Given the makeup of the courts is the US, I can't help but imagine these hypothetical laws would be thrown out on first amendment grounds. Viz. "Our algorithm is our free speech"
Yeah, I get that Amazon is incredibly convenient, but $1000 is $1000 no matter which company takes it from you. If some local mom and pop shop effectively stole $1000 from me, you can bet your ass I'd never patronize them again.
They never said they continued to patronize Amazon. Given the thread kicked off with claims about loosing access to DRMed content due to an unrelated delivery/payment issue, the person involved may be concerned about loosing access to digital content. Some people spend a lot of money on books, movies, etc.. The $1000 may be a drop in the bucket.
> I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
To some this could imply they wanted to continue doing business with Amazon, so accepted the theft. Not losing access is, in a way, continuing to do business. Not sure if that's what they meant, but I can see it being interpreted as such.
Amazon has no moat today. What is even unique on amazon store these days? Fake chinese crap is what. Which you can also find on ebay, same item same product photos and probably still shipped to you in 2-4 days like what prime has been reduced to. If you can wait you can opt for the 3 weeks from china option at literally a quarter the cost.
I don't spend a lot of time building services, but the last few I've done, I actually went straight to Rust. The downside is that it's quite slow to develop -- I probably don't have the knowledge that others do, but it seems that frameworks could really use some work. That said, I love that I can find and fix most my problems during development. Building a service in Python means I'm constantly fixing issues in production.
.NET is certainly better than Python, but I'm not very happy with the type system and the code organization versus my Rust projects.
You know, I tried F# like eight-ish years ago, and I loved it, but I couldn't break into doing it with enough regularity and depth that it made sense for me. I still do a decent amount of C# at work, and with my experience in Rust (algebraic data types, etc.), I imagine that F# would really help out a lot in our .NET code.
Pixels literally have unremovable Google ad right on the home screen. The search bar. Just because it has additional functionality, doesn't mean it's not an ad.
You can trivially install another launcher without that search bar and disable nearly all bundled apps on Pixels. Show me how easy it is to remove all the ads and bloatware from Windows.
Note how you said "disable" :) . That's because it is impossible to remove bloatware from Android, praise be Google. I also have Chrome disabled on my phone for many years, but it is there still.
And regarding Windows, first I want to tell that I'm not a fan of recent MS trends too. Second - I personally never had a single ad on my Win10 and current Win11, so I wouldn't know how to remove those :) . And third - to remove bloatware just uninstall it from the Programs and Features, like OneDrive or Office. LLM can be disabled in Settings. Some bloatware will remain due to deep integration, but that's the same issue as with Google or Apple. For instance I may not want to see Stocks app on iOS, but that's not my choice to make apparently :) .
What benefit would there be to uninstalling those bundled apps entirely vs disabling them? It's a nice goal to aspire to, sure, but does it really matter?
The start menu cluster, incessant pushing of Edge and OneDrive are the reasons I installed Linux after about a decade of not using desktop Linux outside of work. I am genuinely shocked and impressed how clean and snappy the experience is (Arch + KDE Plasma). Thanks to Valve, Windows games run just fine, too. Not going back...
I’m on Linux too, but I still have a Windows 11 box…the reasons I still have it are just about gone but I’ve been too lazy to change it.
I never see nags about Edge. Basically you can avoid those by never opening Edge.
OneDrive can be fully uninstalled (this wasn’t always the case). It legit doesn’t even show up when I search for it anymore.
The start menu cluster, I mean, it’s not the best interface on the planet, but the annoying recommendations can be easily removed…or you can just replace it entirely.
I know this is a user choice and therefore way less egregious than being forced to endure it on the Microsoft side, but perhaps it’s even worth pointing out that running Steam on Linux as a respite from commercialization and ads of Windows is…not really accomplishing that goal. And you don’t really avoid the browser wars by switching to Linux either, as many of the top distributions have Firefox+Google Search as their default configuration.
How!? Mine is full of ads, and that's after buying a "Pro" copy of Windows, registry hacks, declining every ToS I can find, rejecting all the "free" trials, etc.
Do you have an enterprise install managed on a Windows domain where your admin has disabled all this stuff by any chance?
The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.
The start menu shows sponsored articles in it IIRC, although this was something I turned off as soon as I could. It also pushes apps like Candy Crush.
The lock screen has ads literally "dotted" around, again pushing cloud services etc.
I keep being prompted to turn on Copilot, and essentially the only options are "Yes" or "Not yet". Opt-outs aren't respected.
I don't use Edge but the OS keeps advertising Edge, keeps telling me in various places and at various times that Edge is better and that Chrome is dangerous.
These are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, but it's truly pervasive throughout the whole product. Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.
I made my usb install media with Rufus and I it had some option to remove a bunch of frustrating behavior (this option was on by default). For instance it allowed me to create a local account. That seems to have completely removed advertising you mentioned. I had a lot of it in windows 10. Maybe the person you are replying to used Rufus (which is recommended if you want to make the install media from Linux or Mac) and didn’t realize it made changes.
They completely removed it from the installer GUI, yes.
But local-only Windows 11 still works with minimal interference. The most common ways are creating the install medium with Rufus (which has an option to create a local-only installation medium), or by manually dropping into the Windows Command Prompt during setup and running a single command ("ms-cxh:localonly")
> The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.
This is all I see and everything I disabled/uninstalled was done from the Windows settings UI (Windows 11 Pro).
> Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.
I guess I see this too? Just a little box saying to get Microsoft 365 or install OneDrive on the home page of the settings UI. There's basically nothing of value there though so it's easily missed.
and despite the fact you can install AND uninstall numerous web browsers, for some reason Edge is (supposedly) built into the OS and core functionality and it can't be removed - and is the default app for countless file types.
It actually is built in as WebView2. It's like that so apps can use web views without shipping their own browser (Electron) and then it is kept up to date with the system.
Internet Explorer (MSHTML) also still lives on in Windows 11 because older software depends on it to embed browsers in their UI. It'll probably stay there for a long time to preserve backwards compatibility.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
> It seems like these single-node libraries can process a terabyte on a typical machine, and you'd have have over 10TB before moving to Spark.
I'm surprised by how often people jump to Spark because "it's (highly) parallelizable!" and "you can throw more nodes at it easy-peasy!" And yet, there are so many cases where you can just do things with better tools.
Like the time a junior engineer asked for help processing 100s of ~5GB files of JSON data which turned out to be doing crazy amounts of string concatenation in Python (don't ask). It was taking something like 18 hours to run, IIRC, and writing a simple console tool to do the heavy lifting and letting Python's multiprocessing tackle it dropped the time to like 35 minutes.
I used pySpark some time ago when it was introduced to my company at the time and I realized that it was slow when you used python libraries in the UDFs rather than pySpark's own functions.
Yes using Python UDFs within Spark pipelines are a hog! That’s because the entire Python context is serialized with cloudpickle and sent over the wire to the executor nodes! (It can represent a few GB of serialized data depending on the UDF and driver process Python context)
I think Spark was the best tool out there when data engineering started taking off, and it just works (provided you don't have to deal with jar dependency hell) so there's not a huge incentive to move away from it.
This is so true! Even a few years ago, these benchmarks would have been against pandas (instead of polaes and duckdb) and would likely have looked very different.
I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so without risk of second-hand smoke.
My point is that there are frequently these predictions of things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
> I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Yeah, they had done the same thing when California did the same thing 30 years ago. The fact that it didn't happen then didn't stop them from doing it everywhere else similar laws were subsequently proposed.
People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on being able to smoke in public.
A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
I agree, and I am still pointing to the collapse of society, not civilization. My infrastructure is local. If local society collapses, what reason do people have to maintain transmission and distribution lines and electrical substations, to work at power plants, to maintain fiber optic or copper lines for internet connectivity?
Even if "the internet" as a whole is still around, the inability for someone to connect to and to use it means cryptocurrency is similarly useless.
I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
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