Tired of being an unpaid Microsoft support technician, I offered people to install Linux on their computer, with my full support, or to never talk with me about their computer any more.
The more time went by, the more I realised that this state of mind was particularly toxic and ultimately disrespectful of the real needs of the people around us.
I’m using the word ‘we’ here because obviously, I also had this approach at the time (admittedly, a few years later, being a bit younger), but I’m a bit ashamed of the approach I had at the time and today I have a deep rejection for this way of behaving towards a public who often use IT tools for specific needs and who shouldn’t become dependent on a certain type of IT support that isn’t necessarily available elsewhere.
Who are we to put so much pressure on people to change almost their entire digital environment? Even more so at a time when tools were not as widely available online as they are today.
In short, I’m quite fascinated by those who* are proud to have done this at the time, and still are today, even in the name of ‘liberating’ (often in spite of themselves) users who don’t really understand the ins and outs of such a migration.
[*] To be clear, I’m not convinced, given the tone of the blogpost, that the author of this blog post does!
The more time went by, the more I realised that this state of mind was particularly toxic and ultimately disrespectful of the real needs of the people around us.
Can we please stop throwing around the word “toxic” for things are totally normal human interactions. Nobody is obliged to do free work for a product they neither bought themselves nor use nor like.
The “or never talk to me about your computer anymore” if you don’t run it the way I tell you to part, is, IMO, not normal or nice. I’m not sure I’d have called it toxic, but I’d have called it unpleasant and insensitive.
Of course nobody is obliged to do free work for a product they don’t purchase, use or like. That’s normal. But you can express sympathy to your friends and family who are struggling with a choice they made for reasons that seemed good or necessary to them, even if you don’t agree that it was a good choice. It’s normal listen to them talk about their challenges, etc., without needing to solve them yourself. You can even gently remind them that if they did things a different way, you could help but that you don’t understand their system choice well enough to help them meet their goals with it.
The problem is telling a friend or loved one not to talk to you about their struggles. Declining to work on a system you don’t purchase, use or like, is of course normal and not a problem.
I’ve used Linux on my own machines exclusively since 1999, and when I get asked to deal with computer problems (that aren’t related to hardware, networking or “basic computer literacy” skills) I can’t help with, I’ll usually say something along the lines of “you know, you actually probably know more about running a Windows machine than I do” - which doesn’t usually get interpreted as uncaring or insulting, and is also generally true.
If you buy a car that needs constant repairs you get rid of it and buy something else that does not require it. There is no need to sit with family/friends and discuss their emotianal journey working with a Windows computer. it is a thing. If it is broken have it repaired or buy something else.
If you buy a car that needs constant repairs you get rid of it and buy something else that does not require it.
You might. Or you might think that even though you’ve had to fix door closing sensor on that minivan’s automatic door 6 times now, no other style of vehicle meets your family’s current needs, and while those sensors are known to be problematic across the entire industry, there’s not a better move for you right now. And the automatic door closing function is useful to you the 75+% of the time that it works.
And you still might vent to your friend who’s a car guy about how annoying the low quality of the sensor is, or about the high cost of getting it replaced each time it fails.
Your friend telling you “don’t talk to me about this unless you suck it up and get a truck instead” would be insensitive, unpleasant and might even be considered by some to be toxic.
It’s not an emotional journey. You’re not asking your friend to fix it. You’re venting. A normal response from the friend would be “yeah, it’s no fun to deal with that.” Or “I’d know how to fix that on a truck, but I have no idea about a minivan.”
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edit to add: For those who aren’t familiar with modern minivans, they have error prone sensors on the rear doors that are intended to prevent them from closing on small fingers. To close the doors when those fail, it’s a cumbersome process that involves disabling the automatic door function from the driver’s area with the car started, then getting out and closing the door manually. It’s a pain, and if your sensor fails and your family is such that you use the rear seats regularly, you’ll fix it if you value your sanity.
As a sometimes erstwhile unpaid support technician, I vehemently disagree.
I fully admit that sometimes I stepped into that unpaid support technician role when I could have totally, in a kind, socially acceptable way, said “Wow, it’s miserable that your computer broke. You should talk to {people you bought it from}. I can tell you a lot about computing in general, but they’ll know a lot more about Windows than I would.”
And it would’ve been OK, because the people telling me about their problems were mostly venting, not really looking for a solution from me.
But as a problem solver, I’m conditioned to think that someone telling me about an issue is looking for a solution from me. That’s not so; it’s my bias and orientation toward fixing this kind of thing that makes me think so.
Thank you, you’ve put into much better words what I wanted to say than the adjective ‘toxic’, which was the only one I had to hand when I wanted to describe all this.
How on hell could it be considered as toxic to refuse to support something which is against your values, which requires you a lot of work, which is unpaid while still offering to provide a solution to the initial problem ?
All the people I’ve converted to Linux were really happy for at least several years (because, of course, I was not migrating someone without a lot of explanations and without studying their real needs).
The only people who had problem afterward were people who had another “unpaid microsoft technician” doing stuff behind my back. I mean I had been called by a old lady because her Linux was not working as she expected only to find out that one of her grand-children had deleted the Linux partition and did a whole new Windows XP install without any explanation.
First of all it is obviously your choice whether you want to give support for a system you don’t enjoy and may not have as much experience with. Especially when you could expect the vendors of that system to help, instead of you.
But the second part is how you express this: You are - after all - the expert getting asked about providing support. And so your answer might lead them down a route where they choose linux, even though it is a far worse experience for the requirements of the person asking for help.
The last point comes from the second: You have to accept that installing linux is for those people not something they can support on their own. If they couldn’t fix their windows problems, installing linux will at best keep it to the same level. Realistically they now have n+1 problems. And now they are 100% reliant upon you - the single linux expert they actually know for their distribution. And if you’re not there, they are royally fucked with getting their damn printer running again. Or their nVidia GPU freezing the browser. Or Teams not working as well with their camera. In another context you could say you secured your job. And if only because updates on windows are at least 100% happening, which is just not true on linux.
I have seen people with a similar attitude installing rolling releases for other people while disabling updates over more than 6 months, because they didn’t have the time to care about all the regular breakage. And yes that includes the browser.
And the harsh truth is that for many people that printer driver, MS Office, Teams + Zoom and Camera is the reason they have this computer in the first place. So accepting their needs can include “Sorry I am not able to help with that” while also accepting that even mentioning linux to them is a bad idea.
Because it’s a nice thing to do for your family and friends and they’ll likely reciprocate if you need help with something different. Half of the time when I get a “tech support” call from my aunt or grandparents, it’s really just to provide reassurance with something and have a nice excuse to catch up.
Mine was of wasting hours trying to deal with issues with a commercial OS because, despite paying for it, support was nonexistent.
One example: Dell or Microsoft (unsure of the guilty party) pushed a driver update that enabled power saving on WiFi idle by default. That combined with a known bug on my MIL’s WiFi chipset, where it wouldn’t come out of power saving mode. End result was the symptom “the Internet stops working after a while but comes back if I reboot it”.
Guess how much support she got from the retailer who sold her the laptop? Zip, zero, zilch, nada.
You’re not doing free technical support for your relatives, really: you’re doing free technical support for Dell, and Microsoft, and $BIG_RETAILER.
When Windows 11 comes around (her laptop won’t support it) I’m going to upgrade the system to Mint like the rest of my family :) If I’m going to donate my time I’d rather it be to a good cause.
Yes, that was never my experience, and if it had been I would be inclined to agree with you. These days I hear more of “why did I run out of iCloud storage again” or “did this extortion spammer actually hack my email,” which I find less frustrating to answer :)
Yeah it doesn’t matter for generic tech support, in my experience, what OS they’re running.
It’s just the rabbit holes where it’s soul destroying.
Another example was my wife’s laptop. She was a Dell XPS fan for years, and ran Windows. Once again a bad driver got pushed, and her machine took to blue-screening every few minutes. We narrowed it down to the specific Dell driver update. Fixed it by installing Mint :)
Edit: … and she’s now a happy Ryzen Framework 13 user. First non-XPS she’s owned since 2007.
Ugh. It’s not “toxic” to inform people of your real-world limitations.
My brother-in-law is a very experienced mechanic. But there are certain car brands he won’t touch because he doesn’t have the knowledge, equipment, or parts suppliers needed to do any kind of non-trivial work on them. If you were looking at buying a 10-year-old BMW in good shape that just needs a bit of work to be road-worthy, he would say, “Sorry, I can’t help you with that, I just don’t work on those. But if you end up with a Lexus or Acura, maybe we could talk.” He knows from prior experience that ANY time spent working on a car he has no training on would likely either result in wasted time or painting himself into an expensive corner, and everyone involved getting frustrated.
Similarly, my kids would prefer to have Windows laptops, so that they could play all the video games their peers are playing. However, I just simply don’t know how to work on Windows. I don’t have the skills or tools. I haven’t touched Windows in 20 years and forgot most of what I knew back then. I don’t know how to install software (does it have an app store or other repository these days?), I don’t know how to do back ups, I don’t know how to keep their data safe, I don’t know how to fix a broken file system or shared library.
But I can do all of these things on Linux, so they have Linux laptops and get along just fine with them.
Edit: To color this, when I was in my 20’s, I tried very hard to be “the computer guy” to everyone I knew, figuring that it would open doors for me somehow. What happened instead was that I found myself spending large amounts of my own free time trying to fix virus-laden underpowered Celerons, and either getting nowhere, or breaking their systems further because they were already on the edge. Inevitably, the end result was strained (or broken) relationships. Now, when I do someone a favor, I make sure it is something that I know I can actually handle.
But he didn’t force anyone, he clearly says that if those people didn’t want his help, he could just leave it the way it was. To me that’s reasonable - you want my help, sure, but don’t make me do something I’m personally against. It’s like, while working in a restaurant, being asked to prepare meat dishes when being a vegetarian, except that my example is about work and his story is about helping someone, so there’s even less reason to do it against his own beliefs.
From my experience being an unpaid support technician for friends and family, that’s the only reasonably approach. I had multiple situations when people called me to fix the result of someone else’s “work” and expected me to do it for free. It doesn’t work that way. Either I do it for free on my own terms, or you pay me the market rate.
Some examples I remember offhand. In one instance, I tried to teach a person with a malware-infested Windows some basic security practices, created an unprivileged account, and told them how to run things as administrator if they needed to install programs and so on. A few weeks later I was called to find the computer malware-infested again, because they asked someone else to help and he told them that creating a separate administrator account was “nonsense” and gave the user account administrator rights. Well, either you trust me and live more or less malware-free or you trust that guy and live with malware.
In another instance, I installed Linux for someone and put quite some effort into setting things up the way the person wanted. Some time later, they wanted some game but called someone else instead of me to help install it (I almost certainly would be able to make it run in Wine). That someone wiped out all my work and installed Windows to install that game.
People expecting you to be their personal IT team for free just because you “know computers” is just as disrespectful. I don’t think it’s unfair to tell people “no if you want help with your windows system you need to pay someone who actually deals with such things”
The more time went by, the more I realised that this state of mind was particularly toxic and ultimately disrespectful of the real needs of the people around us.
This is looking at the things with the current context. Windows nowadays is much more secure and you can basically leave a Windows installation to a normal user and not expect it to explode or something.
However at the time Windows was still the kind of operational system that if you put it on internet without the proper updates, it would be instantly be infected by malware 1. Most users run with admin accounts and it was really easy to get a malware installed by installing a random program, because things like binaries signatures didn’t exist yet. There were also no anti-malware installed by default in Windows, so unless you had some third-party anti-malware installed your computer could quickly become infested with malware. And you couldn’t also just refresh your installation by clicking in one button, you would need to actually format and reinstall everything (that would be annoying because drivers were much less likely to be included in the installation media, so you would need to have another computer that had an internet connection since the freshly installed Windows wouldn’t have any way to connect to internet).
At that time, it would make much more sense to try to convince users to switch to Linux. I did this with my mom for example, switching her computer to Linux since most things she did was accessing the internet. Migrating her to use Linux reduced the amount of support I had to do from once a week to once a month (and instead of having to fix something, it would be in most cases just to update the system).
It should be added that if you helped someone once with his Windows computer, you were considered responsible of every single problem happening on that computer afterward.
In some cases, it was even very strong problem (I remember a computer which was infected by a malware that dialed a very expensive line all the time. That family had a completely crazy phone bill and they had no idea why. Let assure you that they were really happy with Linux for the next 3 or 4 years)
It should be added that if you helped someone once with his Windows computer, you were considered responsible of every single problem happening on that computer afterward.
Very much that. It was never the user fault, even if you left the computer in pristine condition, if they had an issue in the same week it was your fault and you would need to fix that.
However at the time Windows was still the kind of operational system that if you put it on internet without the proper updates, it would be instantly be infected by malware.
At the same time, however, it was also much more likely that you needed to deal with an application that would only run on windows, a file format that could only be roundtripped by such an application, a piece of hardware that only worked on windows (remember winmodems? scanners sucked, too, and many printers were windows GDI only), etc.
So convincing someone to use Linux was more likely to cause them a different kind of pain.
Today, most hardware works reasonably with Linux. Printers need to work with iPhones and iPads, and that moved them off the GDI specific things that made them hard to support under Linux. Modems are no longer a thing for most people’s PCs. Proton makes a great many current games work with Linux. Linux browsers are first class. And Linux software handles most common file formats, even in a round trip, very well. So while there’s less need to switch someone to Linux, they’re also less likely to suffer if you do.
That said, I got married in 2002. Right after I got married, I got sent on a contract 2500 miles away from home on a temporary basis. My wife uses computers for office software, calendar, email, web browsing and not much else. She’s a competent user, but not able to troubleshoot very deeply on her own. Since she was working a job she considered temporary (and not career-track) at home, she decided to travel for that contract with me, and we lived in corporate housing. Her home computer at the time was an iMac. It wasn’t practical to bring that and we didn’t want to ship it.
The only spare laptop I had to bring with us so she had something to use for web browsing and job hunting on the road didn’t have a current enough to be trustworthy windows license, so I installed Red Hat 7.3 (not enterprise!) on there for her. She didn’t have any trouble. She’d rather have had a Mac, but we couldn’t have reasonably afforded one at the time. It went fine, but I’d never have dared to try that with someone who didn’t live with me.
At the same time, however, it was also much more likely that you needed to deal with an application that would only run on windows, a file format that could only be roundtripped by such an application, a piece of hardware that only worked on windows (remember winmodems? scanners sucked, too, and many printers were windows GDI only), etc.
Yes, but it really depends on the kinda of user. I wouldn’t just recommend Linux unless I knew that every needs from the user would fit in Linux. For example, for my mom, we had broadhand Ethernet at the time, our printer worked better on Linux than Windows (thanks CUPS!), and the remaining of her tasks were basically done via web browser.
It went fine, but I’d never have dared to try that with someone who didn’t live with me.
It also helped that she lived with me, for sure ;).
I feel pretty conflicted about the notion that moving from touching the keyboard to the mouse is a loss of focus.
I bought the notion earlier of course when I was really getting into Vim, but then I seriously tried just using the mouse and I found that it didn’t really make that much of a difference for me. As a result, I find it hard to believe the idea that the ‘context switch’ is really that meaningful.
I think it’s all about how the editor fits your brain. If it fits, great. If not, try something else. For me, vim’s keyboard focus is really enjoyable, and I think we’re more productive with things we like.
I think I could get to the point where I reach for the mouse instinctively, but with vim I never think about vim, it’s like walking, and when I use something else, reaching for the mouse is only triggered by being snapped out of everything being pure muscle memory. I think it’s possible the mouse just becomes another motion, but it’s hard to actually imagine since it’s so far away.
I disagree pretty strongly… Vim editing is a discipline, this is not something you will intuitively be good at, it takes months of labor to even be sort of okay at it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with touching a mouse, but the combination of gross+fine motor control it requires necessarily means you are slowing down your interaction with the machine by at least an order of magnitude, and that increases the risk of being knocked out of the flow state.
Keyboard-driven development in Vim is the only time my editor has felt like an extension of my mind.
I agree with that. Vim is a discipline, and takes a while to get proficient, with it’s rewards being cumulative over time.
My point about enjoying Vim is that I believe that is at the core of why I use it. There are many productive tools, but I stuck with Vim’s learning curve because I enjoyed it, because it fit my brain. Even though learning it was difficult, I was still enjoying the process of learning it, and I don’t think I would have continued to if I hadn’t. For example, I tried Emacs, and didn’t stick with it because it didn’t fit my brain as well, and hence I didn’t enjoy using it as much.
Doesn’t make a big difference for me either, but I think Vim is more fun and feels less like work. Even if it isn’t actually any faster (for me at least), it’s just fun and satisfying to string together editing commands in a way that clicking and dragging isn’t. Tickles the brain just right.
The keyboard feels more “deterministic” than the mouse because I don’t have to aim, I just, well, type the letters. Similarly, vim commands better reflect what I want than selecting the right number of characters with a mouse does. (E.g., if I want to delete a section of text, and I see the word “something” immediately after, I can use d/something. Lots of motions like that reflect how I think of the text I’m editing.)
When I’m at a desk, going for the mouse isn’t a terrible disruption. On a laptop? I hate fiddling with text using a trackpad. Maybe I’m just old, but it feels like working with oven mitts on. Not having to do that is invaluable. Having to use the trackpad (even the ThinkPad pointer) is a cognitive switch.
But, I’ve used Vim for decades. 20-something me, before Vim, might’ve felt differently.
I could believe that the physical context switch—moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse—has the potential to add some delay. But that’s only if you’re very proficient with the keyboard. If you want to move the cursor somewhere else in the document, but it takes you half a second to decide how to do that using the keyboard, you probably would’ve been better off just using the mouse.
I’ve been using Vim for 20 years, and while I’m comfortable using just the keyboard (when Vim is running in a terminal), I feel like I’m faster when I can also use the mouse (in MacVim).
I agree. I HATE having to interrupt my thoughts to decide how to navigate in my editor. Whether that happens frequently is going to vary from person to person …
and I bet that almost everything mentioned in this discussion varies wildly from person to person. I don’t mean that it’s just a matter of taste. I expect there are interesting reasons for all the variation. The variation between people is the sort of thing I would expect to be very very complicated.
I don’t think it’s the movement between the keyboard and the mouse that causes a “loss of focus” or a “context switch”: it’s the mental shift from vim-command-mode to GUI-desktop-mode. These are two different ways of interacting with a computer. In another comment here, @susam describes how switching from Emacs to a different GUI application “disrupts the flow”. Again, I don’t think it’s really about keyboard versus mouse: I think it’s more about two different cohesive models for controlling a computer.
I’ve used Vim for more than twenty years now and I think I’m pretty proficient at it. I don’t really think about how to control it, I just think of the change that I want to make to the text and my fingers automatically express that as Vim commands. The Vim command language is seared into my muscle memory. This has served me really well for a large part of my career, which I have spent using Vim and other teletype-terminal programs in tmux (and Screen before that).
However, these days, I find that I have to use a lot of other GUI desktop applications too - I can’t live in tmux any more - and I find the context switches between Vim and the rest of my desktop really jarring. The same modal command language that used to keep me in the flow now disrupts my flow!
So I recently decided to give up Vim and try a text editor that obeys the same modern desktop idioms as all the other GUI applications that I have to use for work. It’s taken me a few months to get used to it but I’m now glad that I made the switch: I no longer have to suffer jarring context switches every time I change between my text editor and my other tools.
Just the other day, I found myself having to make a load of edits to a configuration file: this was just pure text editing work. I felt like I was going so slowly, constantly grabbing the mouse to select some text, then going back to the keyboard to type. It was the sort of thing that I could do in no time, almost without thinking, in Vim. So I thought I’d test that: I undid all my changes then used a screen recorder to time myself doing them all again. Then I undid them and recorded myself doing it in Vim. It wasn’t really a fair comparison - since I’d already done all the tasks twice by the time I did them again in Vim - but I thought it would be interesting to see how much faster I was in Vim anyway. To my surprise, when I checked the recordings I found that I was faster using the mouse!
Anyway, different people will have different preferences, but I think it will also depend on the type of work that you’re doing. When I used to live in tmux, Vim was great. Now that I no longer have to work over SSH but I do have to use other GUI desktop applications, I prefer something else. I also found it interesting that my perception of my editing efficiency was quite different from the empirical measurements… but maybe that’s just me.
I do find it clumsy to context switch between keyboard-driven work and mouse-based work. Let me share a very recent example. Only yesterday, I was doing source code walkthrough of a new software project for someone else using my Emacs. I could do most of the code walkthrough merely by touch-typing on my keyboard.
I could hop around to different sections of the source code (movement commands), search for files containing specific identifiers or strings (project commands), hop between files (buffer commands), start/restart Docker containers (M-x eshell), run arbitrary shell commands (M-x eshell again), create new files with experimental code to test out ideas, etc. all from within Emacs, using nothing but the keyboard with my fingers relaxed comfortably on the home row most of the time, touch-typing away as I command Emacs to assist me in navigating through the code and testing out ideas.
But every once in a while, I would be forced to move my hand away from the keyboard to the mouse nearby in order to move the mouse pointer over to another GUI application to look up something. Each time I had to make this transition, it disrupted the “flow” and felt cumbersome, highlighting the disparity between the smooth keyboard-driven workflow within Emacs and the clumsy mouse-based navigation outside of it.
While I appreciate that not everyone shares the same experience as mine, and that’s perfectly fine, for me, every time I have to take my hand off the keyboard to reach for the mouse, it feels like shifting from cruising smoothly on a wide-open motorway to suddenly navigating through a bustling, congested local road.
For me the Vim flow is very nice, however lately I’ve been coding in LispWorks and there is no Vim mode there. The lost productivity of that is not as much as I thought it would be and it’s easily offset by the added productivity of LispWorks, so maybe it was all in my head.
The disruption one feels when moving one’s hand from the keyboard to the mouse depends on the distance to the mouse.
I originally learned Vim at a workstation with a full-size keyboard and an external mouse. Moving my hand from the home row to the arrow keys already felt disruptive, and moving to the external mouse took even longer. I could clearly feel the advantage of Vim keybindings.
Now I use a laptop with a 75% (compact tenkeyless) keyboard. Its arrow keys are much closer to the home row. The Mac laptop’s large trackpad is right below the keyboard (I use it mainly for scrolling or small cursor movements), and my external mouse is only a few inches from the keyboard’s arrow keys. That hardware difference is one reason I feel okay with using VS Code instead of Vim.
I am an Emacs user rather than vim but for me a keyboard-only workflow makes a big difference. I think it has to do with the fact that I can do the keyboard operations almost automatically, as if my fingers are doing the task autonomously and without the interruption of a having to do a visual search for the right GUI element.
And this applies to more than just coding. There is a reason people go out of their way to use keyboard-only window managers and to add keyboard navigation to web browsers.
I’ve mostly had the opposite experience, but I suspect that it may be just habit forming. That is, when I use my mouse I am annoyed and slower, but I don’t know how much of that is that I am simply not practiced in doing it versus it inherently being less precise/slower.
Sometimes coming at the question from a totally different angle can be illuminating. Consider this commentary from Adam Savage about his philosophy of shop organization and how it relates to flow-state. Very similar ideas there.
It used to be free to use a custom Google Workspace. At this point, you’re better of just using Fast Mail for email hosting and keeping it separate from Google.
I just tried to sign up for Fastmail actually, and … they apparently don’t support custom international domains. That’s more or less fine for people who live in and were born in the US and UK but might be a problem if you’re literally any other demographic, I’m disappointed.
Both the domains we are using with Fastmail are european ccTLDs (not .uk!) so I am not sure what you mean by “don’t support”. Their original domain was fastmail.fm and they are an Australian company.
Any chance @mort might be referring to Unicode vs. punycode rather than TLDs? I had no trouble using an .xyz in Fastmail when I set it up two days ago; granted, that’s a gTLD rather than a ccTLD and I set it up after I set up my .com.
Have you reached out to their support? Maybe they can add that. I have been a happy customer for many years and I would be surprised if they flat out reject it
Apparently their workaround is to manually enter the punycode domain. Would be kinda difficult to avoid supporting that I guess, but no part of their interface seems to have any understanding of or support for IDNs.
It is a workaround. If Fastmail supported IDNs, that would mean letting the user type in the IDN and not have deal with the punycode. It’s nice that IDNs are just specially encoded ASCII domains behind the scenes so that they can be made to work with legacy software which doesn’t support IDNs, but it’s sad that Fastmail is such legacy software.
I am on Google Workspace. For a long time it was great because of “free forever” plan, but eventually they removed it for everyone. I am considering moving my mail to iCloud since I am already paying for it and they seem to support custom domains. I am trying to understand repercussions of changing mail provider and moving away from Google when I used “Sign in with Google” a ton.
Has anyone else successfully transitioned from GMail to iCloud?
I’m curious about this too. I’m on Google’s $6/month plan (which they’re raising to $7.20 soon unless I choose the annual billing option). I’d like to use the opportunity to switch to a different provider (perhaps Fastmail to support a smaller company and avoid a single point of failure?), but I don’t want to lose any inbound emails in the meantime or make my outgoing emails end up in spam because of a switch with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
Edit: Just made the switch (thanks to this thread for the push!) and it went as smoothly as I could imagine. I had a DNS TTL of 300 seconds, so that gave me just long enough to put in the new MX record after deleting the old one to avoid losing any inbound mail. My outbound mail deliverability seems unaffected but I won’t know for sure until I’ve sent some more emails.
Yeah. They have a really nice import tool that can grab your mail directly from Google (over IMAP I think). That probably works differently with iCloud but I’m guessing they have something equivalent.
Solution: make 4 buttons, copy whatever’s underneath the window corners into the buttons, draw/erase the round window corners, and place them in the corners of the window :þ
No, the play button obviously also prevents the simple naive direct scanout. They are equivalent, IIUC they were used in different contexts in the post.
The hardware does support “video as underlay” which would be required to draw anything over the video, well AMD does at least but the compositor has to be clever enough to leverage it by moving the desktop to an overlay plane (!)
The article says that GTK can use zero-copy direct scanout when the video is unobscured; when there is a play button it can move the video to an underlay with hardware-assisted compositing; but when there are rounded corners GTK cannot offload video compositing at all. What is weird is that the article implies GTK is unable to use the same trick as the play button to get offload with rounded corners, but it doesn’t explain where that limitation comes from.
My guess is that there’s no longer a single surface the application could be rendering into, and there’s some server-side clipping that has to happen for squirkle corners, which implies the need to rasterize into a texture to post-process, whereas when there’s no boundary edges from the frame, there’s no need to clip, and hence rasterize.
The idea of a screenshot that captures the application tree state (e.g. the DOM tree) is really exciting. The internet seems full of screenshots (for whatever reason), and asking users to manually annotate them just doesn’t seem to work in practice.
In the last update, Windows added automatic OCR to screenshots. OCR works very well for screenshots because there’s no noise from a printer or scanner, but it struck me as an incredibly inefficient way of going from structured text to structured text.
Apple’s screenshot format for the whole screen is (was?) PDF but they use PNG for shots of individual windows. This always made me a bit sad because Quartz renders using a PDF drawing model and you can get resolution-independent PDFs by just changing the output device. I wish they’d done this for screenshots, so text would be text in generated PDFs.
This always made me a bit sad because Quartz renders using a PDF drawing model and you can get resolution-independent PDFs by just changing the output device.
That’s assuming applications aren’t internally composing everything down to pixel buffers before sending them off as PDF. X11 also had a relatively high-level view in what is going on with the screen, but these days it’s just sending around pixel buffers, which informed the Wayland design.
The one place where Apple uses PDF “screenshots” is when you take a screenshot in Safari on iOS and then choose “Full Page”. But that’s probably no different than exporting a page to a PDF, just a different UI.
Apple Silicon machines are designed first and foremost to provide a secure environment for typical end-users running macOS as signed by Apple; they prioritize user security against third-party attackers, but also attempt to limit Apple’s own control over the machines in order to reduce their responsibility when faced with government requests, to some extent. In addition, the design preserves security even when a third-party OS is installed.
… these machines may possibly qualify as the most secure general purpose computers available to the public which support third-party OSes, in terms of resistance to attack by non-owners.
If you run a third-party OS on a Chromebook, doesn’t that severely compromise the security of the Chrome OS system? If I remember correctly, many Chromebooks required you to take out a screw to install another operating system and the process prevented secure boot from functioning on the primary Chrome OS installation.
What’s nice about Apple Silicon Macs (from my understanding) is that their secure boot settings are per-OS, not systemwide. You can still perform all of the signature checks on a macOS installation without doing so on a Linux system on the same disk.
Without some kind of physical intervention by users doesn’t that leave macs vulnerable to a persistent attack? Like an evil maid or trojan that installs something like a keylogging hypervisor that boots regular macOS. That would be indistinguishable from the perspective of the user and probably macOS yet could easily be malicious.
reboot again because you forgot which buttons you needed to press on the keyboard :D
press correct buttons during boot
Enter the recovery OS
Enter the administrator password
Change the security setting
That said, I had to work on a chromebook for a while and that didn’t require a screw or anything to get into the unsafe mode, it was also a key chord.
There are a few critical differences though:
Changing to the insecure mode on a Chromebook erases all local content
From the article it sounds like beyond allowing you to launch a untrusted OS the security features are available to multiple OS’s (this is purely my reading of the article, I could very well be wrong). Whether linux or what have you support/use it i don’t know.
You’ve now shifted the goalpost from your original question (original goalpost was “vulnerable to a persistent attack” due to not requiring something similar to Chromebooks’ screw removal, new goalpost is alleging flaws in the SEP). I’ll no longer be responding to you.
Up to the Apple A10 by the checkra1n jailbreak (to bypass the measurement by the SEP used to lock data access on access to DFU for more recent iOS releases).
On the Apple A13 onwards, the measurement of the current SEP firmware version (by the monitor) is a component of the encryption key, making such attacks no longer able to have user data access.
It won’t ever. iMessage is bound to iOS hardware identifiers for authentication. It’s not the porting / RE that’s hard in that case, it’s that you can’t use it without real Apple hardware.
It’s definitely possible to run iMessage on a Hackintosh, where you just need a valid combination of device and logic board serial numbers and a few other magic boot loader values—there are tools to automate generating these. On the other hand, getting Messages.app plus all of the frameworks it requires to run on Linux wouldn’t be easy (remember that iMessage makes heavy use of the system keychain, APNs, and other fancy stuff that you can’t easily reimplement without pulling in half of macOS).
Ok, i phrased that wrong - you need to get an iPhone, but you can copy the identifiers out, which decreases the number of people interested in that solution since… they already have an iDevice.
I haven’t heard of anyone generating new valid numbers though. Have you got a link?
iMessage itself (the blue bubbles) still works just fine without an iPhone, you just don’t have an associated phone number to receive messages at without using your email address.
The serial numbers and SMBIOS stuff are for emulating a real Mac; they don’t come from an iPhone. The process is a bit more of a pain if you’ve never associated your Apple ID with a real Apple device or spent real money on the App Store (you usually have to make a purchase or call support to get your account permitted to use iMessage so as to cut down on spam), but it’s certainly possible.
Would love to get an international take and maybe someone has some data. Does flossing actually help?
I’ve never heard a German dentist recommend it more than in passing and I’ve been to a few different ones. Do Germans have a worse rate of dental problems than Americans? Actually I only ever heard it being mentioned as a sort of “everyone does it, you should do it, it’s second nature” by Americans and Canadians, never by Australians or people from the UK - but who knows how representative that is :)
It’s somewhat contested. Health authorities in the US have found evidence to be unreliable for flossing. That said, I do it daily and always manage to remove at least a little bit of something, even after brushing and using mouthwash, so I think it does serve a purpose.
My guess as someone who grew up in France, is that it’s less necessary if you have good healthcare and go to the dentist regularly. In the US the dentist can be costly even for a routine cleaning, so you better do your part and floss.
(I think it is useful, I’ve noticed a difference after starting to do it daily.)
At the end of the day we’re all human (I think), and tribalism is part of the package. It seems to show up when people invest in one thing vs another, whether the investment is time, money, emotion, brain rewiring (muscle memory!), etc…
As someone who actively used both at one point, and was probably on the proficient to advanced end of the spectrum in terms of editing experience with both, I cringe at claims that one editing style clearly outclasses the other in terms of efficiency, productivity, or whatever. I’d wager that 90% of the time in a keyboard-oriented editor, we navigate by word or line when we’re not navigating by search.
Arguing about editors reminds me of unproductive language disagreements, when we talk in terms of absolutes instead of trade offs.
Agree about 90 claim. After I’ve moved my arrow keys to home row via https://manybutfinite.com/post/home-row-computing/, I became almost as productive at raw text editing anywhere as I was in Emacs or Vim. Well, you also need ace jump and multiple cursors for coding specifically.
I think that some people portray Emacs and Lisp as “holy” and above criticism—although this is certainly a minority of those communities—so others respond with criticism of Emacs’s poor defaults and hostility to new users. People get into heated arguments about their favorite things, and that includes text editors.
It’s mostly team signalling. For some reason a bunch of nerds decided that Emacs/VIM is their Ford/(Holden|Chev) and they need to play silly tribal games.
Serious question: if the title were instead “Writing a Technical Book…”? Would that deserve a flag? Because if writing a technical book isn’t technical, I don’t know what is.
Also of note, other articles on the front page: “How India Censors The Web”, “…Maine Oyster Farm”, “History of C++”, “History of Lisp” , “Why [this unix command] exists”
I’m okay with all of those, since tech seeps everywhere in our lives. (The oyster farm story was a bit disappointing because it was a ton of words for just a little cloud stuff). Computers are everywhere. As people who use them to help people, we need to talk about how people use them and how we can do a better job of helping them. Perhaps we should just eliminate any reference to people at all? (In other words, an explanation of the technical details of X might be fine, but explaining how X got started and what people use it for would not be okay)
I’m just a bit confused. Trying to learn why people draw the distinctions that they do.
if the title were instead “Writing a Technical Book…”? Would that deserve a flag?
I believe so, yes. The flag isn’t about the story’s title but about the story’s content. The story is about writing books, not about computing. You could replace “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” with “Understanding molecular biology” or “Getting started with neurosciences” and the story’s content would not change: the conclusion is that writing popular books about technical content is worth it because it brings money and shares knowledge. This has really nothing to do with computing.
Also of note, other articles on the front page: “How India Censors The Web”, “…Maine Oyster Farm”, “History of C++”, “History of Lisp” , “Why [this unix command] exists”
I did not read any of these, so I refrained from flagging or upvoting them, but these titles do sound like titles of potentially technical stories about computing to me.
Computers are everywhere. As people who use them to help people, we need to talk about how people use them and how we can do a better job of helping them.
I agree, and there are places where talking about how people use computers and how we can do a better job of helping them already happens: hackernews and reddit. These discussions do not need to happen on lobste.rs in my opinion.
Many thanks! I don’t agree with you but I appreciate your taking the time to explain yourself farther.
To me you don’t know something unless you can use it, teach it, and explain it to others. We can certainly agree that the money/commercial aspect of technical books is not about computing (at least directly), but the entire world of conveying technical knowledge to others is as important to me as developer skills. After all, because other people did this, I can code! I owe them my thanks.
And I don’t think the commercial content necessarily needs to be off-topic. Technical people consume things in different ways than other people. My problem with content like this is that far too often it’s trying to appeal to the “I made a zillion dollars in two weeks! Aren’t I awesome!” crowd than it actually covers things that technical folks would need to know to help other technical folks. I suspect that’s because the content creators are shooting for a more general audience, but I don’t know. I agree that it can easily stray into non-tech areas, it just doesn’t always have to be that way.
Ah, but those are the best stories by far, and discussed better here than I’ve tended to find elsewhere, too!
For my part, I was glad to see this one get past the censors. Primo Levi also wrote books that weren’t about chemistry, but I’d like to think the chemists of his time still discussed them, even perhaps at conferences and meetings dedicated specifically to topics of the trade, like making varnishes and paint :-)
apologies, I was being sarcastic (some folks complain about posts hosted on medium and not being about computers to the extent of flagging a computer review tagged hardware as off-topic)
Sarcasm is mean and does not help people change their mind.
some folks complain
I am not complaining. I am describing why I flagged a story the way I flagged it, so that we can build a shared understanding of what is on and off-topic on lobste.rs. If you disagree with my reasons for flagging this story, I think a more useful response would have been to describe why you think I am wrong.
A lot of the reason I’m checking Stack Overflow is (1) the docs for tool/framework/library X are horrible (2) this is the umpteeth tool/framework/library/build system/command line tool to do thing Y I’ve used and can no longer keep everything I need in my head.
I don’t know… I’d at least like to wait until my preferred political party or favourite celebrity endorses this “pro-thinking”. I don’t want to go chasing fads.
It’s not obvious to me that more money constrained enterprises do in fact produce worse software in general; or even that software can be ranked on a single good-to-bad axis irrespective of the goals of the developers and users of that software. I don’t see the amount of money an organization has as being particularly related to how good their software is, or even see that as a particularly relevant question, given that an instition might want to use their money to produce software that does what they think is good rather than what I think is good.
that probably means your company has no pressing need to deliver new and unfinished software and it’s healthy enough not to pressure lower layers in the hierarchy into working crazily even if unnecessary.
My personal experience is that time constraints are rarely the reason for bad software; rather, a number of organisational and/or historical reasons are. Writing bad or good software usually takes about the same time Actually, writing good software is usually faster if you take the long-term view, and I think most people understand that.
The “write once, never look back” coding CEO, that kinda clueless coworker who doesn’t quite seem to know what they’re doing, that asshole coworker who absolutely insists on rewriting everything in their preferred way as that’s the One True Way, that other team in the other city which was recently hired and doesn’t understand the context, changing requirements or directions from management, the customer, or legislation, unclear requirements, a generally toxic work environment which leaves everyone demoralized, someone deciding we should follow latest fad X. Stuff like that tends to be a far larger influence in my experience.
Of course, I’ve only worked in five companies, so it may be different in other companies. But this is my experience based on those five companies.
no but a lot of good software comes from research centers, foundations, public institutions, where the priority is on quality, reliability, correctness, fairness and developers are free to work without being directly exposed to a market-driven feedback loop. That doesn’t mean that these institutions are not immersed in a market economy, but that they invest resources in shielding some people from these pressures in order to be able to produce a kind of quality that is not possible otherwise.
yeah but they can produce that software despite the market, not thanks to the market. The way they get funding and allocate resources is in response and opposition to the market needs.
Peer 2 Peer production is also done in societies with free markets, but they work really hard to try to escape it. It’s a bug, not a feature.
Even when I don’t have a time constraint set by some sort of external party, I still get stuck in the trap of searching Stack Overflow and becoming more and more frustrated (although this usually happens with infrastructure and deployment problems, not actual programming issues).
But I’m not going to put that directly this time, just because some too sensitive people might get “offended”.
When you see something that doesn’t affect you in the slightest and was made for free and given to the community to help, and you complain anyway, maybe you should ask yourself who is “too sensitive.”
+1 to this request. Speaking as a moderator, there’s nothing obviously wrong with this post to me. If it in fact has some problem, fine, we can address that, but only if we know what it is.
It’s almost enough to make me think there isn’t any real complaint, just a personal vendetta… but of course, that’s hard to prove, and really it’s beside the point. Either there is a complaint or there isn’t; if there isn’t, vague insinuations accomplish nothing.
Haha what? I reread the post after I saw this (I don’t even like Rust man) and couldn’t find anything off-topic, or even remotely problematic. Are you referring to the art, perhaps?
Yes. This user had a complaint about the art used in https://lobste.rs/s/3bbj56/edutech_spyware_is_still_spyware#c_9sqrho as well. In both cases, it’s their personal vendetta against cartoonish drawings of animals with human traits. They might be right that others dislike the art style as well, but it’s certainly not worth complaining about.
cmd+shift+4 pops up a crosshair to take a screenshot of a region.
And pressing space after cmd+shift+4 lets you screenshot a particular window.
And since 10.14 (I think) taking a screenshot now gives you a little preview in the bottom-right of the display which delays it writing to a file. If you just want it to write the file and skip the preview, cmd+shift+5 gives you an Options menu where you can disable “Show floating thumbnail”.
The nice thing about that floating thumbnail is that you can drag & drop it like a real file. Sometimes I’m screen shotting just to share with someone in chat, and that dragging that thumbnail over means I can send images without ever having them written to disk.
Mentioned in the other comment but yeah– pressing control along with wither hotkey just copies to clipboard inmediately which I’ve found to bw the best path for this usecase. Then I’m able to just Cmd + V in the target.
On Catalina (not sure about previous versions), you can also hit cmd + shift + 5 and select the clipboard as the default destination. Then you won’t need to add control for screenshots to go to the clipboard.
I give this same advice to new bike owners (who are likely to underspend on their lock), but this advice now really grates on me. I own a seven thousand dollar bike (bikes that are friendly to people with disabilities aren’t cheap 😞). How do I protect it when I’m away from home? $700 bike locks aren’t really a thing, and if you if you thought bike insurance rates on “cheap” bikes were bad…
Compared to a typical $7k bike, I’d guess that yours is far more difficult to fence. I hear that a stolen bike is usually chopped up for parts, and you have
an asymmetrical wheel set in two unusual sizes
no stem or handlebars
a frame not compatible with typical wheel sets
So perhaps it has the theft appeal of an inexpensive bike? (Despite how cool I think it is :)
I would still downgrade or lock your rear seat, though!
This comment is a really insightful addition to @calpaterson’s threat model. Even Powertool Percy’s fences might be stymied by, say, a penny farthing. (Or at least, I really hope that’d be the case.)
Due to COVID, we haven’t had a situation in the past year where we’ve left our bike outside unattended for any amount of time, but I expect our eventual theft-mitigation efforts will be some combination of:
locks, and more locks
paint the bike to be more distinctive
embed a gps tracker (or two?) in the frame
remove the steering pin when leaving the bike unattended
insure the bike (ugh)
Despite how cool I think it is :)
It’s awesome. Totally has ruined “normal” bikes for me. The ability to easily maintain conversations with someone on a long ride is a game-changer in itself!
That’s a really cool bike! Unlike a normal recumbent bike, I’m not seeing anywhere for the rider in front to hold onto with their hands. Is there a seatbelt or some other solution so that the rider in front doesn’t fly off during an emergency stop?
There are handles beneath the front seat! You can also order a seatbelt as an accessory, but the font seat feels very secure—even during abrupt braking!
No such thing. An “ordinary” bicycle frame is actually a high-wheeler. The typical diamond frame design is a “safety”. Anyway, USS has been one school of recumbent design since the 1970s at least.
The obvious first choice is to bring it into your home. If that’s not an option, maybe you can rent space in a neighbor’s garage or at some nearby storage service? There is no safe way to lock a bike up outside for multiple hours (see Percy, from the article).
There is no safe way to lock a bike up outside for multiple hours (see Percy, from the article).
Given a thief with an angle grinder, there isn’t even a safe way to lock a bike up outside for multiple minutes! Of course, I can keep the bike safe at home, but at some point it’s more furniture than bike.
Ah, I read your “when I’m away from home” as “when I’m away and the bike is at home”, which, in hindsight, doesn’t make much sense, oops. Sorry.
When I drag my bike into areas where theft is seemingly high, I get very unshy about taking my bike into the building and stashing it next to the receptionist, cashiers, etc. Most of the time they don’t seem to care, but I suspect this could be different if you’re in an area where cyclists are looked down on more than they are here..
I bought some of the products from Stephen Briggs (I think was a founder together with his wife Sarah. Company name was Pragmasis), this was about 9-10 years ago or so.
I am overall very happy with product, and the quality of interaction I had with Stephen.
Thankfully, the chains (I bought several, as had different needs for different weight/length configs) – were not tested.
I’m also surprised to hear that. Unless you explicitly look for troll channels, my experience has either been quiet (but quick to answer) or constantly active, and on topic.
I can’t say I’ve seen the things that the grandparent comment mentioned, but they definitely wouldn’t be on Freenode. If you limit yourself to Freenode, IRC is a very safe and well-moderated experience, especially on some exemplary channels like the Haskell one.
I have accidentally wandered into uncomfortable conversations and much worse things on some of the other popular IRC networks, of which quite a few still exist: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
The same thing is true of sketchy Discord servers as well; it’s not like IRC is unique in this regard.
A year or two back, Supernets was spamming hard on IRC networks. I forgot if Freenode was affected, but I know a lot of the smaller networks I was on were.
Not OP, but I spend my time on IRCnet and EFnet since my IRC use is just to stay in touch with friends. Anyway, last year I was DDoS’d pretty hard because someone wanted my nick on EFnet.
Sometimes I miss #C++ on EFnet, not enough to go back on EFnet, but I do miss it – a lot of wonderful people were there in the late 90s. Freenode feels a lot more sane in terms of management and tools for the system operators. Cloaks and nickname registration go a long way.
This is the primary reason I find programming in Common Lisp so enjoyable, as opposed to Rust (a probably superior language, but having to wait for 300 dependencies to compile / get linked is a far cry from compiling individual functions in a running Lisp image)
The lack of IDE support for better C++ build systems (e.g. Bazel) is a boat anchor on C++. I’m struggling right now to find a CMake replacement which supports both Visual Studio and CLion on Windows and Linux.
I’m reading a lot of research papers and blog posts on fuzzing to try to learn more about the state of the art with regards to kernel and low-level library fuzzing. I’m especially interested in techniques that work without target binary instrumentation; is there any way to approximate coverage-guided fuzzing (or at least improve efficiency over naive fuzzing) without direct access to source code or in situations where compiling is prohibitively difficult (think the NT kernel on a running Windows system or XNU on real iPhone hardware)?
I’m certainly a beginner in this particular subfield of computer science but I’d like to dive into it to do some of my own research. If anyone has any resources to point me towards, I’d be very appreciative!
The more time went by, the more I realised that this state of mind was particularly toxic and ultimately disrespectful of the real needs of the people around us.
I’m using the word ‘we’ here because obviously, I also had this approach at the time (admittedly, a few years later, being a bit younger), but I’m a bit ashamed of the approach I had at the time and today I have a deep rejection for this way of behaving towards a public who often use IT tools for specific needs and who shouldn’t become dependent on a certain type of IT support that isn’t necessarily available elsewhere.
Who are we to put so much pressure on people to change almost their entire digital environment? Even more so at a time when tools were not as widely available online as they are today.
In short, I’m quite fascinated by those who* are proud to have done this at the time, and still are today, even in the name of ‘liberating’ (often in spite of themselves) users who don’t really understand the ins and outs of such a migration.
[*] To be clear, I’m not convinced, given the tone of the blogpost, that the author of this blog post does!
Can we please stop throwing around the word “toxic” for things are totally normal human interactions. Nobody is obliged to do free work for a product they neither bought themselves nor use nor like.
The “or never talk to me about your computer anymore” if you don’t run it the way I tell you to part, is, IMO, not normal or nice. I’m not sure I’d have called it toxic, but I’d have called it unpleasant and insensitive.
Of course nobody is obliged to do free work for a product they don’t purchase, use or like. That’s normal. But you can express sympathy to your friends and family who are struggling with a choice they made for reasons that seemed good or necessary to them, even if you don’t agree that it was a good choice. It’s normal listen to them talk about their challenges, etc., without needing to solve them yourself. You can even gently remind them that if they did things a different way, you could help but that you don’t understand their system choice well enough to help them meet their goals with it.
The problem is telling a friend or loved one not to talk to you about their struggles. Declining to work on a system you don’t purchase, use or like, is of course normal and not a problem.
I’ve used Linux on my own machines exclusively since 1999, and when I get asked to deal with computer problems (that aren’t related to hardware, networking or “basic computer literacy” skills) I can’t help with, I’ll usually say something along the lines of “you know, you actually probably know more about running a Windows machine than I do” - which doesn’t usually get interpreted as uncaring or insulting, and is also generally true.
If you buy a car that needs constant repairs you get rid of it and buy something else that does not require it. There is no need to sit with family/friends and discuss their emotianal journey working with a Windows computer. it is a thing. If it is broken have it repaired or buy something else.
You might. Or you might think that even though you’ve had to fix door closing sensor on that minivan’s automatic door 6 times now, no other style of vehicle meets your family’s current needs, and while those sensors are known to be problematic across the entire industry, there’s not a better move for you right now. And the automatic door closing function is useful to you the 75+% of the time that it works.
And you still might vent to your friend who’s a car guy about how annoying the low quality of the sensor is, or about the high cost of getting it replaced each time it fails.
Your friend telling you “don’t talk to me about this unless you suck it up and get a truck instead” would be insensitive, unpleasant and might even be considered by some to be toxic.
It’s not an emotional journey. You’re not asking your friend to fix it. You’re venting. A normal response from the friend would be “yeah, it’s no fun to deal with that.” Or “I’d know how to fix that on a truck, but I have no idea about a minivan.”
–
edit to add: For those who aren’t familiar with modern minivans, they have error prone sensors on the rear doors that are intended to prevent them from closing on small fingers. To close the doors when those fail, it’s a cumbersome process that involves disabling the automatic door function from the driver’s area with the car started, then getting out and closing the door manually. It’s a pain, and if your sensor fails and your family is such that you use the rear seats regularly, you’ll fix it if you value your sanity.
“Tired of being an unpaid Microsoft support technician…” - no, it’s not venting.
As a sometimes erstwhile unpaid support technician, I vehemently disagree.
I fully admit that sometimes I stepped into that unpaid support technician role when I could have totally, in a kind, socially acceptable way, said “Wow, it’s miserable that your computer broke. You should talk to {people you bought it from}. I can tell you a lot about computing in general, but they’ll know a lot more about Windows than I would.”
And it would’ve been OK, because the people telling me about their problems were mostly venting, not really looking for a solution from me.
But as a problem solver, I’m conditioned to think that someone telling me about an issue is looking for a solution from me. That’s not so; it’s my bias and orientation toward fixing this kind of thing that makes me think so.
Thank you, you’ve put into much better words what I wanted to say than the adjective ‘toxic’, which was the only one I had to hand when I wanted to describe all this.
How on hell could it be considered as toxic to refuse to support something which is against your values, which requires you a lot of work, which is unpaid while still offering to provide a solution to the initial problem ?
All the people I’ve converted to Linux were really happy for at least several years (because, of course, I was not migrating someone without a lot of explanations and without studying their real needs).
The only people who had problem afterward were people who had another “unpaid microsoft technician” doing stuff behind my back. I mean I had been called by a old lady because her Linux was not working as she expected only to find out that one of her grand-children had deleted the Linux partition and did a whole new Windows XP install without any explanation.
I think there are three aspects to this:
First of all it is obviously your choice whether you want to give support for a system you don’t enjoy and may not have as much experience with. Especially when you could expect the vendors of that system to help, instead of you.
But the second part is how you express this: You are - after all - the expert getting asked about providing support. And so your answer might lead them down a route where they choose linux, even though it is a far worse experience for the requirements of the person asking for help.
The last point comes from the second: You have to accept that installing linux is for those people not something they can support on their own. If they couldn’t fix their windows problems, installing linux will at best keep it to the same level. Realistically they now have n+1 problems. And now they are 100% reliant upon you - the single linux expert they actually know for their distribution. And if you’re not there, they are royally fucked with getting their damn printer running again. Or their nVidia GPU freezing the browser. Or Teams not working as well with their camera. In another context you could say you secured your job. And if only because updates on windows are at least 100% happening, which is just not true on linux.
I have seen people with a similar attitude installing rolling releases for other people while disabling updates over more than 6 months, because they didn’t have the time to care about all the regular breakage. And yes that includes the browser.
And the harsh truth is that for many people that printer driver, MS Office, Teams + Zoom and Camera is the reason they have this computer in the first place. So accepting their needs can include “Sorry I am not able to help with that” while also accepting that even mentioning linux to them is a bad idea.
If I had that attitude towards my wife I would end up very principled and very single.
(Context: she is blind and needs to use Windows for work. I also have to use Windows for work)
I also agree with your interpretation a lot more but I doubt the author would mean that quite so literally.
Why on earth should the author be doing free tech support for people on an OS that they didn’t enjoy using?
Because it’s a nice thing to do for your family and friends and they’ll likely reciprocate if you need help with something different. Half of the time when I get a “tech support” call from my aunt or grandparents, it’s really just to provide reassurance with something and have a nice excuse to catch up.
Maybe we had different experiences.
Mine was of wasting hours trying to deal with issues with a commercial OS because, despite paying for it, support was nonexistent.
One example: Dell or Microsoft (unsure of the guilty party) pushed a driver update that enabled power saving on WiFi idle by default. That combined with a known bug on my MIL’s WiFi chipset, where it wouldn’t come out of power saving mode. End result was the symptom “the Internet stops working after a while but comes back if I reboot it”.
Guess how much support she got from the retailer who sold her the laptop? Zip, zero, zilch, nada.
You’re not doing free technical support for your relatives, really: you’re doing free technical support for Dell, and Microsoft, and $BIG_RETAILER.
When Windows 11 comes around (her laptop won’t support it) I’m going to upgrade the system to Mint like the rest of my family :) If I’m going to donate my time I’d rather it be to a good cause.
Yes, that was never my experience, and if it had been I would be inclined to agree with you. These days I hear more of “why did I run out of iCloud storage again” or “did this extortion spammer actually hack my email,” which I find less frustrating to answer :)
Yeah it doesn’t matter for generic tech support, in my experience, what OS they’re running.
It’s just the rabbit holes where it’s soul destroying.
Another example was my wife’s laptop. She was a Dell XPS fan for years, and ran Windows. Once again a bad driver got pushed, and her machine took to blue-screening every few minutes. We narrowed it down to the specific Dell driver update. Fixed it by installing Mint :)
Edit: … and she’s now a happy Ryzen Framework 13 user. First non-XPS she’s owned since 2007.
Ugh. It’s not “toxic” to inform people of your real-world limitations.
My brother-in-law is a very experienced mechanic. But there are certain car brands he won’t touch because he doesn’t have the knowledge, equipment, or parts suppliers needed to do any kind of non-trivial work on them. If you were looking at buying a 10-year-old BMW in good shape that just needs a bit of work to be road-worthy, he would say, “Sorry, I can’t help you with that, I just don’t work on those. But if you end up with a Lexus or Acura, maybe we could talk.” He knows from prior experience that ANY time spent working on a car he has no training on would likely either result in wasted time or painting himself into an expensive corner, and everyone involved getting frustrated.
Similarly, my kids would prefer to have Windows laptops, so that they could play all the video games their peers are playing. However, I just simply don’t know how to work on Windows. I don’t have the skills or tools. I haven’t touched Windows in 20 years and forgot most of what I knew back then. I don’t know how to install software (does it have an app store or other repository these days?), I don’t know how to do back ups, I don’t know how to keep their data safe, I don’t know how to fix a broken file system or shared library.
But I can do all of these things on Linux, so they have Linux laptops and get along just fine with them.
Edit: To color this, when I was in my 20’s, I tried very hard to be “the computer guy” to everyone I knew, figuring that it would open doors for me somehow. What happened instead was that I found myself spending large amounts of my own free time trying to fix virus-laden underpowered Celerons, and either getting nowhere, or breaking their systems further because they were already on the edge. Inevitably, the end result was strained (or broken) relationships. Now, when I do someone a favor, I make sure it is something that I know I can actually handle.
But he didn’t force anyone, he clearly says that if those people didn’t want his help, he could just leave it the way it was. To me that’s reasonable - you want my help, sure, but don’t make me do something I’m personally against. It’s like, while working in a restaurant, being asked to prepare meat dishes when being a vegetarian, except that my example is about work and his story is about helping someone, so there’s even less reason to do it against his own beliefs.
From my experience being an unpaid support technician for friends and family, that’s the only reasonably approach. I had multiple situations when people called me to fix the result of someone else’s “work” and expected me to do it for free. It doesn’t work that way. Either I do it for free on my own terms, or you pay me the market rate.
Some examples I remember offhand. In one instance, I tried to teach a person with a malware-infested Windows some basic security practices, created an unprivileged account, and told them how to run things as administrator if they needed to install programs and so on. A few weeks later I was called to find the computer malware-infested again, because they asked someone else to help and he told them that creating a separate administrator account was “nonsense” and gave the user account administrator rights. Well, either you trust me and live more or less malware-free or you trust that guy and live with malware.
In another instance, I installed Linux for someone and put quite some effort into setting things up the way the person wanted. Some time later, they wanted some game but called someone else instead of me to help install it (I almost certainly would be able to make it run in Wine). That someone wiped out all my work and installed Windows to install that game.
People expecting you to be their personal IT team for free just because you “know computers” is just as disrespectful. I don’t think it’s unfair to tell people “no if you want help with your windows system you need to pay someone who actually deals with such things”
This is looking at the things with the current context. Windows nowadays is much more secure and you can basically leave a Windows installation to a normal user and not expect it to explode or something.
However at the time Windows was still the kind of operational system that if you put it on internet without the proper updates, it would be instantly be infected by malware 1. Most users run with admin accounts and it was really easy to get a malware installed by installing a random program, because things like binaries signatures didn’t exist yet. There were also no anti-malware installed by default in Windows, so unless you had some third-party anti-malware installed your computer could quickly become infested with malware. And you couldn’t also just refresh your installation by clicking in one button, you would need to actually format and reinstall everything (that would be annoying because drivers were much less likely to be included in the installation media, so you would need to have another computer that had an internet connection since the freshly installed Windows wouldn’t have any way to connect to internet).
At that time, it would make much more sense to try to convince users to switch to Linux. I did this with my mom for example, switching her computer to Linux since most things she did was accessing the internet. Migrating her to use Linux reduced the amount of support I had to do from once a week to once a month (and instead of having to fix something, it would be in most cases just to update the system).
It should be added that if you helped someone once with his Windows computer, you were considered responsible of every single problem happening on that computer afterward.
In some cases, it was even very strong problem (I remember a computer which was infected by a malware that dialed a very expensive line all the time. That family had a completely crazy phone bill and they had no idea why. Let assure you that they were really happy with Linux for the next 3 or 4 years)
Very much that. It was never the user fault, even if you left the computer in pristine condition, if they had an issue in the same week it was your fault and you would need to fix that.
At the same time, however, it was also much more likely that you needed to deal with an application that would only run on windows, a file format that could only be roundtripped by such an application, a piece of hardware that only worked on windows (remember winmodems? scanners sucked, too, and many printers were windows GDI only), etc.
So convincing someone to use Linux was more likely to cause them a different kind of pain.
Today, most hardware works reasonably with Linux. Printers need to work with iPhones and iPads, and that moved them off the GDI specific things that made them hard to support under Linux. Modems are no longer a thing for most people’s PCs. Proton makes a great many current games work with Linux. Linux browsers are first class. And Linux software handles most common file formats, even in a round trip, very well. So while there’s less need to switch someone to Linux, they’re also less likely to suffer if you do.
That said, I got married in 2002. Right after I got married, I got sent on a contract 2500 miles away from home on a temporary basis. My wife uses computers for office software, calendar, email, web browsing and not much else. She’s a competent user, but not able to troubleshoot very deeply on her own. Since she was working a job she considered temporary (and not career-track) at home, she decided to travel for that contract with me, and we lived in corporate housing. Her home computer at the time was an iMac. It wasn’t practical to bring that and we didn’t want to ship it.
The only spare laptop I had to bring with us so she had something to use for web browsing and job hunting on the road didn’t have a current enough to be trustworthy windows license, so I installed Red Hat 7.3 (not enterprise!) on there for her. She didn’t have any trouble. She’d rather have had a Mac, but we couldn’t have reasonably afforded one at the time. It went fine, but I’d never have dared to try that with someone who didn’t live with me.
Yes, but it really depends on the kinda of user. I wouldn’t just recommend Linux unless I knew that every needs from the user would fit in Linux. For example, for my mom, we had broadhand Ethernet at the time, our printer worked better on Linux than Windows (thanks CUPS!), and the remaining of her tasks were basically done via web browser.
It also helped that she lived with me, for sure ;).
I feel pretty conflicted about the notion that moving from touching the keyboard to the mouse is a loss of focus.
I bought the notion earlier of course when I was really getting into Vim, but then I seriously tried just using the mouse and I found that it didn’t really make that much of a difference for me. As a result, I find it hard to believe the idea that the ‘context switch’ is really that meaningful.
Has anyone else had that experience?
I think it’s all about how the editor fits your brain. If it fits, great. If not, try something else. For me, vim’s keyboard focus is really enjoyable, and I think we’re more productive with things we like.
I think I could get to the point where I reach for the mouse instinctively, but with vim I never think about vim, it’s like walking, and when I use something else, reaching for the mouse is only triggered by being snapped out of everything being pure muscle memory. I think it’s possible the mouse just becomes another motion, but it’s hard to actually imagine since it’s so far away.
Very fair!
I disagree pretty strongly… Vim editing is a discipline, this is not something you will intuitively be good at, it takes months of labor to even be sort of okay at it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with touching a mouse, but the combination of gross+fine motor control it requires necessarily means you are slowing down your interaction with the machine by at least an order of magnitude, and that increases the risk of being knocked out of the flow state.
Keyboard-driven development in Vim is the only time my editor has felt like an extension of my mind.
I agree with that. Vim is a discipline, and takes a while to get proficient, with it’s rewards being cumulative over time.
My point about enjoying Vim is that I believe that is at the core of why I use it. There are many productive tools, but I stuck with Vim’s learning curve because I enjoyed it, because it fit my brain. Even though learning it was difficult, I was still enjoying the process of learning it, and I don’t think I would have continued to if I hadn’t. For example, I tried Emacs, and didn’t stick with it because it didn’t fit my brain as well, and hence I didn’t enjoy using it as much.
Doesn’t make a big difference for me either, but I think Vim is more fun and feels less like work. Even if it isn’t actually any faster (for me at least), it’s just fun and satisfying to string together editing commands in a way that clicking and dragging isn’t. Tickles the brain just right.
The keyboard feels more “deterministic” than the mouse because I don’t have to aim, I just, well, type the letters. Similarly, vim commands better reflect what I want than selecting the right number of characters with a mouse does. (E.g., if I want to delete a section of text, and I see the word “something” immediately after, I can use
d/something. Lots of motions like that reflect how I think of the text I’m editing.)I like that idea, keyboard is digital, mouse is analog.
When I’m at a desk, going for the mouse isn’t a terrible disruption. On a laptop? I hate fiddling with text using a trackpad. Maybe I’m just old, but it feels like working with oven mitts on. Not having to do that is invaluable. Having to use the trackpad (even the ThinkPad pointer) is a cognitive switch.
But, I’ve used Vim for decades. 20-something me, before Vim, might’ve felt differently.
I could believe that the physical context switch—moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse—has the potential to add some delay. But that’s only if you’re very proficient with the keyboard. If you want to move the cursor somewhere else in the document, but it takes you half a second to decide how to do that using the keyboard, you probably would’ve been better off just using the mouse.
I’ve been using Vim for 20 years, and while I’m comfortable using just the keyboard (when Vim is running in a terminal), I feel like I’m faster when I can also use the mouse (in MacVim).
I agree. I HATE having to interrupt my thoughts to decide how to navigate in my editor. Whether that happens frequently is going to vary from person to person …
and I bet that almost everything mentioned in this discussion varies wildly from person to person. I don’t mean that it’s just a matter of taste. I expect there are interesting reasons for all the variation. The variation between people is the sort of thing I would expect to be very very complicated.
I use the mouse with vim pretty heavily. I think the fact that it actually works pretty well in there is forgotten in a lot of these threads.
I don’t think it’s the movement between the keyboard and the mouse that causes a “loss of focus” or a “context switch”: it’s the mental shift from vim-command-mode to GUI-desktop-mode. These are two different ways of interacting with a computer. In another comment here, @susam describes how switching from Emacs to a different GUI application “disrupts the flow”. Again, I don’t think it’s really about keyboard versus mouse: I think it’s more about two different cohesive models for controlling a computer.
I’ve used Vim for more than twenty years now and I think I’m pretty proficient at it. I don’t really think about how to control it, I just think of the change that I want to make to the text and my fingers automatically express that as Vim commands. The Vim command language is seared into my muscle memory. This has served me really well for a large part of my career, which I have spent using Vim and other teletype-terminal programs in tmux (and Screen before that).
However, these days, I find that I have to use a lot of other GUI desktop applications too - I can’t live in tmux any more - and I find the context switches between Vim and the rest of my desktop really jarring. The same modal command language that used to keep me in the flow now disrupts my flow!
So I recently decided to give up Vim and try a text editor that obeys the same modern desktop idioms as all the other GUI applications that I have to use for work. It’s taken me a few months to get used to it but I’m now glad that I made the switch: I no longer have to suffer jarring context switches every time I change between my text editor and my other tools.
Just the other day, I found myself having to make a load of edits to a configuration file: this was just pure text editing work. I felt like I was going so slowly, constantly grabbing the mouse to select some text, then going back to the keyboard to type. It was the sort of thing that I could do in no time, almost without thinking, in Vim. So I thought I’d test that: I undid all my changes then used a screen recorder to time myself doing them all again. Then I undid them and recorded myself doing it in Vim. It wasn’t really a fair comparison - since I’d already done all the tasks twice by the time I did them again in Vim - but I thought it would be interesting to see how much faster I was in Vim anyway. To my surprise, when I checked the recordings I found that I was faster using the mouse!
Anyway, different people will have different preferences, but I think it will also depend on the type of work that you’re doing. When I used to live in tmux, Vim was great. Now that I no longer have to work over SSH but I do have to use other GUI desktop applications, I prefer something else. I also found it interesting that my perception of my editing efficiency was quite different from the empirical measurements… but maybe that’s just me.
I do find it clumsy to context switch between keyboard-driven work and mouse-based work. Let me share a very recent example. Only yesterday, I was doing source code walkthrough of a new software project for someone else using my Emacs. I could do most of the code walkthrough merely by touch-typing on my keyboard.
I could hop around to different sections of the source code (movement commands), search for files containing specific identifiers or strings (project commands), hop between files (buffer commands), start/restart Docker containers (M-x eshell), run arbitrary shell commands (M-x eshell again), create new files with experimental code to test out ideas, etc. all from within Emacs, using nothing but the keyboard with my fingers relaxed comfortably on the home row most of the time, touch-typing away as I command Emacs to assist me in navigating through the code and testing out ideas.
But every once in a while, I would be forced to move my hand away from the keyboard to the mouse nearby in order to move the mouse pointer over to another GUI application to look up something. Each time I had to make this transition, it disrupted the “flow” and felt cumbersome, highlighting the disparity between the smooth keyboard-driven workflow within Emacs and the clumsy mouse-based navigation outside of it.
While I appreciate that not everyone shares the same experience as mine, and that’s perfectly fine, for me, every time I have to take my hand off the keyboard to reach for the mouse, it feels like shifting from cruising smoothly on a wide-open motorway to suddenly navigating through a bustling, congested local road.
I have the same experience. I don’t feel any loss of focus from switching.
For me the Vim flow is very nice, however lately I’ve been coding in LispWorks and there is no Vim mode there. The lost productivity of that is not as much as I thought it would be and it’s easily offset by the added productivity of LispWorks, so maybe it was all in my head.
The disruption one feels when moving one’s hand from the keyboard to the mouse depends on the distance to the mouse.
I originally learned Vim at a workstation with a full-size keyboard and an external mouse. Moving my hand from the home row to the arrow keys already felt disruptive, and moving to the external mouse took even longer. I could clearly feel the advantage of Vim keybindings.
Now I use a laptop with a 75% (compact tenkeyless) keyboard. Its arrow keys are much closer to the home row. The Mac laptop’s large trackpad is right below the keyboard (I use it mainly for scrolling or small cursor movements), and my external mouse is only a few inches from the keyboard’s arrow keys. That hardware difference is one reason I feel okay with using VS Code instead of Vim.
I am an Emacs user rather than vim but for me a keyboard-only workflow makes a big difference. I think it has to do with the fact that I can do the keyboard operations almost automatically, as if my fingers are doing the task autonomously and without the interruption of a having to do a visual search for the right GUI element.
And this applies to more than just coding. There is a reason people go out of their way to use keyboard-only window managers and to add keyboard navigation to web browsers.
I’ve mostly had the opposite experience, but I suspect that it may be just habit forming. That is, when I use my mouse I am annoyed and slower, but I don’t know how much of that is that I am simply not practiced in doing it versus it inherently being less precise/slower.
Sometimes coming at the question from a totally different angle can be illuminating. Consider this commentary from Adam Savage about his philosophy of shop organization and how it relates to flow-state. Very similar ideas there.
Also another important take away from the story - cats got spoiled and now drinks only from fountain.
Same story here with the same fountain :) Cat hydration has to be a good thing, so I can’t complain.
it makes sense when you hear it, right? in the wild, moving water is more likely to be safe to drink than still
Yes, I was trying to get a cat few days back and posted a question in pets.stackexchange and they told me to get a fountain(s) too.
In the end I was denied by landlord. so I’m sad until I can afford a mortgage. :(
I’ve heard: Cats don’t see still water. They can make it move and then realize it’s there.
It used to be free to use a custom Google Workspace. At this point, you’re better of just using Fast Mail for email hosting and keeping it separate from Google.
I just tried to sign up for Fastmail actually, and … they apparently don’t support custom international domains. That’s more or less fine for people who live in and were born in the US and UK but might be a problem if you’re literally any other demographic, I’m disappointed.
Both the domains we are using with Fastmail are european ccTLDs (not .uk!) so I am not sure what you mean by “don’t support”. Their original domain was fastmail.fm and they are an Australian company.
Any chance @mort might be referring to Unicode vs. punycode rather than TLDs? I had no trouble using an .xyz in Fastmail when I set it up two days ago; granted, that’s a gTLD rather than a ccTLD and I set it up after I set up my .com.
@snazz is right, I’m talking about IDNs, aka non-ASCII characters in the name.
Have you reached out to their support? Maybe they can add that. I have been a happy customer for many years and I would be surprised if they flat out reject it
Apparently their workaround is to manually enter the punycode domain. Would be kinda difficult to avoid supporting that I guess, but no part of their interface seems to have any understanding of or support for IDNs.
You should always use punycode, without exception, in every circumstance. IDNs are just a display-level thing.
That’s literally exactly what I said their workaround is, yes
And what I am saying is that this is not a workaround.
There isn’t any scenario where you wouldn’t use punycode. Not for Fastmail, not for anything.
It is a workaround. If Fastmail supported IDNs, that would mean letting the user type in the IDN and not have deal with the punycode. It’s nice that IDNs are just specially encoded ASCII domains behind the scenes so that they can be made to work with legacy software which doesn’t support IDNs, but it’s sad that Fastmail is such legacy software.
I am using an IDN with Fastmail just fine.
When I tried to enter my custom domain while signing up it just told me to “enter a domain” if I had entered a domain with an “ø” in it
Just use its punycode encoding.
Yeah, that’s the workaround you have to do to account for the fact that Fastmail doesn’t support IDNs.
I am on Google Workspace. For a long time it was great because of “free forever” plan, but eventually they removed it for everyone. I am considering moving my mail to iCloud since I am already paying for it and they seem to support custom domains. I am trying to understand repercussions of changing mail provider and moving away from Google when I used “Sign in with Google” a ton.
Has anyone else successfully transitioned from GMail to iCloud?
I’m curious about this too. I’m on Google’s $6/month plan (which they’re raising to $7.20 soon unless I choose the annual billing option). I’d like to use the opportunity to switch to a different provider (perhaps Fastmail to support a smaller company and avoid a single point of failure?), but I don’t want to lose any inbound emails in the meantime or make my outgoing emails end up in spam because of a switch with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
Edit: Just made the switch (thanks to this thread for the push!) and it went as smoothly as I could imagine. I had a DNS TTL of 300 seconds, so that gave me just long enough to put in the new MX record after deleting the old one to avoid losing any inbound mail. My outbound mail deliverability seems unaffected but I won’t know for sure until I’ve sent some more emails.
Thanks for the update and the tip about shorter DNS TTL. Did you switch to Fastmail?
Yeah. They have a really nice import tool that can grab your mail directly from Google (over IMAP I think). That probably works differently with iCloud but I’m guessing they have something equivalent.
Wow, that’s some dire consequences of rounded corners.
Weird that they can composit a play button on top of the video, but not rounded corners 🤔
Solution: make 4 buttons, copy whatever’s underneath the window corners into the buttons, draw/erase the round window corners, and place them in the corners of the window :þ
Depends whether the window is a rectangle with rounded corners or an actual squircle :)
No, the play button obviously also prevents the simple naive direct scanout. They are equivalent, IIUC they were used in different contexts in the post.
The hardware does support “video as underlay” which would be required to draw anything over the video, well AMD does at least but the compositor has to be clever enough to leverage it by moving the desktop to an overlay plane (!)
The article says that GTK can use zero-copy direct scanout when the video is unobscured; when there is a play button it can move the video to an underlay with hardware-assisted compositing; but when there are rounded corners GTK cannot offload video compositing at all. What is weird is that the article implies GTK is unable to use the same trick as the play button to get offload with rounded corners, but it doesn’t explain where that limitation comes from.
My guess is that there’s no longer a single surface the application could be rendering into, and there’s some server-side clipping that has to happen for squirkle corners, which implies the need to rasterize into a texture to post-process, whereas when there’s no boundary edges from the frame, there’s no need to clip, and hence rasterize.
The idea of a screenshot that captures the application tree state (e.g. the DOM tree) is really exciting. The internet seems full of screenshots (for whatever reason), and asking users to manually annotate them just doesn’t seem to work in practice.
In the last update, Windows added automatic OCR to screenshots. OCR works very well for screenshots because there’s no noise from a printer or scanner, but it struck me as an incredibly inefficient way of going from structured text to structured text.
Apple’s screenshot format for the whole screen is (was?) PDF but they use PNG for shots of individual windows. This always made me a bit sad because Quartz renders using a PDF drawing model and you can get resolution-independent PDFs by just changing the output device. I wish they’d done this for screenshots, so text would be text in generated PDFs.
That’s assuming applications aren’t internally composing everything down to pixel buffers before sending them off as PDF. X11 also had a relatively high-level view in what is going on with the screen, but these days it’s just sending around pixel buffers, which informed the Wayland design.
At least on Sonoma (current) macOS, both full-screen (cmd-shift-3) and window (cmd-shift-5) screenshots are saved as PNG.
The one place where Apple uses PDF “screenshots” is when you take a screenshot in Safari on iOS and then choose “Full Page”. But that’s probably no different than exporting a page to a PDF, just a different UI.
Interesting:
I’m surprised to not see ChromeOS mentioned here, reading this analysis it seems it would stand up fairly well?
If you run a third-party OS on a Chromebook, doesn’t that severely compromise the security of the Chrome OS system? If I remember correctly, many Chromebooks required you to take out a screw to install another operating system and the process prevented secure boot from functioning on the primary Chrome OS installation.
What’s nice about Apple Silicon Macs (from my understanding) is that their secure boot settings are per-OS, not systemwide. You can still perform all of the signature checks on a macOS installation without doing so on a Linux system on the same disk.
Without some kind of physical intervention by users doesn’t that leave macs vulnerable to a persistent attack? Like an evil maid or trojan that installs something like a keylogging hypervisor that boots regular macOS. That would be indistinguishable from the perspective of the user and probably macOS yet could easily be malicious.
It does require physical actions. You have to
That said, I had to work on a chromebook for a while and that didn’t require a screw or anything to get into the unsafe mode, it was also a key chord.
There are a few critical differences though:
The article answered this.
It relies on their SEP being trustworthy which doesn’t have a great track record…
You’ve now shifted the goalpost from your original question (original goalpost was “vulnerable to a persistent attack” due to not requiring something similar to Chromebooks’ screw removal, new goalpost is alleging flaws in the SEP). I’ll no longer be responding to you.
Wait, when was the SEP compromised?
Up to the Apple A10 by the checkra1n jailbreak (to bypass the measurement by the SEP used to lock data access on access to DFU for more recent iOS releases).
On the Apple A13 onwards, the measurement of the current SEP firmware version (by the monitor) is a component of the encryption key, making such attacks no longer able to have user data access.
Call me when it runs IMessage.
It won’t ever. iMessage is bound to iOS hardware identifiers for authentication. It’s not the porting / RE that’s hard in that case, it’s that you can’t use it without real Apple hardware.
It’s definitely possible to run iMessage on a Hackintosh, where you just need a valid combination of device and logic board serial numbers and a few other magic boot loader values—there are tools to automate generating these. On the other hand, getting Messages.app plus all of the frameworks it requires to run on Linux wouldn’t be easy (remember that iMessage makes heavy use of the system keychain, APNs, and other fancy stuff that you can’t easily reimplement without pulling in half of macOS).
Ok, i phrased that wrong - you need to get an iPhone, but you can copy the identifiers out, which decreases the number of people interested in that solution since… they already have an iDevice.
I haven’t heard of anyone generating new valid numbers though. Have you got a link?
iMessage itself (the blue bubbles) still works just fine without an iPhone, you just don’t have an associated phone number to receive messages at without using your email address.
The serial numbers and SMBIOS stuff are for emulating a real Mac; they don’t come from an iPhone. The process is a bit more of a pain if you’ve never associated your Apple ID with a real Apple device or spent real money on the App Store (you usually have to make a purchase or call support to get your account permitted to use iMessage so as to cut down on spam), but it’s certainly possible.
Here’s a more detailed link on that topic: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Post-Install/universal/iservices.html
Would love to get an international take and maybe someone has some data. Does flossing actually help?
I’ve never heard a German dentist recommend it more than in passing and I’ve been to a few different ones. Do Germans have a worse rate of dental problems than Americans? Actually I only ever heard it being mentioned as a sort of “everyone does it, you should do it, it’s second nature” by Americans and Canadians, never by Australians or people from the UK - but who knows how representative that is :)
It’s somewhat contested. Health authorities in the US have found evidence to be unreliable for flossing. That said, I do it daily and always manage to remove at least a little bit of something, even after brushing and using mouthwash, so I think it does serve a purpose.
There is evidence that flossing prevents gingivitis. The problem with studying flossing is 1) controlled trials have ethics barriers, and 2) that most people self-report that they floss when they don’t.
My guess as someone who grew up in France, is that it’s less necessary if you have good healthcare and go to the dentist regularly. In the US the dentist can be costly even for a routine cleaning, so you better do your part and floss.
(I think it is useful, I’ve noticed a difference after starting to do it daily.)
My Swedish dentist tells me to floss regularly.
Although I do not prefer emacs day-to-day, I never understood the disdain for it. It must be the cool thing to do/say on the Internet.
At the end of the day we’re all human (I think), and tribalism is part of the package. It seems to show up when people invest in one thing vs another, whether the investment is time, money, emotion, brain rewiring (muscle memory!), etc…
In-group/out-group dynamics, mostly? Getting incensed by some other person’s choice of tools is pretty weird, when you think about it.
As someone who actively used both at one point, and was probably on the proficient to advanced end of the spectrum in terms of editing experience with both, I cringe at claims that one editing style clearly outclasses the other in terms of efficiency, productivity, or whatever. I’d wager that 90% of the time in a keyboard-oriented editor, we navigate by word or line when we’re not navigating by search.
Arguing about editors reminds me of unproductive language disagreements, when we talk in terms of absolutes instead of trade offs.
Agree about 90 claim. After I’ve moved my arrow keys to home row via https://manybutfinite.com/post/home-row-computing/, I became almost as productive at raw text editing anywhere as I was in Emacs or Vim. Well, you also need ace jump and multiple cursors for coding specifically.
I think that some people portray Emacs and Lisp as “holy” and above criticism—although this is certainly a minority of those communities—so others respond with criticism of Emacs’s poor defaults and hostility to new users. People get into heated arguments about their favorite things, and that includes text editors.
It’s mostly team signalling. For some reason a bunch of nerds decided that Emacs/VIM is their Ford/(Holden|Chev) and they need to play silly tribal games.
Is there a reason the font weight is so low? The text is already grey, making it light doesn’t help with readability.
Presumably because that weight looks really nice on macOS, which dilates fonts. It looks strange with ClearType or FreeType.
I flagged this story as off topic because it’s not about computing.
Serious question: if the title were instead “Writing a Technical Book…”? Would that deserve a flag? Because if writing a technical book isn’t technical, I don’t know what is.
Also of note, other articles on the front page: “How India Censors The Web”, “…Maine Oyster Farm”, “History of C++”, “History of Lisp” , “Why [this unix command] exists”
I’m okay with all of those, since tech seeps everywhere in our lives. (The oyster farm story was a bit disappointing because it was a ton of words for just a little cloud stuff). Computers are everywhere. As people who use them to help people, we need to talk about how people use them and how we can do a better job of helping them. Perhaps we should just eliminate any reference to people at all? (In other words, an explanation of the technical details of X might be fine, but explaining how X got started and what people use it for would not be okay)
I’m just a bit confused. Trying to learn why people draw the distinctions that they do.
I believe so, yes. The flag isn’t about the story’s title but about the story’s content. The story is about writing books, not about computing. You could replace “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” with “Understanding molecular biology” or “Getting started with neurosciences” and the story’s content would not change: the conclusion is that writing popular books about technical content is worth it because it brings money and shares knowledge. This has really nothing to do with computing.
I did not read any of these, so I refrained from flagging or upvoting them, but these titles do sound like titles of potentially technical stories about computing to me.
I agree, and there are places where talking about how people use computers and how we can do a better job of helping them already happens: hackernews and reddit. These discussions do not need to happen on lobste.rs in my opinion.
Many thanks! I don’t agree with you but I appreciate your taking the time to explain yourself farther.
To me you don’t know something unless you can use it, teach it, and explain it to others. We can certainly agree that the money/commercial aspect of technical books is not about computing (at least directly), but the entire world of conveying technical knowledge to others is as important to me as developer skills. After all, because other people did this, I can code! I owe them my thanks.
And I don’t think the commercial content necessarily needs to be off-topic. Technical people consume things in different ways than other people. My problem with content like this is that far too often it’s trying to appeal to the “I made a zillion dollars in two weeks! Aren’t I awesome!” crowd than it actually covers things that technical folks would need to know to help other technical folks. I suspect that’s because the content creators are shooting for a more general audience, but I don’t know. I agree that it can easily stray into non-tech areas, it just doesn’t always have to be that way.
Thanks again!
Ah, but those are the best stories by far, and discussed better here than I’ve tended to find elsewhere, too!
For my part, I was glad to see this one get past the censors. Primo Levi also wrote books that weren’t about chemistry, but I’d like to think the chemists of his time still discussed them, even perhaps at conferences and meetings dedicated specifically to topics of the trade, like making varnishes and paint :-)
Is it hosted on Medium to boot?
No? It’s a Jekyll site.
apologies, I was being sarcastic (some folks complain about posts hosted on medium and not being about computers to the extent of flagging a computer review tagged hardware as off-topic)
Sarcasm is mean and does not help people change their mind.
I am not complaining. I am describing why I flagged a story the way I flagged it, so that we can build a shared understanding of what is on and off-topic on lobste.rs. If you disagree with my reasons for flagging this story, I think a more useful response would have been to describe why you think I am wrong.
All good. I see the sarcasm now. Text makes it hard to convey tone.
“The root cause is a lack of thinking.” We would all like to appear pro-thinking.
I’d suggest the root cause are time constraints.
A lot of the reason I’m checking Stack Overflow is (1) the docs for tool/framework/library X are horrible (2) this is the umpteeth tool/framework/library/build system/command line tool to do thing Y I’ve used and can no longer keep everything I need in my head.
I would like very much to join the “We would all like to appear pro-thinking” party! Or can we get that added to some group’s platform?
Limiting our sophistry to at least appear in favor of thinking is something we should all be able to get behind.
We’ll have buttons that say “I’ve thought about it!”
I don’t know… I’d at least like to wait until my preferred political party or favourite celebrity endorses this “pro-thinking”. I don’t want to go chasing fads.
That could be another party slogan! “I don’t know…. I don’t want to go chasing fads”.
and time constraints come from need for profit. The market economy is incompatible with good code.
That’s ridiculous. Time constraints can come from anywhere and trying to use it as a dig against market economies is tenuous, at best.
Then it might be by chance that the software world is in a terrible state and the more money-constrained enterprises produce the worst software.
Anyway could you tell me where time constraints would come from in the current production mode?
A limited lifespan in which to do what we must do.
Many of us are keenly aware of our impending end of file.
It’s not obvious to me that more money constrained enterprises do in fact produce worse software in general; or even that software can be ranked on a single good-to-bad axis irrespective of the goals of the developers and users of that software. I don’t see the amount of money an organization has as being particularly related to how good their software is, or even see that as a particularly relevant question, given that an instition might want to use their money to produce software that does what they think is good rather than what I think is good.
I generally have a lot more time to spend on code I’ve written while employed than code I’ve written in my spare time.
that probably means your company has no pressing need to deliver new and unfinished software and it’s healthy enough not to pressure lower layers in the hierarchy into working crazily even if unnecessary.
My personal experience is that time constraints are rarely the reason for bad software; rather, a number of organisational and/or historical reasons are. Writing bad or good software usually takes about the same time Actually, writing good software is usually faster if you take the long-term view, and I think most people understand that.
The “write once, never look back” coding CEO, that kinda clueless coworker who doesn’t quite seem to know what they’re doing, that asshole coworker who absolutely insists on rewriting everything in their preferred way as that’s the One True Way, that other team in the other city which was recently hired and doesn’t understand the context, changing requirements or directions from management, the customer, or legislation, unclear requirements, a generally toxic work environment which leaves everyone demoralized, someone deciding we should follow latest fad X. Stuff like that tends to be a far larger influence in my experience.
Of course, I’ve only worked in five companies, so it may be different in other companies. But this is my experience based on those five companies.
Or you could accept the market forces at that place converge on “do it better.”
Which explains why all the good software comes from north korea, the soviet union and pre-reform china…
no but a lot of good software comes from research centers, foundations, public institutions, where the priority is on quality, reliability, correctness, fairness and developers are free to work without being directly exposed to a market-driven feedback loop. That doesn’t mean that these institutions are not immersed in a market economy, but that they invest resources in shielding some people from these pressures in order to be able to produce a kind of quality that is not possible otherwise.
And these research centers, foundations, public institutions are of course located in societies with free(-ish) markets.
yeah but they can produce that software despite the market, not thanks to the market. The way they get funding and allocate resources is in response and opposition to the market needs.
Peer 2 Peer production is also done in societies with free markets, but they work really hard to try to escape it. It’s a bug, not a feature.
Even when I don’t have a time constraint set by some sort of external party, I still get stuck in the trap of searching Stack Overflow and becoming more and more frustrated (although this usually happens with infrastructure and deployment problems, not actual programming issues).
You know what I’m going to complain about and I think there’s a significant amount of users here who share my thoughts at this.
But I’m not going to put that directly this time, just because some too sensitive people might get “offended”.
Well, just stay on topic in the posts, okay? That’s not the first time and not the only blog with this particular “issue”.
When you see something that doesn’t affect you in the slightest and was made for free and given to the community to help, and you complain anyway, maybe you should ask yourself who is “too sensitive.”
Could you please briefly point out what the issue is? Is the problem a lack of depth, some web-technology used, the drawings?
+1 to this request. Speaking as a moderator, there’s nothing obviously wrong with this post to me. If it in fact has some problem, fine, we can address that, but only if we know what it is.
It’s almost enough to make me think there isn’t any real complaint, just a personal vendetta… but of course, that’s hard to prove, and really it’s beside the point. Either there is a complaint or there isn’t; if there isn’t, vague insinuations accomplish nothing.
The user already had a comment deleted, this is just a continuation/provocation.
https://lobste.rs/s/3bbj56/edutech_spyware_is_still_spyware#c_9sqrho
He can’t point it out, because he will be downvoted into oblivion
Haha what? I reread the post after I saw this (I don’t even like Rust man) and couldn’t find anything off-topic, or even remotely problematic. Are you referring to the art, perhaps?
Yes. This user had a complaint about the art used in https://lobste.rs/s/3bbj56/edutech_spyware_is_still_spyware#c_9sqrho as well. In both cases, it’s their personal vendetta against cartoonish drawings of animals with human traits. They might be right that others dislike the art style as well, but it’s certainly not worth complaining about.
Great list of tips!
And pressing space after cmd+shift+4 lets you screenshot a particular window.
And since 10.14 (I think) taking a screenshot now gives you a little preview in the bottom-right of the display which delays it writing to a file. If you just want it to write the file and skip the preview, cmd+shift+5 gives you an Options menu where you can disable “Show floating thumbnail”.
Don’t miss the fact that ⇧⌘5 can also do screen recordings, with or without audio. Previously you had to run QuickTime Player and find it in the menu.
Pressing control along with either of those just copies the image to the clipboard, ready for pasting!
The nice thing about that floating thumbnail is that you can drag & drop it like a real file. Sometimes I’m screen shotting just to share with someone in chat, and that dragging that thumbnail over means I can send images without ever having them written to disk.
Mentioned in the other comment but yeah– pressing control along with wither hotkey just copies to clipboard inmediately which I’ve found to bw the best path for this usecase. Then I’m able to just Cmd + V in the target.
On Catalina (not sure about previous versions), you can also hit cmd + shift + 5 and select the clipboard as the default destination. Then you won’t need to add control for screenshots to go to the clipboard.
I give this same advice to new bike owners (who are likely to underspend on their lock), but this advice now really grates on me. I own a seven thousand dollar bike (bikes that are friendly to people with disabilities aren’t cheap 😞). How do I protect it when I’m away from home? $700 bike locks aren’t really a thing, and if you if you thought bike insurance rates on “cheap” bikes were bad…
Compared to a typical $7k bike, I’d guess that yours is far more difficult to fence. I hear that a stolen bike is usually chopped up for parts, and you have
So perhaps it has the theft appeal of an inexpensive bike? (Despite how cool I think it is :)
I would still downgrade or lock your rear seat, though!
This comment is a really insightful addition to @calpaterson’s threat model. Even Powertool Percy’s fences might be stymied by, say, a penny farthing. (Or at least, I really hope that’d be the case.)
Due to COVID, we haven’t had a situation in the past year where we’ve left our bike outside unattended for any amount of time, but I expect our eventual theft-mitigation efforts will be some combination of:
It’s awesome. Totally has ruined “normal” bikes for me. The ability to easily maintain conversations with someone on a long ride is a game-changer in itself!
Obviously seven $100 locks. /s
That’s a really cool bike! Unlike a normal recumbent bike, I’m not seeing anywhere for the rider in front to hold onto with their hands. Is there a seatbelt or some other solution so that the rider in front doesn’t fly off during an emergency stop?
There are handles beneath the front seat! You can also order a seatbelt as an accessory, but the font seat feels very secure—even during abrupt braking!
No such thing. An “ordinary” bicycle frame is actually a high-wheeler. The typical diamond frame design is a “safety”. Anyway, USS has been one school of recumbent design since the 1970s at least.
The obvious first choice is to bring it into your home. If that’s not an option, maybe you can rent space in a neighbor’s garage or at some nearby storage service? There is no safe way to lock a bike up outside for multiple hours (see Percy, from the article).
Given a thief with an angle grinder, there isn’t even a safe way to lock a bike up outside for multiple minutes! Of course, I can keep the bike safe at home, but at some point it’s more furniture than bike.
Ah, I read your “when I’m away from home” as “when I’m away and the bike is at home”, which, in hindsight, doesn’t make much sense, oops. Sorry.
When I drag my bike into areas where theft is seemingly high, I get very unshy about taking my bike into the building and stashing it next to the receptionist, cashiers, etc. Most of the time they don’t seem to care, but I suspect this could be different if you’re in an area where cyclists are looked down on more than they are here..
https://securityforbikes.com/products.php?cat=Extreme+Security+Chain+and+Lock+deals
I bought some of the products from Stephen Briggs (I think was a founder together with his wife Sarah. Company name was Pragmasis), this was about 9-10 years ago or so.
I am overall very happy with product, and the quality of interaction I had with Stephen. Thankfully, the chains (I bought several, as had different needs for different weight/length configs) – were not tested.
Expectation: a pure text-based chat system, from a more enlightened age
Reality: trolls spamming channels with huge ascii-art dildos and/or swastikas, and ddos
Not in my reality.
I’m also surprised to hear that. Unless you explicitly look for troll channels, my experience has either been quiet (but quick to answer) or constantly active, and on topic.
Never saw anything like that on freenode. Mind me asking - what channels do you visit?
I can’t say I’ve seen the things that the grandparent comment mentioned, but they definitely wouldn’t be on Freenode. If you limit yourself to Freenode, IRC is a very safe and well-moderated experience, especially on some exemplary channels like the Haskell one.
I have accidentally wandered into uncomfortable conversations and much worse things on some of the other popular IRC networks, of which quite a few still exist: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
The same thing is true of sketchy Discord servers as well; it’s not like IRC is unique in this regard.
A year or two back, Supernets was spamming hard on IRC networks. I forgot if Freenode was affected, but I know a lot of the smaller networks I was on were.
Not OP, but I spend my time on IRCnet and EFnet since my IRC use is just to stay in touch with friends. Anyway, last year I was DDoS’d pretty hard because someone wanted my nick on EFnet.
Sometimes I miss #C++ on EFnet, not enough to go back on EFnet, but I do miss it – a lot of wonderful people were there in the late 90s. Freenode feels a lot more sane in terms of management and tools for the system operators. Cloaks and nickname registration go a long way.
I’m in, like, 15 networks, and never saw anything like that either.
This is the primary reason I find programming in Common Lisp so enjoyable, as opposed to Rust (a probably superior language, but having to wait for 300 dependencies to compile / get linked is a far cry from compiling individual functions in a running Lisp image)
Ha! I’m currently coming at this from converting a small C++ project to Rust and I’m finding Cargo to be so much more enjoyable than CMake :)
The lack of IDE support for better C++ build systems (e.g. Bazel) is a boat anchor on C++. I’m struggling right now to find a CMake replacement which supports both Visual Studio and CLion on Windows and Linux.
I’m reading a lot of research papers and blog posts on fuzzing to try to learn more about the state of the art with regards to kernel and low-level library fuzzing. I’m especially interested in techniques that work without target binary instrumentation; is there any way to approximate coverage-guided fuzzing (or at least improve efficiency over naive fuzzing) without direct access to source code or in situations where compiling is prohibitively difficult (think the NT kernel on a running Windows system or XNU on real iPhone hardware)?
I’m certainly a beginner in this particular subfield of computer science but I’d like to dive into it to do some of my own research. If anyone has any resources to point me towards, I’d be very appreciative!