a Linux phone, I’m just waiting for the hardware and software to improve. I already almost entirely avoid the Play store, so making the final switch shouldn’t be that big of a jump.

If you’ve been around tech circles for any length of time, sure, but your average person probably hasn’t heard of it.

Well yeah, because this time they have a ton of games and their own hardware. They’ve proven the concept, and the fact that more expensive and devices w/ less user-friendly software are selling shows that there’s a market here.

So all a competitor would need to do is build the hardware, Valve does all the rest.

is keeping them alive and imprisoned for life at the expense of law-abiding citizens the way forward?

Yes, for two reasons:

• it’s immoral to kill people, because there’s always a chance at rehabilitation; IMO, if we give up on that, we give up on humanity
• it’s generally more expensive to execute someone than keep them locked up indefinitely, so it’s not even a pragmatic option

Even if the second were not the case, I would still say yes due to the first.

I think the goals should be essentially this:

1. complete rehabilitation - not always possible, but it should always be assumed to be
2. return to society with the harm being neutralized - any alterations must 100% be the choice of the individual (e.g. a serial rapist could elect to be castrated, a kleptomaniac or stalker could elect for permanent tracking via microchip, etc)
3. return to productive interaction with society, while still physically restrained - e.g. they can work within prison
4. voluntary doctor-assisted suicide - an individual should always have the option of ending their life, provided they’re of sound-enough mind

I’m against 2 & 4 until we have certain checks in place to prevent abuse, and 3 would absolutely need to be opt-in by the prisoner.

Would they not grow resentful of having to support those who do not follow the social contract?

As long as murder is unacceptable in society, it’s the price you pay for the privilege of stripping someone else’s rights from them.

IMO, the only valid use of lethal force is if there’s no valid alternative option to protect innocent lives. I would kill if it directly spared innocent lives, but not if there’s any possibility of protecting innocent lives another way.

I bought a computer and wanted to install a clean OS on it (it came with Ubuntu, which I loathe visually and general UX-wise…). I had a choice: go through the effort on my other machine of pirating Win10, or just install Linux

Yeah, I dislike Ubuntu as well, which is why I recommend Mint. Most of the community support for Ubuntu is directly relevant, but you don’t have to deal with any of the nonsense that comes by default (UI/UX, snaps, etc).

That said, you can also just install Windows, no need to pirate it. Yeah, you’ll get the watermark and can’t switch the desktop background as easily, but other than that, it’s perfectly functional. That’s what I use for my dual-boot because I use Windows maybe once/year, if that.

My point here is that Linux and Windows are fundamentally different. If you want Windows, but want to avoid something specific about it (cost, ads, etc), Linux isn’t going to be a great transition an comes with a bunch of caveats, and no amount of lipstick is going to hide that. If you’re switching away from Windows, surely you’re also okay with it looking a bit different too, no?

Alt+F2 rather than Win+R

Key bindings can be changed.

Notepad++

Recommendations:

• Visual Studio Code - closer to an IDE than a simple text editor, but it’s pretty good in general
• Kate - esp if you’re using KDE (Alt+F2 is the key combo there, but maybe it’s the same on Cinnamon and other default Mint DEs)

Some things don’t have a direct replacement, but generally speaking, there’s usually a few analogues for anything you’d use on Windows. For example, for games, you have:

• Steam - most games w/o anti-cheat work, and some with anti-cheat work, if the devs enable it
• Heroic - for GOG, EGS, and Prime games
• a bunch of FOSS games - 0 AD and Battle for Wesnoth are my favorites

her tax software is Windows-only and does not work correctly in Wine

Consider teaching her to use one of the online tax software solutions (e.g. in the US, FreeTaxUSA is free and easy). Yes, it’s different, but it’s also pretty easy, even for someone who is older. I use FreeTaxUSA (assuming you’re in the US; if not, look for an alternative), and it feels just like TurboTax, but without all of the upcharge nonsense. If that’s truly the only roadblock and she ends up liking the online version, then you’re golden (I recommend helping her create an account, but let her do everything else)!

Best case scenario, she saves a few bucks and is that much closer to switching to Linux. Worst case scenario, she goes back to what she’s used to, no harm done.

Look past enemy and look at the sentiment: scores from big name reviewers aren’t a good metric for whether you’ll like a game. Statements don’t all need to be taken literally.

You can have familiarity without direct replication. KDE Plasma uses a lot of the same design metaphors as Windows, yet it’s distinct, both visually and functionally.

Linux will never work exactly like Windows, and I think it’s important to highlight that with the design. For example, instead of replicating the Microsoft Store and Windows Update split, it combines them in the Discover app, because system and user software is combined in Linux. It’s pretty intuitive, but different.

Familiarity is fine, but the more you try to make one thing look like another, the more jarring the differences become.

Yup. Fortunately, I’ve been away from HN long enough that I didn’t immediately avoid the article, and I’m glad I didn’t.

And that’s one thing I like about the projects I work on. Nothing I’ve built has been directly responsible for profit, it has just supported other profit centers.

My current project helps us sell our main physical product by making the supporting software easier to use vs competitors. Yeah, the features highlight the benefits of our product vs competition, but the user is free to use any competitor they want, and we even have an open-ish API so they can make their own interface. We charge for it, but it’s far from turning a profit since the main point is to be something our sales team can bundle with the main product.

We build software for reports, simulation, design, etc, and the entire goal is to be useful, not extract profit. We charge for computationally heavy features, but that’s more to prevent abuse (i.e. keep costs reasonable) than anything.

My company also has direct competition and who has decided to go with the lockin approach, and customers seem to appreciate us as an alternative. The business itself isn’t particularly ethical, but it’s necessary, so it helps me sleep at night.

That said, our end goal is to replace good (but dangerous) jobs with automation. and that will be complete once we plug the leaks in our abstractions, and that’s a little sad. So it goes I guess.

Least amount of force is ideally jail. No funky science experiments, just keep them in a secure facility.

inhumane

It’s only inhumane if they’re no longer a danger to society.

Justice should never be about punishment, but preventing further harm and making as much restitution as possible.

I’m considering running my own build farm for updates, so maybe I’ll write up a post about it if I get to it.

Interesting. I didn’t have high hopes because the premise sounded incredibly dumb, but maybe they pulled together a decent story around it.

I’ll definitely wait for a few more reviews (I almost never buy day 1), but I’ll check it out.

Reviewers almost never give 1/10, the lowest I’ve seen recently is 5/10. And anything below 8 should be seen as the reviewer not liking it.

Or just install minidlna. It works and it’s easy to set up.

I’ve never understood this. You go through all the trouble of switching OSes, presumably because you don’t like something about it, and then proceed to make it look exactly like what you had?

I personally don’t care what my desktop looks like, I hide as much of the desktop stuff so there’s more space on screen for what I actually care about. I used GNOME for a year or so because he had a better Wayland implementation, and now I’m on KDE because I wanted to try out Plasma 6 (spoiler, it fixed my Wayland problems) and as long as I can use a key combo to type an app name to launch, I don’t have a strong preference between them. I really don’t care much between the two, I don’t see much of the desktop anyway. I used to use a tiling WM, but I got tired of random apps messing stuff up and then Wayland scrambled the entire ecosystem up, so I bailed.

I admit I did install a “Windows XP” theme when I first switched to Linux, and again when the “aero” theme came out, but I only left it on for a couple days, and mostly to troll friends.

I’m glad the choice exists, I guess I just don’t understand it.

It’s not, but it can be worth it.

Yeah, just install Mint or something with that skin installed.