581–590 of 765 posts
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For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
So the greatest thing about Windows 10 is Linux? (Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
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Yep. And when I’m unhappy with my government, I can vote them out or, if I want to, get politically active. I can’t vote out Google. Their customers are advertisers, not me. And I don’t know which apps on my phone send my information to Facebook or what they do with it.
It's much easier to change what company you do business with than what government you're under. I can't believe you're managing to turn this simple fact on its head and imply the exact opposite.
You can stop doing business with Mom&Pop’s coffee shop relatively easily, just like you can move to a different town to get away from your city government authority.
But you’re practically never going to truly get away from Meta, Google, Amazon, Nestle, McKesson, ATT, and those behemoths due to their size, similar to how you’re going to struggle to get out from under the US Federal government.
Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger a…
For a terrifying counter-example do some research into how easy it is for a stalker to abuse data about their victims.
The free-for-all collection and market of data about all of us is the real problem. Anyone with a few bucks can get around the "safeguards" around accessing it. Governments, your employer, your neighbor, your opponents in an election, criminals.
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This very American point of view, for some reason the Americans believe that politicians are some other kind of breed of people coming from somewhere else and they don't have control over them. The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by fo…
Americans and Europeans are both right about their own situation, because most European countries have functioning political systems, so there is a good level of popular control over the functioning of the state. The same is absolutely not true in the US due to issues like the senate filibuster, lobbying, campaign financing, gerrymandering, first past the post, and surely others I’m not thinking of. The US is best un…
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> I'm fairly certain that if a person is highly active on social media such a system could produce a better diagnosis than most people get when they see a professional What makes you so sure? (This is a serious question, not rhetorical.)
Mostly because the quality of professional diagnosis is poor. Myself I have a condition which 5-10% of people have. As a child, I had two very high quality psych evaluations for the time where people observed all the signs and symptoms (particularly the first one) but failed to draw a line between them. Since then I saw therapists maybe 6 times in 30 years (sometimes the same one) and it was always “adjustment disord…
Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger a…
> The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). No, the worst thing a company can do is to influence your desires, feelings and behaviours, causing you to spend money irresponsibly, getting your kids addicted to useless games, ... All that is also what this kind of tracking aims at. It is quite incredibl…
They can sell/give the data they have on you to someone with real intent to harm you.
They can use their money, power and the data they have on you to ruin your life, just like a Government could. A strategic leak of private data about a vocal critic of your company is not uncommon.
They can also use their data to influence Governments in ways that will harm all of us. And they do.
I could go on and on.
Ok, my contrarian hot take (for HN at least). The real entities we need to be afraid of in regards to privacy are governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs. The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries). The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger a…
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The fact remains there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”. Now it exists in windows as well as iOS, MacOs etc so its a pretty established standard by now to have that as a Boolean system wide (and that system apps follow it while third party apps can query it of course). Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s besi…
there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode” There was no need for apps to ask that. Previously, apps would just say "draw this dialog box in the user's preferred color scheme" and it would work fine. The only reason this dark mode hint is necessary is because too many apps started ignoring the Windows system color scheme and doing their own thin…
The difference to windows users is that you change a switch and apps actually change whereas before you couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t Microsoft’s fault before and it isn’t they who updated the apps now so they don’t get credit for that. But the fact remains you basically couldn’t use dark mode before and now you can.
Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data. Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking. It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., go…