"Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what." .. well put. It occurs to me that this is the case on the HW front with Apple as well. I remember the butterfly keyboard, the notch, everything glued in and unservicable, the removal of ports like magsafe, ethernet, USB-A... well, at least some of the HW mis-steps have been reversed. We see some movement in that direction from the later versions of Tahoe.
I understand, and even agree, that how this is being handled has some pretty creepy aspects. But one thing missing from the comments I see here and elsewhere is: How else should verification be handled? We have a real problem with AI/bots online these days, trust will be at a premium. How can we try to assure it? I can think of one way: Everyone must pay to be a member (there will still be fraud, but it will cost!). How else can we verify with a better set of tradeoffs?
How about everyone gets a digital certification from their own government that this is the person named this and that. No need to share cranial measurements and iris scans.
Well, different trade offs there. On the plus side, sounds pretty simple. On the other hand...
Digital certification from the gov sounds a lot like "digital ID", which has run into considerable resistance in the UK and EU in just the last few months. As a general observation I find most EU citizens I interact with much more trusting of government than ... well, any other group of folks I have interacted with (I have the privilege of having lived and worked in S. America, N. America, sub Saharan Africa and now an EU country). If it does not fly well here, I don't think its general solution that most people would be comfortable with.
Having lived in borh the UK and Poland I was very surprised (given history) to find how comfortable, in comparison, Poles are with ID requirements, tax ID to join gyms and football clubs compared to the UK whicb still resists mandatory ID. There does seem to be a UK EU divide here
There should be no verification. The idea of a single platform where every worker is listed, identified, and connected to other people he/she knows IRL is scary. It shouldn't exist.
> Identity
>
> Verified using government ID in March 2025
Not that I would necessarily trust a verification badge for someone who controls the company with the responsibility for generating verification badges.
I agree that reserving judgement and separating the roles of individuals from the response of the organization are all critical here. Its not the first time that one of their staff were found to have behaved badly, in the case that jumps to my mind from a few years ago Peter Bright was sentenced to 12 years on sex charges involving a minor1. So, sometimes people do bad things, commit crimes, etc. but this may or may not have much to do with their employer.
Did Ars respond in any way after the conviction of their ex-writer? Better vetting of their hires might have been a response. Apparently there was a record of some questionable opinions held by the ex-writer. I don't know, personally, if any of their policies changed.
The current suspected bad behavior involved the possibility that the journalists were lacking integrity in their jobs. So if this possibility is confirmed I expect to see publicly announced structural changes in the editorial process at Ars Technica if I am to continue to be a subscriber and reader.
Probably. Question is, who will be accountable for the bot behavior? Might be the company providing them, might be the user who sent them off unsupervised, maybe both. The worrying thing for many of us humans is not that a personal attack appeared in a blog post (we have that all the time!) its that it was authored and published by an entity that might be unaccountable. This must change.
Both. Though the company providing them has larger pockets so they will likely get the larger share.
There is long legal precedent for you have to do your best to stop your products from causing harm. You can cause harm, but you have to show that you did your best to prevent it, and your product is useful enough despite the harm it causes.
Respectfully: I think the study is largely irrelevant to those who you seem to dismiss as one who "revel in Enforcement Theatre". I do agree the study provides valuable information I think it missed the point made by many advocates of immediate removal of those in the US illegally: No matter how low the rate of criminality by those in the country without permission, the number of events caused by that population should be pushed to 0 by removing them or not having them enter the country in the first place.
Specifically: According to Wikipedia there were about 1.7 M undocumented people in Texas as of 2023. The study estimates 96.2 violent crimes per year per 100K for that same population. So that is about 1,635 violent crimes per year that should not happen. Across all the categories they present, its 308.8 crimes per 100K per year- so for the undocumented population that means about 5,250 crimes per year that in theory should not happen (if there were 0 undocumented people in Texas).
The fact that the rate is lower for native-born or legal immigrants is immaterial to the argument advanced by those seeking more enforcement of immigration laws. Now, there are many, many aspects of the current administration's approach that can be debated and will probably not stand up well to scrutiny, but its important to understand the arguments being made if we are honestly interested in engaging in discussion and improvement.
Another interesting thing: From the study results I think that if you did drop the number of undocumented people in Texas to 0, the crime rates would actually increase, even as the absolute number of crimes dropped. And the number would only drop if those removed were not replaced with (for example) legal immigrants.
> its important to understand the arguments being made if we are honestly interested in engaging in discussion and improvement.
Yes. But making their arguments into different, milder, sanitized and whitewashed ones is NOT understanding them. It is carrying water for them. As of now, both their rhetorics and actions match perfectly. There is zero reason to think this is about crime levels.
> The fact that the rate is lower for native-born or legal immigrants is immaterial to the argument advanced by those seeking more enforcement of immigration laws
When the deportations are done in an orderly manner and without visible abuses, these people are unhappy. When they are done with visible abuses, then they feel like they are getting what they wanted. They do not particularly like the focus on lawbreakers either, their own rhetoric casts violent law breaking as something good - if done by the right side. In fact, when only illegal immigrants are deported, they act like something was missing.
If we are honest to ourselves about what they want and openly talk about, they want white ethnostate. They have issue with legal migrants and with non white citizens too. They have issue with EU having non whites in it. Somehow, their primary targets are cities with relatively low illegal immigration rather then ... Texas with much higher illegal immigration.
Immigration is not a left-right issue, there are reasons to want to limit wanted and unwanted immigration, regardless of who one might vote for.
> If we are honest to ourselves about what they want and openly talk about [...] without visible abuses, these people are unhappy.
You seem to be talking about a subset of all people who do not want immigration: caricaturally-extreme racists. You and GP are not talking about the same people, and GP is not carrying water for anyone.
I still visit regularly (and have since about 2000 or so), but I agree that it is not the same as in those days. I remember feeling like I was gaining actual insight into the topics from the comments, today... much less so. Maybe being older also plays a role, but I think /. has certainly changed as well.
I'm an American living in the EU for the last 1.5 y due to a work assignment. From what I observe here rough times and hard choices are coming for Europe, and probably relatively soon. I am sorry to say it, but I believe (as the saying goes) it is later than you think.
As for relying on your democratic process: I hope you are right.
I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done.
However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.
This project is brand new to me but I have a use case I'm immediately considering, when combined with the "shiny" dashboard library as seen here: https://shinylive.io/r/examples/
At work we have analysts who sometimes produce web-based dashboards for the business to consume. When we had Python folks, they used Plotly Dash and we had to host a server for them. It's a bit silly--the dashboard just accesses APIs and static data, crunches a bit, and renders some HTML. There's no inherent need for it to require its own server. There is "WebDash" [1] but I have not gotten it to work and it says it's alpha quality.
Now that we're getting into R, I don't have any path to production for dashboards. I want to avoid getting into another Plotly Dash situation where every analyst with a one-time idea ends up creating long-term IT burden. Enter WebR: now we only need to serve static files. That's a lot easier; I can serve essentially an unlimited number of dashboards from existing infra this way. Our client machines are beefy with tons of headroom and our EC2 instances are as small as possible, so shifting work from the server to the client makes sense here. I'm gonna try it and see if I've missed something.
When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine.
For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.)
In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side.
It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).
I might have missed it, but they did not include any of their "game" watches from the 1980s in the history, somehow! I spent many a happy hour on the submarine one (https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/the-handheld-museum-a-...). The pyramid one was also popular.
