We've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.
Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern.
Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.
The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.
I heard somewhere that Onedrive goes one step further, i.e. deleting local files and keeping them only in cloud. so when people delete file from onedrive, they find local files already deleted
This particular case isn't a dark pattern, but the fact OSes are written under the assumption that users want to create an account for cloud services is.
(Yes, by this definition Google, Microsoft and Apple are all dark patterners.)
Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.
The problem is that this incompetence is the result of (bad) choices by Microsoft's management. I'm not even talking about middle managers but the C-suite, who only care about satisfying shareholders, not about creating good working conditions or making sure the product is good.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is forcing their cloud services on anyone that doesn't actively fight back. Whether this is because they deliberately expect that they will dupe people into paying for storage they don't need or just because the cloud services team needs to hit their user KPI doesn't really matter much.
America got to design the western world order after WWII, but Europe was happy to give it the reins at the time. America setting the agenda was realistically the only way to get all these countries to agree.
The whole "American Imperialism" narrative only came about much later. In reality Europe got a great deal, most countries got to set their own agenda, and the USSR was contained.
In it's original form, the Monroe Doctrine was anti-imperial. It's tone changed during America's brief flirtation with empire at the turn of the century.
But the idea of a modern American Empire (Post-WW2) defined by Bretton Woods and NATO only makes sense of one doesn't have perspective on what empires were like before.
The world order for after WW2 was designed before the war was over. Invasion plans were partially argued over based on what different countries wanted to ensure they controlled.
For example, Churchill wanted to go through the Baltic instead of Normandy so he could be sure Britain still controlled Greece
- So far they have only hired 8,500 of the planned 10,000 employees
- Amazon did not request any of the tax credit for the year they didn't add headcount
I think everyone is rightly underwhelmed by HQ2 but I think calling it a scam is a bit hyperbolic. At the end of the day it's not actually costing the local taxpayers anything to do this
> While the law requires men to request the permit, the spokesperson clarified, it also obliges the military career center to issue it, if "no specific military service is expected during the period in question.”
> "Since military service under current law is based exclusively on voluntary participation, such permissions must generally be granted,” the official added.
> When asked, the ministry spokesperson pointed out that "the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”
It seems like the purpose is to have the law and all the paperwork set up as a precaution for the future. Sure, right now it’s all voluntary and just rubber stamping, but if in the future they need to do something like Ukraine and lock down travel for military aged men, it’s much easier to flip a switch and start denying travel permits rather than having to set up and fund an entirely new system for requiring travel permits.
If it were to get closer to war (i.e., Spannungsfall, let alone the Verteidigungsfall) a set of laws would unlock that allow control of various areas of life and the economy anyway.
Ah, invasive extra paperwork (enforced by criminal penalties, at least in theory) for something they say on the surface they won’t actually need. So very german (hah)
In the United States, adult males have to sign up for the Selective Service for the same reason even though we haven't had conscription since the Vietnam War in the late 1970s(?).
I don't know how it worked for anyone else, but I remember the selective service PSA ads when I was growing up -- (that's a manual emdash) If you don't sign up for selective service when you turn 18, you'll be celebrating your birthday at pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison. Or maybe you couldn't get a welfare check, college loan, or federal job. The details are a bit fuzzy.
Then a month or two before my 18th birthday, I got a postcard saying I had been auto-registered. It was a rather disappointing denouement.
Can someone explain to me how the Selective Service is constitutional? I know Congress "shall have Power To... provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union", but that's only a call, not a legal requirement for anyone to answer the call. The argument seems untenable to me. Not to mention that it's a gross violation of individual freedom, and that if you can't get people to fight for their country then maybe there's something wrong with the country.
It’s the same reason there is a different legal system in the military than for everyone else.
Sometimes, you need to round up all the men and start killing folks - or everyone else dies. Such is life. Making it easy to find them is a basic operational best practice.
Informally, it's put forward as one of the most successful government programs in history: it succeeds at all it's objective, comes in at or under budget, employs few people, and avoids the scope creep that kills other successful programs.
It's only shortcoming: it doesn't actually do anything.
Nobody wants to be the guy who got the nation caught with its pants down if conscription needs to come back in a hurry. The same reason the military budget always ratchets upwards.
Measured as a percentage of GDP (which I'd say is the most sensible way to measure it) the US's current military budget is lower than at any point since WWII aside from a few years between the end of the Cold War and 9/11.
Struggling to see the relevance, but, thank you for teaching me this:
The U.S. Army is the permanent, professional standing land force (Regular Army, Reserves, National Guard),
while the Army of the United States (AUS) was a temporary, authorized component used primarily during major wars to rapidly expand forces through draftees and volunteers.
Under U.S. federal law, men ages 18–25 must register with the Selective Service System to be eligible for most federal jobs. Federal agencies enforce this under hiring rules in 5 U.S.C. § 3328.
The wording is a bit strange - technically all men (18-25) must register. When I tried to register, I was told I couldn't because I was already registered.
The Selective Service auto-registers people from various data sources.
But this puts me in a weird spot: I've never actually registered. I am registered. But I did not register - which is the requirement.
There are Kafka-esque parts of the US government where this distinction could matter.
It is not like they had a choice. The article is about
1939, the events were well progressed then. Only very few were able to hide themselves and stay hidden for years.
Not sure what point you are trying to make. Does that justify the law and its consequences? Does that mean people who did not register were doing something wrong or stupid?
I thought it was those pesky Poles refusing to provide a German land corridor to enable intra-territorial transit between Germany and Germany’s exclave East Prussia. That and ethnic Germans allegedly being harassed in Poland.
First one is definitely true and isn’t emphasized much and tbh I feel like that demand wasn’t unreasonable. Shipping people and things and providing defense would be a lot harder to an exclave than to contiguous territory. They did seriously overreact by invading, of course, and it seems like Mr H had some serious temperamental issues.
Second one I’ve never researched enough to know if it’s true or German propaganda.
I don’t recall the Germans ever claiming that Poland was about to invade them? Maybe I missed it.
Previously it was conditional, only in effect “in the event of tension or defense” (machine translation), but they are very exceptional circumstances -- AFAIK not ever invoked since unification.
The change this year was to make it applicable regardless of those conditions: “Outside the tension or defense case, §§ 3 [...]” shall apply.
This is a significant change from the previous Cold War policy. I have talked about the definition of these terms in another comment, with another news article as source.
Not true. Back then, limitations on "Spannungsfall" and "Verteidigungsfall" were in place which have been removed last year. The real news, though, is that the public (media, opposition parties) didn't noticed until a couple of days ago.
This kind of reminds me of the book Get Shorty and the subsequent movie. About a mafia loan shark moving to hollywood and becoming a producer.
Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.
At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.
By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up.
Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs.
Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
> Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary energy source…
Batteries don’t consume lithium, battery recycling doesn’t consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.
I don’t think humans will last that long, but if they do I’m unsure what technology they’ll be using. Theoretically dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who knows.
Compliance costs are there because the government takes up the burden of accident costs. If the government does that, you can expect the government to then have a say in how things are designed and operated.
> Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air. Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the technological growth curve because of the recent boom in production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-effective once the tech gets worked out better.
So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other storage alternatives.
The main reason lithium batteries are used in cars and electronics is because they offer some of the best energy storage per kilogram. That's really important for something meant to be portable, but it's completely irrelevant for a large permanent installation.
People bring this up regularly, but I don't think it's that relevant. Studies regularly show that campaign contributions actually have very low influence on elections.
Trump notably had much smaller campaign budgets than his opponents in both winning elections, not even including the massive amounts of brazen fraud he used to pay himself with the money.
Fundamentally, it's presidential democracy that is flawed. We have a very powerful high office, and if enough people want to willing vote in a corrupt president, there's really not many checks against the damage that they can do.
Yes, it's possible to win with less money than your opponent, but why would anyone want to take that risk?
The problem with money in politics is not that money guarantees a win, but that the presence of large donations distorts the entire incentive structure of campaigning and governing: Courting big donations means spending time with big donors (who expect access in exchange for their money) and when it comes time to govern, studies have shown that campaign contributions and lobbying are dramatically more influential to what gets proposed and passed than the preferences of the general public.
Focusing on the problems with presidential campaigns re: money in politics is missing the forest for the trees: All politicians have limited time to spend between campaigning and governing, and if they're constantly raising money the governing gets delegated to lobbyists.
(This is why people are always so shocked when politicians who don't accept corporate PAC contributions have drastically different priorities than those who do. Of course they do! They don't have to spend all their time hanging out with corporate lobbyists!)
This doesn't really speak to Citizens United though. The nature of Dark Money is that no one knows where it comes from, so politicians cozying up to their donors is not actually the particular concern here.
(Also, there has been the opposite trend, which is that more money than ever comes from private donations from billionaires and other wealth.)
> if enough people want to willing vote in a corrupt president
Why do people do this though? Maybe it's inevitable, but I think there was a lot of pent up frustration with the government that led a lot of people to just say "fuck it". Not really excusing it (especially for his second term), but I feel like we're reaping years and years of a dysfunctional and ineffectual congress. Not that that's an especially easy problem to solve either.
I think this also explains a lot of the frustration with SCOTUS. In-theory, SCOTUS is supposed to just interpret and flesh out the policies decided on by congress. In practice, congress doesn't really do anything, and people started depending on SCOTUS's ability and willingness to make far-reaching and impactful decisions. Now a more conservative SCOTUS isn't doing that.
It's worth noting that an ineffective and gridlocked congress is specifically a problem of presidential-style democracies. Parliamentary systems with a prime minister have some of their own shortcomings (notably a weak executive), but the government is actually controlled by the legislature.
Countries that follow the presidential model regularly succumb to strong man type leaders. Ironically, in the modern era when the US had a hand in helping other countries establish their governments, we specifically helped them establish parliaments.
I agree there is a lot of pent up frustration in the U.S. and the GOP did a bang-up job of cultivating this frustration. And now that they have their chance at bat they seem to be striking out.
At the risk of my analogy making something serious sound like a game, I'd like to see another team have a chance at bat.
Citizens United affected far more than campaign contributions. Non-campaign political spending (aka "outside spending") has increased nearly eightfold and shows no signs of slowing down.
The electoral college gets a bad rap, but I almost wonder if going back to not having state popular votes determine presidential electors might be the move.
I also think that the system of party primary elections by popular vote is a big part of the problem. To win the Republican primary you have to be more "Republican" than your opponents. Ditto for the Democratic primary. Then you end up with candidates at the far ends of the spectrum instead of more centrist ones.
In congress this means a complete inability to compromise, resulting in the current stalemate. In the presidency, you end up with someone who thinks of his opponents as criminals deserving prosecution.
The top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle.
Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.
It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.
The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.
But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.
It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.
Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.
No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.
Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.
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