>I'd like to think the superior product wins. But Windows still thrives despite widespread Linux availability.

That's because by most metrics Linux is inferior is Windows.

I was trying to use Claude.ai today to learn how to do hexagonal geometry.

Every time I asked a question it generated an interactive geometry graph on the fly in Javascript. Sometimes it spent minutes compiling and testing code on the server so it could make sure it was correct. I was really impressed.

Anyway I couldn't really learn anything since when the code didn't work I wasn't sure if I had ported it wrong or the AI did it wrong, so I ended up learning how to calculate SDF and pixel to hex grid from tutorials I found on google instead.

This is also my exact experience

Judge: so he had a number in his online account and you changed the number without his authorization? Straight to jail.

That is how.

Law isn't code.

You must be kidding. If you can read BBCode you can read HTML.

>Arbitration does help with the problem of overwhelmed and expensive courts. What is needed is fair arbitration.

That sounds like you want all the benefits of an actual court without all the costs of an actual court?

I want the court result for free and instantaneously.

Barring that, faster and cheaper is better.

Simply limiting discovery, counterbalanced by loosened rules of evidence, followed by allowing specialist arbiters and avoiding the multi-year wait for a court proceeding seems to be faster and cheaper. There is a small error introduced by allowing discovery of 1,000 pages of emails instead of 100,000, and by allowing hearsay or affidavits, but probably most disputes would not strictly depend on deposing a dozen people and interpreting the 23rd box of company documents.

To be fair, this is partly because of the internet.

If you install random apps and it destroys your PC, you can fix that by having backups. By contrast on work computers with important data, everything is supposed to be locked down and you can't install random apps. But then we started to increasingly connect devices to the internet.

Now gaining access over a smartphone essentially means being able to send payments via the banking apps. People are sending money with crypto so they are susceptible to simple clipboard swap attacks that are almost impossible for the user to detect until it happens. Then there is all the personal data that can be stolen that can be used for other attacks in the future.

Essentially the amount of damage you can take by losing access has increased much faster than the security devices meant to prevent.

To make matters worse, the security devices that are marketed to the average user tend to be exploitative rather than trustworthy (e.g. OneDrive).

It feels like instead of protecting users developers seem more interested in creating something that only does half of the job and then blaming the user for not knowing how to do the other half, so a comprehensive solution for the problem is never created.

I think there are a lot of things that users can be protected from:

1. Protect users from attackers external to the computer

2. Protect users from attackers who are other users on the computer

3. Protect users from applications run by other users on the computer

4. Protect users from applications they themselves run on the computer

5. Protect unprivileged (non-root) users from their own actions

6. Protect privileged (sudo/root) users from their own actions

OSes have been historically OK at 1-3. Not great or even good. There have been a lot of remote code vulnerabilities and local vulnerabilities over the years.

OSes have pretty much ignored 4 until maybe a decade ago, and are making token progress toward it, but I don't think many of them take it very seriously.

OSes have instead started to crack down on 5-6, which I'd argue isn't even the job of an OS.

Before 1984 "take a taxi" meant you could actually take the taxi.

Apparently Taxis in New York used to all be ex-cop cars, and cop cars all had the same key, so one key would get you any taxi.

Most agricultural plant had a "Lucas key" [1] which meant you could use any key to start any machine.

I used to have one on my house keys long after I actually needed it, kind of an agricultural/industrial shibboleth. It's also how many many years ago I came to be drink-driving an eight tonne excavator through streets of Glasgow at 3am, with some rather grateful Strathclyde Police traffic cops keeping my way clear, but that's a whole 'nother story.

I have a ring somewhere with all the “common keys” such as elevator overrides, construction equipment, etc.

I used to have a keyring with the dozen or so different keys we have for network and equipment cabinets. One day I left it at home, and when I got to site realised that the cabinet was almost certainly one of the ones I didn't have a key for anyway.

I pulled the thin stainless strip out of an old wiper blade I'd thrown into the boot of my car to put in the bin later (and six months later, still had not), chopped two lengths of it, bent one into an L-shape and filed the little notch at the end of the other a little deeper and rounder. At some point muuuuch later I welded a little stainless washer to the ends of them both to put it on a keyring.

Yes, it was quicker and easier to just rake the wafer locks in the rack than find the right key.

I did buy a new key for my ex-cop car on eBay, but there isn't just one, I had to buy all 7 possibilities (for $8 total).

To me that sounds like Github does too many things, not that Codeberg does too few.

Indeed. A code repository alternative should definitely not require an equivalent to Github Pages.

To me, and devs at large (given their market share), that sounds like convenience.

Either take some responsibility and properly evaluate what that convenience means for you long term or don't complain when they leverage that vendor lock in at your disadvantage.

I wonder at which point do children become such a liability for platforms that it's easier to just ban all children altogether.

Children don't have disposable income to buy ads/subscriptions. They don't have experience to write about. The only thing they have that adults don't is time which translates into engagement metrics.

In an ideal world, the adults that buy/manage the computers would create age-restricted account for children, and the OS would give this information to the browser, which would just transmit it via HTTP. This is the safest method to verify ages. If an operating system doesn't want to support this, it's ultimately the adult's responsibility to install one that supports it. This would mean there would be no burden on the adults (the majority of the planet) to verify their ages, so there would be no burden on the platforms to restrict ages either.

If platforms could verify ages without inconveniencing their main user base, I wonder if platforms would just start banning all minors, or if there is some reason to allow minors in the platform that justifies all the liability surrounding them.

Children are an extremely valuable ad target.

They have their hands directly on their parents heart strings, and their parents have a credit card.

This isn't anything new, think about the toy ads we had on TV when we were young.

I guess you are right. I assumed that something like Youtube Kids would have no ads at all given the audience, but it seems it does have ads targeted at young children. Bleak world we live in.

Nobody takes “age-restricted account[s] for children” seriously.

Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.

Their RSS could use some improvements, but the same could be said about all of them.