I would imagine most production rails applications don't use sqlite as the backing database.
2,691 karma · joined February 3, 2025
The reason you have health insurance, and you don't just pay for healthcare, is because pooling together a lot of people and paying for all of them is cheaper than paying for each individually.
You've probably noticed that, the bigger the company, the better the health insurance plans. Why is that? Their risk pool is bigger.
Follow the logic. What's the biggest risk pool you can use? The entire US population. What would then provide the lowest per-capita cost? Spreading the cost across the entire US population. It's economies of scale.
Bonus: we can also eliminate much of the administrative aspect of healthcare because we are no longer coordinating thousands of separate insurance entities. You mentioned make-work - yes, we have that. Why does a hospital need 500 billing specialists? You tell me.
Americans (I'm an American) sometimes have a preconceived notion that, if something is really expensive, it must be good. No... no that's not necessarily the case.
The insurance companies would love for you to believe that, but in actuality, we're just getting fucked. It's just a worse system overall, in pretty much every metric you could possibly choose.
1. You get way less faxes than emails.
2. Faxes can't steal credentials.
3. You should be auditing expenses anyway.
ARM and phone manufacturing is a hot mess in comparison. We're still trying to reverse engineer M series MacBooks and iPhones are off limits. Android is also not open source, no AOSP does not count.
There would be a lot more competition in the space if the hardware had proper specs, like x86 does.
Its data collection. Its privacy. If were waiting around for the day people start acting ethically, we'll experience the heat death of the universe.
Governments can always turn evil. Companies can always be compelled. People can always turn evil.
We need to not give them the ammunition. We've cornered ourselves into a situation where we sacrifice our data and privacy, and we are forced to blindly trust it will not be used against us.
If we do not collect data, we cannot have data breaches. If we do not collect data, we cannot have mass surveillance. If we do not collect data, we cannot have wiretapping.
We've simply allowed and encouraged tech companies to collect as much data as humanly possible. That starts with Google, Meta, et al. We then trust they will not abuse it.
But they certainly can, and they certainly will. What is done now cannot be undone. We cannot take back data immortalized. But, what we can do is prevent new data collection.
Use private services. Run software locally when feasible. Deny analytics. Block advertisments. Use end to end ecryption. Etc.
Also, you're confusing markets here. We're not talking about the smartphone market. We're talking about the market of apple accessories.
Apple solely controls that market and also participates in it. Its a true monopoly.
Okay, if their hardware is esoteric, open the protocols for interacting with hardware.
> Should they give away every hardware design needed too?
Yeah probably. It would be a lot better, more like x86. We would actually get repairable phones instead of landfill fodder. But that's a different issue.
> Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
And then it became a cheap scam, whereby Apple made a few dollars off of every single lightning cable produced by anyone on Earth due to licensing.
Also, as for USB-C - doesnt matter, still better. My chargers work across multiple devices. Yes, there's some standards noncompliance, this is still a huge improvement over ZERO cross compatibility.
Okay, fine, I already covered for this. If your new protocol is really the bees knees, then open it, problem solved.
> No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.
They're not.
The annoyance of the cookie banners is the entire draw for companies. Its not a downside. They're user-hostile. You are their enemy. Their goal is to wear you down and trick you into opting-in, so they can both track with impunity and follow the law.
If you're using functional cookies, you don't have to ask. If you're still asking, you're just wasting your time.
The reason every website asks is because:
1. They're stupid and don't even bother to preliminarily research the laws they comply with.
2. They actually are tracking you.
Ultimately if you're using something like Google Analytics, then yeah you probably do need a banner. Even if it's just a blog.
Great, so then don't do that.
Also, data collection is fully a choice. You can always choose not to. I've built websites with logins and everything and guess what - no cookie banners necessary. Just don't collect data you don't need.
Also, filesystems just work. Nobody is gonna say "oh I'm using fileystem X and it works!" because that's the default. So, naturally, 99% of the stuff you'll hear about filesystems is when they don't work.
Don't believe me? Look up NTFS and read through reddit or stackexchange or whatever. Not a lot of happy campers.
But, they won't, because they rely on that moat to keep competitors out. It's exactly the same at the lightning cable.
Not very convincing.
The reality is that, if Apple conforms non-maliciously, they're proving that the law is reasonable and they can do it while remaining profit. Um, that's a huge problem.
They require the plausible deniability of "oh we can't do this, it's too expensive!" Otherwise, other governments (US) might look to implementing similar laws. So, it's a long con. They're burning lots of money, now, with the hope it allows them to continue their anti-competitive behavior for longer. If they're REALLY lucky, they might even stall out the EU and get the EU to backtrack on their laws. That's the golden scenario.
But it doesn't even matter, because ultimately Granny can download the Apple Approved (tm) anydesk app and the hacker can remote control her phone. So.
The appstore is not secure, I don't know who lied to you and told you it is. You think Apple reads the code? Fuck no. They just ask the dev "is this secure?". The dev answers "yes", obviously, and that's the entire review process.
Meta was exfiltrating cookies from your browser to their app using an exploit in Safari. They could've taken your bank session and drained your accounts, if they wanted. Luckily they were very kind and only used their malware to sell you shit.
Facebook is a big app with lots of visibility. Now do the other 100,000 apps on the app store.
> Obviously that ship has sailed for you, but I mean in the general sense.
In the general sense, no, you don't need a distributed system. Even if you have billions of dollars worth of revenue - no, you don't need a distributed system. I know, because I've worked on monoliths that service hundreds of thousands of users and generate billions in revenue.
If you're making YouTube, maybe you need a distributed system. Are you making YouTube? Probably not.
You can, of course, choose to make a distributed system anyway. If you want to decrease your development velocity 1000x and introduce unbelievable amounts of complexity and risk.
iOS and Android are a security nightmare. Downloading a random-ass executable to pay for parking is asking for trouble. Relying on millions of lines of proprietary Google code that you-don't-know-what-it-does is asking for trouble.
This code could have, and almost certainly does have, spyware, keyloggers, and various other forms of malware. You're simply trusting that it doesn't, because it's unverifiable.
And this doesn't even TOUCH on all the vulnerabilities associated with cellular networks, the baseband, SS7, etc. Good luck auditing that code.
At least on a server I can have some baseline guarantees about what software I'm running and what it's doing. Whereas on a phone, your location could constantly be triangulated, your phone identity spoofed, your cellular traffic sniffed, and on and on and you'd never know.
I mean, just this week we saw a post on here about ICE using fake cell towers to identify protestors. That shit is truly trivial to do, and people have been doing it for almost two decades. You wanna talk CVE? Start with that.
The reality is that global warming is definitely happening, and also the Earth is definitely not flat. But it's pretty easy to make a super convincing argument that the Earth is flat - you just don't mention any of the math behind why the Earth is round and then you can have a 5 hour long video filled to the brim with evidence the Earth is flat.
And it's not even lying. We're not saying anything that's not true. We're just choosing to omit data and evidence that proves us wrong. We can even include fake data and evidence, if we want, and refute that - ie build a strawman.
Wayland is, by far, the best windowing system I've ever used. No dropped frames, ever. Its actually kind of uncanny, it feels like you're using an iPhone.
Also the taskbar is just broken in general. It'll pull tons of apps behind the '...' button even though there's plenty of room on the taskbar and it'll also put fake apps that aren't actually open on the taskbar.
Also no vertical task bar. Come on Microsoft.
Ubuntu 24.04 is older than Debian stable currently.