Some of us have watched it ratchet up since the 80’s, when there were no such restrictions. The fact that some people hit a threshold and decide to stop putting up with it isn’t surprising.
There were pedophiles, porn, extreme gore, cults, scams and a primitive notion of brainrot. Music and games (not that I played games, but honestly my mum thought that this is why I liked computers and what I was doing) were generally thought to turn kids into killers.
Computer users even in the best conditions (and not children) were looked at negatively- as if they were no life losers. The techbro thing, and the normalisation of computer use is a very modern notion.
FWIW I had the same exact situation as the parent, and heard it all from my mum. The computer was considered undesirable at best and actively harmful at worst.
Their point is: for some individuals it can be beneficial.
My point is: on a societal level, the numbers are pretty clear that teens consume too much media (and social media is even more addictive) and their skills and attention span deteriorate.
I think you understood my point and you understand the reasons for the act. But I'm just protesting on behalf of the kids that will pretty much have their lives ruined or made worse for this decision, for what it's worth.
Comment section isn’t nuanced enough to have this conversation and I am on a phone, but that is the way that the industry slandered the luddites as the parent claims.
The truth was that the machines produced worse quality goods and were less safe, not that people couldn’t skill up to use them and not that there wasn’t enough demand to keep everyone employed. It was quality and safety.
You should look into the issue further, because I had your opinion too until I soberly looked at what the luddites really were arguing for, it wasn’t the end of looms, it was quality standards and fair advertising to consumers.
Every party in the dispute was acting out of economic self-interest: the manufacturers wanted cheaper labour and higher margins, Parliament wanted industrial growth.
Only the workers are getting framed as though self-interest invalidates their position. The Luddites’ arguments about quality standards and consumer fraud were correct on the merits regardless of their motivation for raising them.
“More affordable clothes” that fall apart in a month aren’t more affordable.
And the choice was never mechanisation versus no mechanisation… it was whether the transition would include basic labour and quality standards. With regulation, you’d still have got mechanisation and cheaper clothing in the end… just without the fraudulent goods and wage suppression. Framing it as “society versus a few jobs” is exactly the manufacturer’s argument from the 1810s, which is very effective propaganda reaching through centuries.
“After a few bumps”, mate, people were transported to penal colonies and fucking hanged for asking for quality standards and fair wages.
Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence to protect manufacturer profits. Saying it all worked out eventually doesn’t justify the process, any more than cheap cotton justified the conditions under which it was produced. And frankly, look at modern fast fashion: cheap clothing that falls apart in weeks, produced under appalling conditions overseas. We’re still living with the consequences of the principle that cheapness trumps everything else.
Weird, never had an issue getting my hands on an Apple laptop of any desired configuration, even odd keyboard layouts for the region (UK and Sweden).
Had plenty of issues getting specific specification Thinkpads: because they are largely sold through resellers and they don’t stock all SKUs I suppose.
I don’t buy this reasoning until there is evidence of orders going unfulfilled.
I could make 20M units of something and leave my resellers as bagholders who then have to sell years old hardware at a discount- and by the internal consistency of your logic: I would have the volumes.
Isn't this an artifact of the demand side and not the supply side?
Yes, apple shipped fewer laptops than dell in 2025. That's because Apple laptops started at $1100 in 2025.
They won't have a problem securing the chips for Mac Neo's, they're the same SOC as the iPhone. What, Apple is going to have an issue manufacturing a few million motherboards?
thats part of why NIST updated their password rotation recommendations from 90 days to indefinite: people pay lip service to security if it is too inconvenient. you have to try to meet people where they are.
It's not just about "convenience", it is hard for the human mind to remember a truly random password. You can try all the mnemonic tricks you want but at the end of the day it requires a lot of time and repetition before entering the password is effortless. So what people do is create a stream of derivable passwords. For example, I can think of a phrase "I love beach balls bouncing on the ocean!" and then make a password "ilBBbotocean!" and when it comes time to change that password, I'll just add a number "ilBBbotocean!1". Studies have shown this is what people do. But it is easy for attackers to also derive these passwords once one password in the chain has been compromised.
The effect of that is that by requiring frequent rotation, the organization is effectively training their users to have a single permanent password and to never change it, even after a compromise. That's extremely harmful. At least with permanent passwords that are force rotated after they show up in database or there has been an incident, you have a much higher percentage of compliance with making new passwords, and the organization is safer because everyone isn't using passwords derived from the previous password.
I remember a case where a company decided to assign employees random 16 character passwords with symbols and rotated them every 90 days or so. They were unchangeable and the idea was that everyone would be forced to use a secure password that changed regularly.
You can probably guess what happened, and that was that no one remembered their passwords and people wrote it down on their pads or sticky notes instead.
Writing down a password is a great option. However you need to keep that paper in a secure location. Put it in your wallet and treat it like a $100 bill - don't paste it to a monitor or under the keyboard.
A password manager is better for most things, but you need to unlock the password manager somehow.
> It is mostly about ensuring some busy admin doesn't have to inventory every user permission.
So, its a bad authn practice that is maintained to mitigate the impacts of bad authz practices (you make authn less secure when people are intended to be authorized, in the hopes than when they aren't and you haven't cleaned up their permissions, the password expiration will cause authn failures so the fact that their authorization hasn't been revoked won't matter), instead of adopting good authn and authz practices?
Each departments resources are usually preemptively cutoff globally from the redundant employees at the same time for safety reasons. A lot faster than chicken pecking each users group membership, and batched password invalidation.
If the former user had IT administrative and VPN access, it would otherwise take time to figure out who should still be there. It is faster to rotate the whole departments access to auto kick non-participants off the network. Then mop up the specific user logins, and migrate any orphaned user assets into the department share.
Keep in mind >90% of security breaches come from within firms. =3
Every time I log into the FTB (CA tax authority) website I have to set a new password. I wish there were some affirmative guidance to stop doing this because at the moment governments still think forcing password changes makes it “safer”.
> I wish there were some affirmative guidance to stop doing this because at the moment governments still think forcing password changes makes it “safer”.
NIST SP 800-63B-4 [0] seems to be pretty clear “affirmative guidance”, though its only actually legally required in certain circumstances.
[0] https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html @ 3.1.1.2: “[...] Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require subscribers to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence that the authenticator has been compromised. [...]”
I’m surprised it’s even as high as three nines, at one point in 2025 it was below 90%; not even a single nine.[0] (which, to be fair includes co-pilot, which is the worst of availabilities).
People on lobsters a month ago were congratulating Github on achieving a single nine of uptime.[1]
I make jokes about putting all our eggs in one basket under the guise of “nobody got fired for buying x; but there are sure a lot of unemployed people”- but I think there’s an insidious conversation that always used to erupt:
“Hey, take it easy on them, it’s super hard to do ops at this scale”.
Which lands hard on my ears when the normal argument in favour of centralising everything is that “you can’t hope to run things as good as they do, since there’s economies of scale”.
These two things can’t be true simultaneously.. this is the evidence.
Sure they can. Perhaps a useful example of something like this would be to consider cryptography. Crypto is ridiculously complex and difficult to do correctly. Most individual developers have no hope of producing good cryptographic code on the same scale and dependability of the big crypto libraries and organizations. At the same time these central libraries and organizations have bugs, mistakes and weaknesses that can and do cause big problems for people. None of that changes the fact that for most developers “rolling your own crypto” is a bad idea.
That’s an excellent example. OpenSSL, by virtue of trying to do everything is the most buggy implementation of TLS generally available today leading to the point where there have been hard forks designed to reduce the scope to limit this damage.
I’d go so far as to say that there are more crypto libraries than there are “default” options for SaaS Git VCS (Gitlab and Github are the mainstay in companies and maybe Azure Devops if you hate your staff- nobody sensible is using bitbucket) but for TLS implementations there’s RustTLS, GnuTLS, BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, NSS, and AWS-LC that come to mind immediately.
PC gaming revenue on its own is around $45 Billion a year and there are all sorts of vertical market software that only runs on Windows.
But even if all most people want is browser, why go through the hassle of running Linux?
I usually recommended a Windows PC to most people because on the low end, they are cheap, disposable, and if the one odd program they might want to run isn’t available, I didn’t have to hear about it.
If they know what they want, I didn’t have a problem recommending an Air and now for a lot of use cases, a Neo.
Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).
Why bother making native releases when Valve/Proton will take care of it? Who wants the headache of supporting another build and directly supporting N flavors of Linux distributions?
When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
Steam runtime already gives developers a single target rather than having to support different distros individually.
If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.
And still why should normal people go to Linux over Windows? Linux support is still not that great from OEMs and for the unwashed masses your local Best Buy or Apple Store.
Have you read the article? There's real frustration with Windows. It's so bad that my 15 year old, who only really uses his computer to launch Steam, asked me to help him install Linux. He had heard about Bazzite and already knew his gpu would be compatible. He gets about 20 fps more on Linux and can choose when updates are applied. There's no forced online login, ads in the OS or copilot prompts. His browser doesn't revert to Edge.
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
Some people, myself included, are already less frustrated with Linux. Which means it is likely that other people would be less frustrated if they tried Linux. Not 100% of them, of course, but some for sure.
> Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.
The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.
I don’t do anything too “serious” as far as writing documents that Google Docs can’t handle - we use that at work instead of Office - is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?
Some people have some bizarre obsession with having absolute and total control over the placement of every single last character in their document while simultaneously not caring about the fact that this placement is sometimes not reproducible and randomly becomes diseased.
My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.
And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.
If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.
If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.
I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.
It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.
And you’d be making the same mistake as all those people that claim Windows is too awful to use for real work. Web Office is limited, but it is more than enough for the majority of business users.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who only uses the web browser exclusively.
It’s true that most stuff is in the browser, but basically every user has a couple things that are native apps which don’t work on Linux.
Wine has come a long way for gaming, but my experience is for regular programs, most stuff doesn’t work. Even the simple apps are usually critically broken.
I only use Teams for meetings and the calendar, and the occasional chat during a meeting. I find it totally fine and I don't really think about it much one way or the other. For reference I have a 2021 M1 Max with 64 GB.
Probably all managers and engineers working on Teams have similar copious amounts of memory and powerful CPUs on their devices and hardly use their own product. That would explain a lot
It honestly wasn't much different on my 2018 i5 Mini with 32 GB.
Maybe what sucks here is the experience of running it on Windows. Or maybe it sucks for large meetings? But I never have Teams meetings with > 40 people at this company.
Laws apply to actions in the country, they’re not based on citizenship.
If you go to Amsterdam and sleep with a hooker, you didn’t break a law by doing that: despite prostitution (specifically purchasing sex) being illegal in many western countries.
Laws apply to whatever they say they apply to. Limiting their scope to actions in the country, or at least giving precedence to similar foreign laws, is at least as much about the practicalities of enforcement as a matter of principle.
For example, Finland claims jurisdiction over crimes where the action itself or its relevant consequences happen in Finland or the victim is a Finnish citizen, permanent resident, or legal entity. Then there are plenty of rules and exceptions detailing what those principles mean in practice.
That’s not always true, and increasingly less so, particularly the Australians and the crime of child sex tourism. I am sure it’ll be expanded to hate crimes and disturbing the peace laws as well and from there used as a political cudgel to suppress opposition to government policies. At least for now you have to be a citizen of the country but the UK has stated an intention to extradite US citizens for online hate crimes.
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
Commonwealth countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction. I don't know that it's ever been enforced for something so relatively petty as intoxication or prostitution, but it is nevertheless the law. (Obligatory IANAL though.)
Interestingly if you go to Canada and legally smoke weed then try to go to the US a month later, you can get denied because you did something that is perfectly legal in Canada, but not the US
Normally its considered legal to sell but not legal to buy.
Prostitution is primarily conducted by women, and this is a way for them to still seek protection and healthcare while still technically criminalising the practice.
Apple isn't shy about its gatekeepy behaviour, and some people believe that it's why Apples ecosystem is subjectively nicer than the Microsoft one.
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