jbstack

Suggestion: improve the opening summary paragraph:

"Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow."

From this, I can't tell how it's any different to just plain self-hosted Git. A well written introduction should tell the reader immediately what the software actually does. If it's meant to be an alternative to something like gitea / forgejo then say that, with a brief summary of features that build on top of Git.

> This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend.

The author is very clear that that's not what they are trying to achieve:

"Now, don’t get me wrong, Jabber is not “production quality.” I would never sell it as a product or even recommend it to other people, but it does what I needed from Wispr Flow, and it does exactly the way I want it to."

At the risk of sounding repetitive, my comments are in the context of the OP's article which is specifically about a scenario where you lack control in macOS. If you're someone who doesn't care about being able to do what the article wants to do, then your use case doesn't fall within the scope of what I'm referring to.

Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.

Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.

NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.

No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.

> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.

Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".

Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).

Such public shaming loses its value when it's overused though (see: boy who cried wolf). The "written by AI" accusation is thrown around so much, when it often isn't even true, that it just triggers scepticism as the initial reaction. At least, it does for me.

I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users (other than cases where you're required to use one e.g. for work). I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want? In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.

I feel like HN should have a policy of discouraging comments which accuse articles and other comments of being written by AI. We all know this happens, we all know it's a possibility, and often such comments may even be correct. But seeing this type of comment dozens of times a day on all sorts of different content is tedious. It almost feels like nobody can write anything anymore without someone immediately jumping up and saying "You used AI to write that!".

As a matter of adopting sensible definitions, I think you need to draw the line somewhere between what is gambling and what is not.

If the risk taken can, in principle, be shifted in your favour (i.e. to produce positive expectation) through application of skill, then it isn't gambling. For example, in my mind, betting on whether you will win a game of chess is not gambling. On the other hand, if you cannot influence the outcome in your favour through skill, then it is gambling. Roulette is generally a good example of this (with the caveat that in some very specific circumstances it's possible to beat with skill).

If we're limiting the definition to merely risk-taking (you might win or you might lose) without factoring in skill, then virtually everything in life becomes gambling. For example, you gamble when you deposit money in the bank because it might go bust.

There's also the legal definition, in which case it's just a matter of checking whether the jurisdiction you are in considers the activity to be gambling or not.

If you need a strategy to mitigate it (roll back and change approach) then it isn't really fair to describe it as "silly". If it's silly you could just ignore it altogether.

It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again.

You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.

That's not the debate we're having here. See the comment I originally replied to:

> What precise process do you suggest to tell them apart at Google scale?

The suggestion is that scale makes a difference. I was refuting that.

> You may want to limit Google size by forcing them to perform human reviews for all their customer service interactions

You've inferred that, but I didn't make this claim. A sensible strategy would involve automating as much as possible while allowing for the ones that matter (e.g. OP's example) to be escalated.

Clearly you can't do that if, as in OP's case, you don't even perform any automated ID checks before telling the complainant that their ID hasn't been verified.

> Again, you're talking from a moral standpoint

Not at all. I'm taking the legal standpoint. I say nothing about whether this particular law, or any other law, is moral or not. Complying with the law is a basic requirement that any company has to satisfy. Why should Google be any different just because it's big? You seem to be suggesting that laws should only apply to small entities and that once you go above a certain scale, you are above the law.

Again, if you simply cannot comply with the law for some reason (as you seem to be suggesting applies to Google) then you shouldn't be running that business at all because, after all, doing so implies doing something illegal.

I'm not sure how this is a reply to my comment. What you said applies whether you are hosting 1 video a month or 1,000,000 videos a month. My point was that scale isn't an excuse. What applies to large applies to small and vice versa.

Why does scale matter?

If I have 100 customers and I have to spend 1 hour a week dealing with legal compliance requests then if I have 200 customers I have to spend 2 hours a week dealing with legal compliance requests, but I also have more resources to do it with.

In fact, scale usually makes it easier rather than harder because you can take advantage of economies of scale to streamline the process.

And, in the end, if you aren't able to comply with the law then you shouldn't be in that business regardless of your scale.

I have a crazy idea... how about we take action on legitimate cases AND don't take action on fake ones?

As someone who runs a charity, it surprises me how often people equate "non-profit" with "doesn't get paid" or "does everything for free". Non-profits still need money, they just don't use that money to make profit that is paid to shareholders. Instead, they use the money to further the stated objectives of the organisation.

NB: I'm not trying to imply anything about whether Anna's Archive is non-profit or not. Just that the fact that it aggressively tries to raise money isn't a relevant factor.

You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.

The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.

You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.

Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.

And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.

It's a bad analogy because the incentives are totally different. With sports betting (of the type in the article) you're betting against the bookmaker. If you win, they lose, and vice versa. Obviously it's better for them that you lose.

With financial markets you are betting against other users. The ones running the market take fees on each transaction, so they don't care whether you win or lose. Their incentive is just to keep you making transactions.

But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.

If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".

I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.

This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".

Great. If you added those this would probably become my go-to SQL client.

You could always run it in a sandboxed browser (e.g. a Firefox profile) and limit the use to just language learning (e.g. reading neutral articles online). The data you would leak wouldn't be much different than what you risk any time you browse any website.

All this will do is compel me to import my phones instead of buying them in the UK. If I stay below the thresholds I can even avoid giving 20% VAT to this dystopian government that we've ended up with.

I've recently been trying to find a good SQL TUI client, and one of the ones I tried was Harlequin. The main disadvantage, which every other SQL TUI I tried also suffers from, is that they don't comprehensively show every type of database object in the browser pane (e.g. tables, views, indexes, procedures). For example Harlequin only shows tables. This means that when you want to view one of the missing ones, you have to run a query. This means that you have to already know that the object you are looking for exists: there's no way to get a good overview of what you have in the database just by glancing at the browser. For me this sort of defeats the point of having a TUI in the first place.

It seems like the OP's offering has the same problem, although it does offer more objects than Harlequin. I'll be bookmarking it to see how it develops.

Yes but the article said "particularly the review screen". 95% of the review screen is made up of your card, which you can customise.

> First, [Anki] is ugly to look at, particularly the review screen.

You can customise note types with CSS and Javascript, which means that you can make cards look however you want.

> this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.)

I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his account after he refused to answer their very intrusive questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives living in another country). They also refused to return his money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that he thought the bank was in the wrong.

It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee, and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.

Similar to how people in this thread are talking about mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having multiple accounts and spreading my money around.

Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or small) does this sort of thing to me I don't hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" and start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author of the original post.