Unlurker|Replay|About
Creators Turn Your Outrage into Their Paycheck (thebookofragebait.com)
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it’s not just “creators”, our news cycle depends on this. algorithm-driven social media amplifies this nonsense. I had to cut myself out of all social media because I found myself unreasonably angry every day. this new cycle and social media cycle was literally poisoning my life. it’s not like we didn’t have negative news or negative stories or flame bait back in the days of usenet, but it was easier to escape. Now, with all the TikTok and Twitter/X and Facebook embeds, it’s not only impossible to escape, it literally follows you around now. The only way to win is not to play at all.
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Does that mean that this creator is turning my outrage at rage bait creators into _their_ paycheck?
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You won't know until you buy their book (yes)
Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them (bbc.com)
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I definitely lost weight easily on wegovy and just as easily gained it back when I stopped taking it. The whole experience definitely drove home how I needed to improve my mental health alongside any “purely physical” intervention. Same situation when I lost weight by meticulously calorie counting. I think obesity is hard to fix even when you are not a “thermodynamics denier” (as another commenter said) because all you can practice is moderation from the get go. How many people would fail to fix their alcoholism if complete abstinence, even just a period of complete abstinence to rewire the brain, was never an option? They actually had to go down to the pub and practice stopping everyday at 1 pint?
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If you’re substantially overweight, you have to wonder if the long term side effects of GLP-1 are better than being obese That said, its a little disheartening to see people who are 10-15kg overweight also resort to these drugs - this kind of excess weight can be fought with simply diet and exercise
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Then just continue to take them? The article just once seems to mention side effects and these were suspected to be related to rapid weight loss and less to the drug itself. Pointless human interest story with some rent-a-quote expert sprinkled in that tries to imply some ominous danger but can't come up with any hard data on that themselves.
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We need to start looking at obesity as a hunger disorder, and not as the result of an addiction, a lack of knowledge about nutrition, or a lack of self control. When an obese person regulates their eating and loses weight, the hunger often doesn't go away - and often increases. This is physical, not psychological hunger. When the obese person almost inevitably returns to eating to fullness, they regain weight. When a person takes GLP-1s, hunger is greatly reduced, and an obese person can eat less food while still achieving satiety without gaining weight. When they stop taking the GLP-1s, the hunger returns, and when they return to eating to fullness, they regain weight. Similarly, when a person takes stimulant weight loss medication, they can eat less food while experiencing less hunger, and thus lose weight. Similarly, when they go off of the stimulant (or develop a tolerance), the hunger returns and when they return to eating to fullness, they regain weight. In many obese people, the hunger is present even when they eat a nutritious meal at the appropriate number of calories to maintain their weight. Common advice is to say "this mix of macros or foods makes me satisfied!" and, well, that's great for you but not universal. People who naturally feel reasonably satisfied with an appropriate number of calories to maintain their weight still experience hunger, but not with the intensity or insatiability of that hunger that many obese people do. While it does occur with some who have severe eating disorders, most obese people do not overeat themselves into obesity by continuing to eat long after they're full. They eat until the hunger goes away. It's the hunger. Take away the hunger, and the weight goes down. Bring back the hunger and the weight goes up. It's simple, it's obvious, and few say it.
I did lose 30-40kg about 2 years ago on Ozempic. I don't count calories. I went off Ozempic (now Mounjaro) and I gain weight at about 0.5-1kg a month. As I am resistance (gym) training, significant % of that ends up being muscle mass rather than fat. So I end up taking Mounjaro for about 1-2 months every 3-4 months, approximately 33% of the time being "on". Funnily, I end up with bulk/cut periods without doing them explicitly. This ends up working well for growing muscles. Notice all people in the story are women. I guess pairing GLP-likes with bodybuilding works quite well for men. As times goes on, I end up needing mounjaro less due to my increased muscle mass.
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I don't count calories. I went off Ozempic (now Mounjaro) and I gain weight at about 0.5-1kg a month. yeah that is how ppl become obese. over 2-5 years it adds up Notice all people in the story are women. Probably due to social media. Women may be more inclined to show off their success online. Also, women respond better to these drugs compared to men.
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When you restart taking it after an "off" period, do you immediately resume whatever dose you were at before? Or do you taper up each time? (Curious because I know for many people, side effects level out after they've been at a given dose for long enough, but temporarily return whenever they increase their dose; not sure how "off" periods affect that kind of tolerance.)
I guess it's a dialect thing, but I have become accustomed to disregarding absolutely every article that employs the word "jab".
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The word itself is just insufferable at this point. The media collectively went bonkers for it while describing COVID vaccine delivery.
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> (British) A medical hypodermic injection (vaccination or inoculation). From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jab I hope that helps
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That's just what they call it in British English, and this is a BBC article.
I don't have a horse in this race, but from my personal experience eating satiating whole foods with lower glycemic index, higher fiber and protein content makes it very difficult to gain excessive weight. On the asthma front, from experiences with someone close to me -- getting in great physical shape (with caveats regarding training) DID indeed help greatly with broncho-constriction and higher scores on FEV. Basically symptoms and inhaler use went down tremendously over a few years and a physical transformation.
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Before GLP-1s, there was rarely any such thing as "satiation" for me. Getting full was something that happened without the feeling of having had enough. The main effect of wegovy, for me, was having a feeling of not needing to eat rather than just feeling too full to eat. It was quite an experience, and one I am not sure I had had in more than 30 years.
Interesting link: a company called Fractyl Health is studying a surgical procedure they call "Revita," that they hope can keep weight off for patients after they discontinue GLP-1s.[0] The premise, IIUC, is that obesity is driven partly by mucosal overgrowth on the duodenum. This thicker-than-expected layer of mucus is less porous, which leads your digestive system to underestimate the number of calories you've consumed. Revita basically re-surfaces the duodenum. So, the idea is that you get to a lower weight with the GLP-1 drugs, and then Revita can hopefully reset your set point there. Their first clinical trial is still in progress, but I think it's interesting to watch. [0]: https://www.fractyl.com/our-platforms/revita/
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> Revita basically re-surfaces the duodenum. Does this reduce mucous production going forward? Otherwise, it seems like it would be a temporary effect.
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My impression (and I'm not a scientist) is that the mucosal overgrowth comes from eating an obesogenic diet. (Some combination of too much sugar / salt / wrong types of fat?) If you get the procedure and don't go back to an obesogenic diet, then it should be permanent.
Other medications become lifelong medications but without this level of scrutiny. I am 100% in favor of finding a more permanent treatment, but switching blood pressure meds, and cholesterol meds, and other daily meds for a single once a week med is a massive improvement, especially since the all source mortality data keeps rolling in showing the efficacy here is orders of magnitude better than all the other medications out there. A constant issue here is that we keep calling this a 'weight loss drug' and society views being fat as a moral failing ant that you 'just don't have the will power' to overcome. We need to stop. If this is a lifelong drug it is worth it compared to the relatively ineffective, and just as lifelong, alternatives out there.
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A constant issue here is that we keep calling this a 'weight loss drug' and society views being fat as a moral failing ant that you 'just don't have the will power' to overcome. We need to stop. If this is a lifelong drug it is worth it compared to the relatively ineffective, and just as lifelong, alternatives out there. I have noticed much less moralizing over the issue now compared to 2-3 years ago. I think more people realize these drug are safe and effective and not 'taking the easy way out', but rather a treatment for a medical problem than just blaming laziness or gluttony.
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The article explains they they are not safe nor effective
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But it is factually true that it’s a matter of willpower, no amount of reframing it is going to change that. It’s not like others like myself, currently on a cut cycle, don’t experience hunger. The idea that we are just “lucky” ignores all the willpower and discipline we fight through to do it ourselves. I’ve eaten about 800 calories today and it is 4pm. Just finished 90 minutes on the indoor bike. My stomach feels hungry. I experience that and just sit with it. That is the difference.
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On the one hand I'm impressed but 800 is really super low . I was losing about a kilo a week at the peak of my diet eating double that.
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Congrats, your metabolism (FAO, gluconeogenesis, insulin sensitivity, …) works well. Don’t assume that’s the case for everyone, because it’s well researched that this is highly individual.
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The ability to tolerate discomfort is probably as genetic/inante as metabolism.
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You know nothing about my metabolism.
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Well one of those has to work well or you would have fainted by now.
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How can you say that with any certainty, though? How do you know that hunger hits you in the exact same way it does another person? That overcoming it requires the exact same amount of willpower in all people?
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My hunger feels 8 trillion times worse than an obese person’s. Since I am making the claim, everyone else has to affirm it now.
"Ozempic face" is actually just "unhealthy rapid weight loss face". Ozempic makes it easier to starve yourself, but that isn't how it's supposed to be used.
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Taking Ozempic also drops a lot of muscular mass and that ozempic face look totally makes sense. There's no free lunch or wonder drug. While it's effective at weight loss it has a lot of unwanted side effects. And when stopping the drug the weight gain comes back so not sure if it's worth it.
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It’s also accelerated muscle loss, even heart tissue. I‘m not saying it’s not worth it, but this should be kept on the radar for sure.
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Many of the fly by night digital proscribes just jack the dosage to show rapid gains. Coupled with people lying on BMI to get a script is a bad combination and why it’s so obvious.
Being overweight is a chronic disease. Just like alcoholism, or any kind of other addictions. I've struggled with alcohol abuse, and once you come to the realization that you're abusing it, the fix FOR ME was relatively simple: I stopped (under medical supervision) drinking, or to be more precise: I stopped starting to drink. I have no problems not drinking, I have a problem that when I start I cannot stop. I have the same issue with food. Not eating is a lot easier than stopping to eat. But I cannot completely stop eating. Yet with alcohol people are like: hey, good for you. With my weight issues people are like: dude, just eat less, or exercise more. (I stopped sharing the food story with people).
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Other countries do not have obese people, but have many drinkers! It is issue of food and ingrediences. Too many sugars, fructose syrups from corn... If fat american moves to asian country, he loses fat, without changing a diet.
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I have observed that being addicted drugs gets way more sympathy than being addicted to food even though the neural pathways and other factors are the same.
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since I also share the ability to cold turkey on most anything, what you can completly stop eating is processed food, or anything that requires an advanced chemical engineering degree to decipher, ditch most of the carbs, ALL of the sugar. Meat, veggies,fruit,grains,nuts,the most complex packaged foods I buy are yogurt, and bread from an outfit that contracts farmers to grow wheat, pickles, stuff from wierd and wonderfull ethnic groceries where they openly miss there country and insist on having you try the good stuff!, wild food, tucked away farm markets, but most of all, I put my body in charge, which requires listening, but once you realy clean up, perhaps you will find as I have, that certain off the record indulgences have very significant negative phisiological repercusions, on a one to one basis. but this practice is not for dilly dalyiers, so
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I really, really, really like mayonnaise though
It's frustrating. "Just Eat Less" is roughly the way to lose weight, but the problem is not that fat people are so unbelievably stupid that they didn't know this. I am sure for some people it really is that simple. Not us. My weight has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I've never been terribly thin, but I've been "not technically obese" from time to time. I'm currently back on the downswing, but God, what a pain in the ass. It feels like gaining weight is incredibly easy and losing it is incredibly hard (and I do believe this is validated by the science , because you wind up with more fat cells when you first gain weight, which I guess is both relieving and terrifying.) No matter how many attempts it takes to fix my body, I'm obviously going to just keep trying, because obesity is horrible for you in so many ways. It saps your energy, it's carcinogenic, it increases your blood pressure and risk of heart disease, but it feels like one of those struggles that is never-ending. I've improved my diet numerous times but it never feels like it's quite enough.
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There's a lot of very visible and conscious messaging about losing weight. There's an equal and opposite level of messaging to keep eating, which is less conscious and runs under the radar. Snacks are literally designed to be addictive. TV ads start from birth. Most restaurants have huge portion sizes. "Family" and "Festival" events assume overeating is expected. Junk food is cheap and quality food is expensive. Overeating is framed as being "naughty" but also indulgent and nurturing. All of this is a huge social problem that's not acknowledged at all. It's very, very hard to Just Eat Less when there's a constant barrage of messaging encouraging you to do the opposite, and you're not even aware of it. The contradictory messaging is actually a classic crazy-making psychological double bind. So of course it's very difficult to make a dent in this, and even harder to permanently change habits so all the contradictions no longer influence you.
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Most restaurants have huge portion sizes. ppl keep blaming this, but this is contradicted by shrinkflation, yet people still are getting fatter than ever. There is nothing to stop someone from buying more food to offset smaller portions.
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> It feels like gaining weight is incredibly easy and losing it is incredibly hard I feel like there is more to it. Obviously, I sympathize with you, and I noticed that when I switch from a bulking cycle to a cutting cycle, it is a bit difficult to adjust for the first couple of weeks as well. But by god, I truly am struggling to switch the other way around, and it takes me months to adjust to the bulking cycle, even with the help of stuff like weed. And when I don’t work out aggresively and don’t keep track of my cycle, it feels just natural for me to default to eating way less, as opposed to the other way around. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a dig at your take. All I mean is that, I feel like the whole issue is a bit more complex.
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But by god, I truly am struggling to switch the other way around, and it takes me months to adjust to the bulking cycle, even with the help of stuff like weed You could just have good genetics in which your body is resistant to weight gain or you have a low appetite to begin with. As shown by the worldwide obesity epidemic, this is apparently quite an uncommon problem. 75% of country overweight or obese.
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(and I do believe this is validated by the science, because you wind up with more fat cells when you first gain weight, which I guess is both relieving and terrifying.) the data is pretty clear . the vast majority of dieters fail, even when the bar for success is set really low, like a 2-5% long-term weight loss of starting body weight for an obese person is considered a success.
> the problem is not that fat people are so unbelievably stupid that they didn't know this I don't suggest this applies to you, but even a small amount of searching around and reading stuff on the web will reveal a substantial subgroup of outright thermodynamics deniers.
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> outright thermodynamics deniers I've heard people say this before, but when reading those arguments it mostly turns out to be people who think there's something more complicated going on with digestion, excretion, or metabolism such that eaten calories are more efficiently used for some, and burned off or passed through without full processing to some degree for people who self-reportedly "can't gain weight".
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Right, the body can choose to either convert surplus calories to fat or waste heat. The latter could explain how some individuals are much more resistant to weight gain than others. This is also supported by overfeeding studies, in which controlling for relevant factors, some people gain much more fat on a deliberate calorie surplus than others.
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Can you provide an example of someone who outright denies thermodynamics? I’m familiar with people who believe that there are details of how a body metabolizes fuel , expends energy, and generally operates that escape analysis focused on fuel volume and physical activity. I am familiar with people who characterize this as denial of the laws of thermodynamics, but I am not familiar with anyone who seems to believe that there are situations in which the laws of thermodynamics are outright suspended.
What works for me is to eat highly nutritious low-glycemic food until I feel full (eggs, avocado, quinoa, etc) Otherwise I over eat crap and gain weight easily
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the problem is, obese or formerly obese people clan eat a lot of anything before the full feeling sets in, no matter what. Eggs, chicken..does not matter.
It can be hyped because jabs bring immediate results. And it can be prescribed by almost every doctor so number of people who can report is big, and therefore visible results can be further disseminated (hyped). But… treatment is working. Question is at what cost. If something is too good to be true, one has to ask what is behind it. But perhaps it is a similar situation to when antibiotics were invented.
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Most developed medical technology doesn't have "a cost". That's puritan morality theater masquerading as wisdom.
And it works much better for most people
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> And it works much better for most people I thing it takes less effort to be effective but it has pretty bad side effects.
Utah homeless campus takes shape (ksl.com)
I lived in downtown SLC near Pioneer Park where there are a few shelters and affordable housing complexes. As a result, Pioneer Park became a place where most unhoused congregate downtown. IMO this is an effort to get the unhoused out of downtown. The location of the new facility is out by the airport, in the middle of nowhere, cutting off the unhoused from the social fabric. If the goal is to help the unhoused be woven into the social fabric the answer is to build up, not out, so they are a part of city living, and should include: 1) Small-scale, incremental affordable housing, 2) Mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods, and 3) Preservation of older, cheaper buildings I like the spirit of the project. I don't like that is quarantining a portion of society.
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Salt Lake also has https://theothersidevillage.com/ which is rather less quarantined. One specific goal of that was to be near transit.
“If the goal is to help the unhoused be woven into the social fabric” - I don’t think that’s ever been the goal. Maybe in some idealistic substack, but not when it comes to actual policy making. The goal has always been removal of anyone seen as a nuisance at best, or a threat at worst.
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Many cities have mixed-income housing strategies to create a social and economic mix, including London where council housing is peppered in throughout the boroughs. "Building more densely in the right places will not just enable the delivery of more homes, but will also improve access to jobs and services, while helping to fund desperately needed social and physical infrastructure. It will help people to be active and healthy, by locating more housing within walking and cycling distance of local amenities and public transport access, and by reducing reliance on car ownership. Furthermore, it will help to foster socially and economically mixed neighbourhoods, which are a key part of maintaining London’s vibrancy and economic success." -London Housing Strategy https://www.housinglin.org.uk/_assets/Resources/Housing/OtherOrganisation/london_draft_housing_strategy.pdf
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The only thing in common between Salt Lake City and London is that they are both English speaking cities. Might as well compare Paris with Cayenne.
I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone (idiallo.com)
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I wonder how hard would it be to just switch back to Windows 7 for these kinds of cases? Obviously the most ideal solution is to use Linux but there's still some edge cases where Windows is needed or is just preferred. If you install Windows 7 in a VM you'll be blown away by having a simple, clean OS that just runs applications and doesn't shove ads or Bing search into the start menu. And obviously it would be vulnerable to software exploits but if the device is mostly kept offline I can't see many issues with that coming up. Something to think about...
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I don't know how many years/months/days/hours the author is going to continue using Windows for, but this seems like a perfect task to be "resolved" by AHK, which is probably in the top 10 things Windows users have access to. Worth trying, at least before switching to another source of operating system.
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Switch to Win10 LTSC iOT if you want to keep getting security updates for many years Bonus is it strips out all the crap and is super fast Downside is a few specific pieces of software refuse to install (for no good technical reason). Adobe Photoshop for example There is also win11 LTSC iOT which I believe might actually install on older hardware that normal win11 will not (don't quote me on this)
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The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.
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Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.
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Ultimately, I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to. I switched to Linux because Microsoft became so actively hostile to me I felt like I didn't have any other choice. No Microsoft, I'm not buying new hardware just to get the new OS. No, I'm not going to let you nag me every single day until I get pissed off enough to. No, I will not tolerate all the little things in your OS that piss me off everyday. Your software sucks. Your filesystem sucks. Your constant nagging sucks. I don't want your cloud TPM security bullshit and I DEFINITELY don't want Copilot or Recall. Seriously Microsoft: fuck you. Giving up being able to play certain games - which require me to install malware into my computer anyway - is a small price to pay to have my sanity and freedom back. I own my computer, not you. Goodbye and good riddance. I already used MacOS and Linux for work anyway. But don't worry Apple, you're riding that line pretty dangerously too - you're gonna be next on the chopping block if you don't get your act together.
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Use Rufus it'll disable hardware requirements, without hassle. You will need an iso. If you know someone with 11 have them download it. Otherwise download the generic.
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...but then you have to use Windows 11...
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I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you. Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore. I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.
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The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade. He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).
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There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032. Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.
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Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.
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Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS. Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
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> Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS. I can offer a slightly different perspective. I remember Microsoft from the 90s and early 2000s. And while technical details differ, their attitude towards users didn't change that much.
Is it possible to switch an existing windows 10 install to the extended support version? (Can't remember the exact term).
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LTSC. Technically MSFT doesn’t offer them to laymen like us but I don’t think they would care if you pirate them.
Surprisingly effective solution: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate] "ProductVersion"="Windows 10" "TargetReleaseVersion"=dword:00000001 "TargetReleaseVersionInfo"="22H2"
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Just curious what does it do?
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Sets the underlying Registry keys for the Group Policy "Select the target Feature Update version". It tells the Windows Update service to select updates for a specific feature update instead of offering latest. https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/Default.aspx?PolicyID=15143#15143
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Tells Windows update the version to target ie it won't try updating past this. I'm not sure if it stops every nag screen tho (it did stop the big one starting up IIRC).
I hope you researched Linux driver support for that model first. I share the dissatisfaction with the direction of Windows -- but their driver library is unparalleled. Linux CAN run great on lots of machines, but it has nowhere near the hardware support.
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> but it has nowhere near the hardware support. My usb scanner would like to have a word with you. Its last supported driver was for windows 2000 and it still works well on Linux. Hardware support vary between the 2 operating system and new stuff may be supported earlier on windows but I can't say that windows driver library is unparalleled, quite the opposite actually.
In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives: Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS And probably some others I haven't heard of. Using Windows in 2025 AND complaining about it is complaining about a self inflicted wound.
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I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent. If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.
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That is besides the point. In that case it is self-inflicted by the company choosing to depend on it.
True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
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What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software. I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint. I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
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Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer. Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
There must be a way to disable this thing. Maybe we can disable the service? But anyway I already switched to Linux for my daily usage. It is not smooth as Windows due to driver issues and other weird things, like Firefox crashing frequently when I’m typing in a text box like this one, but still feels better than Windows. The Windows team and its product manager is determined to trash the product. Good work!
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> There must be a way to disable this thing. If Windows had a slogan, this would be it.
Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business. Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.
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Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
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But somehow, apps and websites load just as fast on my decade old personal laptop as on my brand new work laptop.
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My daily desktop is mostly 2012 vintage. This hardware is still in use and works fine. For what it's worth, that machine is being used while I upgrade my 2001 Computer Of Theseus once more. It's now getting it's third motherboard with CPU - this one salvaged from a 2018 or 2019 gaming machine. It's on its second case, and has seen more hard drive and memory upgrades than I can count - all of them piecemeal. Other than perhaps the motherboard screws and hard drive screws, I'm not sure if anything actually purchased in 2001 still survives in there. Maybe the power cable and pc speaker. And I don't remember ever replacing the rear case fan now that I'm looking at it.
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It's triggers broom :-p
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Cool, but my decade-old machine works perfectly well for my needs, as too I imagine a million other such machines.
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I'm sure it works, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been improvements.
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on. Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
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> So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) You mean the Microsoft vacuum cleaner ? /s
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I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device. This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
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Hardware key storage is a low level security primitive. Both Android and iOS have mandated it for far longer. It's a low level security primitive that enables a lot of scenarios, not just DRM. For example - it's not possible to protect SSH keys from malware that achieves root without hardware storage. Only hardware storage can offer the "Unplug It" guarantee - that unplugging a compromised machine ends the compromise.
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Maybe instead Microsoft could allow Windows 11 to install and run on machines that are otherwise capable and just flash red screens at you all the time where otherwise ads would show up that constantly nag that "THIS COMPUTER IS FUCKING INSECURE!" or something. It would be equally as annoying but I'm sure running latest Windows 11 but with TPM 1.0 instead of TPM 2.0 will be more secure than running Windows 10 without bug fixes and security patches. (But my understanding is there were other things like bumping minimum supported instruction sets that happened to mismatch a few CPUs that support the instructions but were shipped with older TPM)
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And clever people found out the way - https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement
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You're missing the point, the TPM 2.0 requirement is there to drive adoption, not to actually prevent you from installing Windows 11.
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Windows 12 will close the loophole: your CPU will require a signed code path from boot down to application level code. No option to disable Secure Boot or install your own keys. But there needs to be an installed base of secure hardware for this to happen, hence the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11.
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> motivate people to buy new hardware Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
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May I suggest Framework ( https://frame.work/linux ).
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
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Worse than that, there's no consistency in Fn+key shortcuts. Recently acquired an HP Ergonomic Keyboard as a replacement for a broken Sculpt, only to find out that it literally cannot send Ctrl+Break -- there's no key for it, no Fn+key shortcut for it and the remapping software doesn't simulate it properly.
don't you like doing finger contortions to use all the modifier keys?
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They aren't always the same: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=9943 Also, even when they are the same, on certain laptops you literally hit the key-rollover problem.
You probably didn't grow up with horrors like the WordPerfect function key strip or being faced with a keyboard like that on the ZX80/81/Speccy etc.
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Yes, it's a miracle that after 40 years of typing every day, my fingers still work. But that may be a biased view on my part; there may be lots of programmers out there with arthritis in their fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other occupational diseases.
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
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Make it do the security stuff out-of-the-box, allow the user to change ANYTHING they want, including turning off the security stuff. Linux! It's in everyone's best interest.
I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo. Unless im literally running Linux From Scratch im at the mercy of maintainers to do whatever they want.
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I mean.. how is this different from any OS distribution? The other OS distributions let you turn it off.
"Ubuntu will apply security updates automatically, without user interaction. This is done via the unattended-upgrades package, which is installed by default." https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/how-to/software/automatic-updates/
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Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with: sudo apt-get remove --purge unattended-upgrades (doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space). OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter. Edit: fixed
I sure like seeing Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled. 0 updates can be applied immediately. 108 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Apps. Learn more about enabling ESM Apps service at https://ubuntu.com/esm every time I log in. Or > You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options. every time I log in.
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So disable it?
Not being battered by upsells nobody asked for every time you turn the laptop on is so refreshing.
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Windows used to be like that too, when MS was more focused on being hostile to the competition than its own customers.
My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well. Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.
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> Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.
Exactly. Upgrade, to Linux.
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Why bother with Linux when there is MacOS? You get decent hardware to go with it too
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Because MacOS is just as insidious? Recent versions will bring up the iCloud pop-up on every boot. Won't go away until you comply. Both Mac and Windows are for suckers.
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IMO Mac eco is good hardware plus meh software. Some built ins are really in bad shape — but I guess people have different opinions, although I think calling Finder a beta version is an insult to “beta”.
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Because some of us would rather not have to buy new hardware just because Apple says no more updates for your machine.
Sales people don't understand it, not software developers.
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If you are a software developer and you implemented that without question, you suck.
These problems are rampant enough in the OSS world too, never heard of an open source salesman.
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Rms?
Mullvad VPN: "This is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt." (mastodon.online)
A reasonable point about the discussion, but I doubt it is a meaningful one. The intention of these international agreements is that they circumvent the laws by moving data out of jurisdiction and have someone else do the surveillance, right? I have to assume that the EU is doing metadata analysis. All the talking is just about bringing it in house. On another topic, I don't know how mullvad intends to avoid compliance. "If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what." Saying "we can't give you logs because we don't have them" just means that they need to start logging or gtfo of the EU.
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They'll probably take it to court in the regions within the EU where this would be illegal, for example Germany. This is kind of what I meant by this law would be ignored/repealed as it goes against member nations own laws. I would expect there would be a lot of civic push back too. This law hasn't passed before, I'm not confident it will pass this time either. The real issue here is that the EU is not good at handling band faith actors - the same law in different wrapping should not be allowed to persist.
In the ancient Greek colony of Locri, any who proposed a new law would do so with a rope around their neck, if the law was voted down, they would get hanged. Food for thought.
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Intentionally misinformed citizens continued to charge the streets demanding "essential services" like barber shops need to be reopened and to intentionally dismantle and resist against all government protections on public safety during the pandemic (like wearing a mask during an active spreading event), literally while their grandparents and relatives slowly and painfully died on respirators in hospitals largely agreeing with the same notion of covid prevention measures being "pointless". They then attacked the institutions that provided either medical treatments or provided assistance, and continue to promote that culture. Lemmings to a cause they dont understand for a message they know is false. That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
> Most people don’t even have an internal monologue Is there any scientific indication that whether private thoughts are automatically verbalized actually has an impact on cognitive activity or function? Also where do you get this idea that most people lack an internal monologue? Afaik research indicates that totally lacking verbal thinking is very rare.
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There is a person thinking about how to solve actual problems at the bus/rail stop. The other person is totally reactive (someone FaceTimes them), mostly glued to doomscrolling (consuming non stop). There are disproportionately more of the latter than the former. There’s nothing wrong with that it’s just how humans are wired. It’s pretty obvious.
Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists. I suppose you could be politically nihilistic enough to think there's no reason for this law to exist, or that it's primarily some authoritarian suppression agenda, but I find that preposterous. Bruxelles is a lot of things, but authoritarian is not one of them. Child sexual exploitation is a problem, and it does demand a solution. If you don't like this one, find a better one.
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> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no . Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either. Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them. It's like a lot of things.
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But they aren't working with industry here.
Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." "papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Secret_law
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SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't. Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
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> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it. I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law. And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
I think EU will manage without you liking it. But painting its leadership as the one trying to shape dictatorship is incredible ignorant. Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other. A country serving small minority of large companies is the best description of the US, not the EU.
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Wow. I cannot fathom anyone thinking this, but also I am doubtful the EU pays for propaganda on HN so it is what it is I guess. After von der Leyen's corruption and the fast pace into totalitarianism against the will of the population nonetheless. Just wow.
You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving (neilthanedar.com)
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The purpose of life is not only to be happy. It's not a useless metric but don't over-index on it
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Overcomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.
This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade. Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath. There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
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Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
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I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too. But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
I find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting. I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold. The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.
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Same. I can identify with the subject matter, but the whole thing was just so off-putting. Trite, sound bites.
15 years ago this exact comment would have been written swapping out millennials for gen x and gen z for millennials.
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This is a such a cop-out. We millennials had it easy compared to zoomers.
Everything is noticeably more expensive than it was 15 years ago, though.
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Sure, but I also make ~6x as much as I did 15 years ago. Despite that I still think everything is too fucking expensive.
I'm burned out because I have to raise two young children, work a full time job in a demanding career, and then in the hour or two a day of time that isn't accounted for in those two tasks, I need to maintain a household and try to care for myself. I feel a strong sense of purpose caring for my family, but don't have enough time to meet life's demands. Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
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I feel you. The answer is that you need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Also, it's good for kids to be spending time with other good people, too. Continuing in the way you describe is bad for you and you know it so the only thing left now is to figure out how to change it. I hope everything goes well with you.
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When kids were added to the family, it actually improved my life. I actually had motivation then for making money—and making time. Now, empty nested, I can see that I was both rudderless and identity-less before the kids. I'm wandering now (and retired) trying to find a replacement identity. I'm still a father of course (and husband) but with less input and less to do. In fact I feel inclined to step back and let the girls have their lives now. So I road-trip, come up with projects to keep me busy, try to be an "educator".
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People underestimate how quickly you burn out when you're completely on your own. It's the people around you that give you purpose and motivation.
> because I have to raise two young children It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.
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having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century on the contrary. global population growth will plateau in a few decades, and negative population growth is already a problem in many countries, like all western countries, south korea, and also china.
If you wait until everything is planned, ready and accounted for you'll never have kids.
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Even if you reach that point, you're likely now at the age where fertility problems become a real issue. If you want to have kids do it when you're in your early 20s.
I feel the same way about kids. For me, I think, it changed my perspective. Lots of things at work that would have bothered or frustrated me no longer do so. Having kids is a great way to develop a Zen attitude about some things. Though, to be fair, you gain a whole new set of much scarier things to worry about.
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If you don't have a zen attitude around a three year old you're going to have a bad time
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LOL! Totally!
I know a lot of people who DoorDash, have groceries delivered, have a house cleaner, and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time. It’s never quite as much time as expected, though. Each is a marginal addition of free time that brings its own complications (like my friend who did an alarming amount of DoorDash and is now investing a lot of time into dropping weight and managing cholesterol and blood sugar)
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It's not about buying time though, it's about what you do with the bought time. I see a lot of people using these expensive services and then wasting the extra time - or worse, filling time while they wait for the completion.
Glad you brought up your friend in the 2nd bit there as it seems to have become relatively common for some people to make food delivery services a very regular part of their lifestyle without really paying attention to the staggering amount of saturated fat they are ingesting even from the majority of "healthy" options available on these services (nevermind the even worse fast food options) Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.
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Saturated fat is not the demon we've been lead to believe for the past 30-40 years. Sugar is. And there's a lot of sugar in prepared food too.
> have kids because they otherwise lack meaning That's how life on earth worked for 3 billion years. I think that assuming humans are somehow above that is unwise. We're not.
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I think, until very recently, people had kids because the sex is good.
I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it. Like two people can't be together without being married. But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids. As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
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Kids with two parents are far less likely to get into crime and have mental health problems, so there is that. (Before anyone gets onto me I lived in a single parent household for years.)
Day laborers protest noise machines installed at Home Depot (latimes.com)
Someone installed one of these at a shop in SFbay a couple years ago and I tracked it down, took an SPL recording snapshot, and emailed the city to report a violation of noise laws with the proof. The noisemaker was physically uninstalled after a few weeks and did not return. So, presumably Home Depot is violating LA Noise Ordinance, and could reasonably be expected to accrue fines or even forced to cease operating their retail business on that property, given a properly filed code violation report; and, since any persistent sound levels necessary to cause discomfort are almost certainly an OSHA violation, a side copy to the relevant Home Depot worker unions in LA/Cali/US might produce a rather significant result as well.
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I guess the question is what the noise level is once off Home Depot property and whether the area is prohibited for their own workers
Home Depot isn't democratically elected, but you should sign up for survivor if you want to vote people out. Functioning democracies don't work that way.
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All societies eject people who enter illegally. Go cross illegally into Mexico and you can experience this.
>I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app. Then you'd need to prove your identity and pay taxes on what you earn. This is for illegal immigrants working under the table.
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It's also only in some areas. None of the big home improvement centers where I live have anyone hanging around looking for work.
Could there be a motif unrelated to ICE ? That Home Depot does not like that day labourers are loitering and approaching customers entering and leaving the store.
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I believe Home Depot offers a similar service now so in a way they are directly competing
They don't have to set up Flock cameras and share the data with people who plan the ICE raids. Home Depot's hands aren't totally clean here.
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Last time I got 10 gauge conduit wiring it was literally padlocked and needed a manager to get because the theft issues are so bad.
I’ve done landscaping, home repair, fence construction, outdoor painting. My family still actively does. I don’t find them beneath me. Working under the table without work authorization is actually spectacularly illegal as an employer and employee. Tax evasion is also spectacularly illegal as an individual. What are you talking about?
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Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed. https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2025/2025-53.html "The Labor Commissioner is reminding all workers that California’s labor laws protect every worker in the state, regardless of immigration status." https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG ... "A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
Logging Sucks (loggingsucks.com)
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I've recently come off a team that was racking up a huge Splunk bill with ~70 log events for each request on a high traffic service, and this is all very resonant. Hadn't heard the "wide event" name, but I had settled on the same idea myself in that time (called them "top-level events" - i.e. we would gather information from the duration of the request and only log it at the "top" of the stack at the end), and evangelised them internally mostly on the basis it gave you fantastic correlation ability. In theory if you've got a trace id in Splunk you can do correlated queries anyway, but we were working in Spring and forever having issues with losing our MDC after doing cross-thread dispatch and forgetting to copy the MDC thread global across. This wasn't obvious from the top-level, and usually only during an incident would you realise you weren't seeing all the loglines you expected for a given trace. So absent a better solution there, tracking debug info more explicitly was appealing. Also used these top-level events to store sub-durations (e.g. for calling downstream services, invoking a model etc), and with Splunk if you record not just the length of a sub-process but its absolute start, you can reconstruct a hacky waterfall chart of where time was spent in your query.
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While I agree with some of it, I feel like there's a big gotcha here that isn't addressed. Having 1 single wide event, at the end of a request, means that if something unexpected happens in the middle (stack overflow, some bug that throws an error that bypasses your logging system, lambda times out etc...) you don't get any visibility into what happens. You also most likely lose out on a lot of logging frameworks your language has that your dependencies might use. I would say this is a good layer to put on top of your regular logs. Make sure you have a request/session wide id and aggregate all those in your clickhouse or whatever into a single "log".
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I've recently added error tracking to my self-hosted analytics app (UXWizz), and the way I did it is simply add extra events to each user/session. Once you have the concept of a session or user, you can simply attach errors or logs as Events stored for that user. This solves the main problem mentioned in the article, where you don't know what happened, plus being an Event stored in a MySQL database, you can still query it. Why not simply use Events for logging, instead of plain strings?
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Use events instead of repetitious logging calls. https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/
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> No grep-ing. How is grep a bad thing? I find myself using it all the time. I’m not into graphical user interfaces. They overwhelm me. By the time I’ve clicked myself through the GUI or written some horrible proprietary $COMPANY Query Language string, I might have already figured out the bug using tried and tested CLI tools.
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This seems like a classic time vs space trade off. Instead of reconstructing a "wide event" from multiple log lines with the same request id, the suggestion seems to be logging wide events repeatedly to simplify reconstruction from request ids. I personally don't see the advantage, and in either scenario, if you're not logging what's needed your screwed.
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Persisting a data schema that represents business events is a great idea. That’s more about Event Sourcing though and doing that can answer a ton of questions about the system without doing it in log messages. Wide events as a strategy is expensive, even with sampling, and doesn’t address the fundamental problem - why do we log messages? I was hoping the article would enumerate why we log messages. Nailing down those scenarios first will lead to a happy life. Why do we log? - proof of life - is the system running? - what is the state (in memory) when an error occurred? - when did an error occur? - do I need to get up at 2 am and fix something? - what do I need to fix? I feel like every team operating a system has their own reasons for logging.
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Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally. Today, a single user request might touch 15 services, 3 databases, 2 caches, and a message queue. If a user request is hitting that many things, in my view, that is a deeply broken architecture. I'm building an analytics SaaS and we made the conscious decision to keep it simple: Next.js API routes + Supabase + minimal external services. A single page view hits maybe 3 components max (CDN -> App -> Database). That said, I agree completely on structured logging with rich context. We include user_id, session_id, and event_type on every log line. Makes debugging infinitely easier. The "wide events" concept is solid, but the real win is just having consistent, searchable structure. You don't need a revolutionary new paradigm - just stop logging random strings and use JSON with a schema.
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"Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally." But the next era will be like the previous one. Today monolith is enough for most of apps.
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distributed event id and you are all set
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the best implementation of structured logging I've seen is dotnet build's binlogs ( https://msbuildlog.com ), I would love to see it evolve into a general purpose logging solution
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The article, AI or not, is extremely naive. It doesn't mention any premise or any problem to solve. Proposes a solution and just goes with it. What if your monster of a event is lost when your service crashes or is lost by the logging library/service/etc? What if you're interested in measuring, post factum, how long each step takes? What if you want to trace a log through several (micro-)services and maybe between a mobile app and some batch job executor that runs once a day? "Logging sucks" when you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve.
> Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally. I worked with enterprise message bus loggers in semiconductor manufacturing context wherein we had thousands of participants on the message bus. It generated something like 300-400 megabytes per hour. Despite the insane volume we made this work really well using just grep and other basic CLI tools. The logs were mere time series of events. Figuring out the detail about specific events (e.g. a list of all the tools a lot visited) required writing queries into the Oracle monster. You could derive history from the event logs if you had enough patience & disk space, but that would have been very silly given the alternative option. We used them predominantly to establish a casual chain between events when the details are still preliminary. Identifying suspects and such. Actually resolving really complicated business usually requires more than a perfectly detailed log file.
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At last a sane person. Logs are for identifying the event timeline, not to acquire the whole reqs/resp data. Putting every detail into the logs is -in my experience - makes undertanding issues harder. Logs tell a story. When, what happened, not how or why that happened. Why is in the code, how is in the combination of, data, logs, events, code. And loosely related, I also dislike log interfaces like elk stack. They make following track of events really hard. Most of the time you do not know what you are loooking for, just a vauge understanding of why you are looking into the logs. So a line passed 3 micro seconds ago maybe your euraka moment, where no search could identify , just intuition and following logs diligently can.
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> It generated something like 300-400 megabytes per hour. Despite the insane volume we made this work really well using just grep and other basic CLI tools. 400MB of logs an hour is nothing at all, that's why a naive grep can work. You don't even need to rotate your log files frequently in this situation.
The substance of this post is outstanding. The framing is not, though. Why does it have to sound so dramatic and provocative? It’s insulting to its audience. Grumpiness, in the long term, is a career-limiting attitude.
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Career-limiting perhaps (if expressing normal human emotion is a minus inside of an organization, it may be time to bail) but some of the best minds I've met/observed were absolute curmudgeons (with purpose—they were properly bothered by a problem and refused to go along with the "sweep it under the rug" behavior). Sure, I've dealt with plenty of assholes, too, but the grumps are usually just tired of their valid insight being ignored by more foolish, orthogonally incentivized types (read: "playing the game" not "making it work well").
Horrid advice at the end about logging every error, exception, slow request, etc if you are sampling healthy requests. Taking slow requests as an example, a dependency gets slower and now your log volume suddenly goes up 100x. Can your service handle that? Are you causing a cascading outage due to increased log volumes? Recovery is easier if your service is doing the same or less work in a degraded state. Increasing logging by 20-100x when degraded is not that.
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Good point. It also reminded me of when I was trying to optimize my app for some scenarios, then I realized it's better to optimize it for ALL scenarios, so it works fast and the servers can handle no matter what. To be more specific, I decided NOT to cache any common queries, but instead make sure that all queries are fast as possible.
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Just implement exponential backoff for slow requests logging, or some other heuristic, to control it. I definitely agree it is a concern though.
> Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally. Today, a single user request might touch 15 services, 3 databases, 2 caches, and a message queue. Your logs are still acting like it's 2005. If a user request is hitting that many things, in my view, that is a deeply broken architecture.
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> If a user request is hitting that many things, in my view, that is a deeply broken architecture. Things can add up quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if some requests touch a lot of bases. Here's an example: a user wants to start renting a bike from your public bike sharing service, using the app on their phone. This could be an app developed by the bike sharing company itself, or a 3rd party app that bundles mobility options like ride sharing and public transport tickets in one place. You need to authentice the request and figure out which customer account is making the request. Is the account allowed to start a ride? They might be blocked. They might need to confirm the rules first. Is this ride part of a group ride, and is the customer allowed to start multiple rides at once? Let's also get a small deposit by putting a hold of a small sum on their credit card. Or are they a reliable customer? Then let's not bother them. Or is there a fraud risk? And do we need to trigger special code paths to work around known problems for payment authorization for cards issued by this bank? Everything good so far? Then let's start the ride. First, let's lock in the necessary data. Which rental pricing did the customer agree to? Is that actually available to this customer, this geographical zone, for this bike, at this time, or do we need to abort with an error? Otherwise, let's remember this, so we can calculate the correct rental fee at the end. We normally charge an unlock fee in addition to the per-minute price. Are we doing that in this case? If yes, does the customer have any free unlock credit that we need to consume or reserve now, so that the app can correctly show unlock costs if the user wants to start another group ride before this one ends? Ok, let's unlock the bike and turn on the electric motor. We need to make sure it's ready to be used and talk to the IoT box on the bike, taking into account the kind of bike, kind of box and software version. Maybe this is a multistep process, because the particular lock needs manual action by the customer. The IoT box might have to know that we're in a zone where we throttle the max speed more than usual. Now let's inform some downstream data aggregators that a ride started successfully. BI (business intelligence) will want to know, and the city might also require us to report this to them. The customer was referred by a friend, and this is their first ride, so now the friend gets his referral bonus in the form of app credit. Did we change an unrefundable unlock fee? We might want to invoice that already (for whatever reason; otherwise this will happen after the ride). Let's record the revenue, create the invoice data and the PDF, email it, and report this to the country's tax agency, because that's required in the country this ride is starting in. Or did things go wrong? Is the vehicle broken? Gotta mark it for service to swing by, and let's undo any payment holds. Or did the deposit fail, because the credit card is marked as stolen? Maybe block the customer and see if we have other recent payments using the same card fingerprint that we might want to proactively refund. That's just off the top of my head, there may be more for a real life case. Some of these may happen synchronously, others may hit a queue or event bus. The point is, they are all tied to a single request. So, depending on how you cut things, you might need several services that you can deploy and develop independently. - auth - core customer management, permissions, ToS agreement, - pricing, - geo zone definitions, - zone rules, - benefit programs, - payments and payment provider integration, - app credits, - fraud handling, - ride management, - vehicle management, - IoT integration, - invoicing, - emails, - BI integration, - city hall integration, - tax authority integration, - and an API gateway that fronts the app request. These do not have to be separate services, but they are separate enough to warrant it. They wouldn't be exactly micro either. Not every product will be this complicated, but it's also not that out there, I think.
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> These do not have to be separate services, but they are separate enough to warrant it. All of this arises from your failure to question this basic assumption though, doesn't it?
The reason we end up with very complex systems I don't think is because of incentives between "managers and technicians". If I were to put my finger to it, I would assume it's the very technicians who argued themselves into a world where increased complexity and more dependencies is seen as a good thing. Fighting complexity is deeply unpopular.
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At least in my place of work, my non-technical manager is actually on board with my crusade against complex nonsense. Mostly because he agrees it would increase feature velocity to not have to touch 5 services per minor feature. The other engineers love the horrific mess they've built. It's almost like they're roleplaying working at Google and I'm ruining the fun.
A post on this topic feels incomplete without a shout-out to Charity Majors - she has been preaching this for a decade, branded the term "wide events" and "observability", and built honeycomb.io around this concept. Also worth pointing out that you can implement this method with a lot of tools these days. Both structured Logs or Traces lend itself to capture wide events. Just make sure to use a tool that supports general query patterns and has rich visualizations (time-series, histograms).
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This post was so in-line with her writing that I was really expecting it to turn into an ad for Honeycomb at the end. I was pretty surprised with it turned out the author was unaffiliated!
Get an AI code review in 10 seconds (oldmanrahul.com)
How to do agentic workflow like 2 years ago.
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What would SOA be?
Hum? I just tell claude to review pr #123 and it uses 'gh' to do everything, including responding to human comments! Feedback from coleagues has been awesome. We are sooo gonna get replaced soon...
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Good thing I work on an old C++ code base where it's impossible for AI to go through the millions of lines that all interact horribly in unpredictable ways.
With not much more effort you can get a much better review by additionally concatenating the touched files and sending them as context along with the diff. It was the work of about five minutes to make the scaffolding of a very basic bot that does this, and then somewhat more time iterating on the prompt. By the way, I find it's seriously worth sucking up the extra ~four minutes of delay and going up to GPT-5 high rather than using a dumber model; I suspect xhigh is worth the ~5x additional bump in runtime on top of high, but at that point you have to start rearchitecting your workflows around it and I haven't solved that problem yet. (That's if you don't want to go full Codex and have an agent play around with the PR. Personally I find that GPT-5.2 xhigh is incredibly good at analysing diffs-plus-context without tools.)
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Do you do any preprocessing of diffs to replace significant whitespace with some token that is easier to spot? In my experience, some LLMs cannot tell unchanged context from the actual changes. That's especially annoying with -U99999 diffs as a shortcut to provide full file context.
Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025 (hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app)
Why does this list sound like a 16 year olds "I am very Smart" list? These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to the forefront of the culture
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You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech person. I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such. And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it. What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented. I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!) I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great. I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
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Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece. I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN. Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest. One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add some disambiguation logic for common title collisions. How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more traditional like regex + entity matching?
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I was recently reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, and she has so many great quotes that are directly relevant to this situation. Here's a shorter one: > “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.” And a longer one: > “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better world.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
I Program on the Subway (scd31.com)
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Doing connected work from the subway has gotten much, much easier in the last few years. I attribute that to three things: 1. Cell service has become low-latency. This is very different from "fast", which it has also become! When I started working from the train (on HSPA+), pings in the hundreds of milliseconds were the norm. My first step was usually to SSH to a remote machine, and let just the text lag on me. Nowadays, I can run a Web browser locally without issue. 2. Cell service has, at the same time, become ubiquitous in subway tunnels. When I started, there were some areas that dropped down to EDGE (unusable), and some areas that had no service at all. Now, there is exactly one place on the Boston transit system - Back Bay Station - where I lose cell service. 3. Noise cancelling tech has gotten better. It's not just about noise cancelling headphones: both of my laptops (a 2024 MBP and a ThinkPad P14s) have microphones that can filter out screeching wheels and noisy teenagers quite well. That means I can take meetings without making them miserable for the people on the other end. These, honestly, are a huge game-changer for me. The ability to take a 30 minute meeting while commuting, where otherwise I would've had to get in early or stay late at work, actually does wonders for my ability to have a life outside of work.
> they would have to do it at a station, where they could immediately get off the train. I think, though, that this would be risky, given that subway stops generally have a lot of people getting on/off the train in the first place. I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together. For me I always pocket my phone or e-reader at each stop, unless I'm in Japan or Taiwan.
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I'm not worried about the laptop. Pretty much everyone knows that any valuable laptop is a tracking device anyway. You should be worried about getting actually robbed, or even being attacked for no reason, while you're not paying attention. Also, yes, nobody's going to help you. Some of it is because of general unawareness, as you point out. Then, it's difficult to know who's the aggressor. Even if that's all crystal clear, you're almost certainly going to deal with months or years of legal hell if you intervene. Successful interventions often lead to prosecutions.
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I also code on the subway from time to time and this does occur to me. But there are locations in an NYC subway car you can sit that would make it very difficult for someone to grab your laptop and exit the train before the doors close. It's still a risk but it's not uncommon to see people with all kinds of valuable items (e.g. shopping bags from premium fashion stores) out in the open on the subway. Crazy to think back to 2007 when iPhone users were advised to buy black earphones so the white ones wouldn't give them away as targets for theft. How far we've come/how commoditized our electronics have become.
CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally (spectrum.ieee.org)
Aren’t CATL already producing sodium-ion batteries for about 60% the cost of lithium-ion for equivalent capacity?
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Yeah. Maybe this tech will have a place for week-long storage and be a good buffer for wind power but I hard to see the economics working for daily cycling.
So it's a compressed air facility but it's using dry CO2 because it makes the process easier and CO2 is cheap. Not a carbon sequestration thing, but will likely fool some people into thinking it is. So the question is, how much does it cost? The article is completely silent on this, as expected.
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The tanks to hold liquid CO2 will likely be a lot cheaper than compressed air tanks because the required pressure is much lower. But they are going to loose a lot of energy to cooling the gas and reheating the liquid. I would be surprised if the round-trip efficiency is higher than 25%.
what happens if that large enclosure fails and the CO2 freely flows outside? That enclosure has a huge volume - area the size of several football fields, and at least 15 stories high. The article says it holds 2k tons of co2, which is ~1,000,000 cubic meters in volume. CO2 is denser than air will pool closer to the ground, and will suffocate anyone in the area. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster Edit: It holds 2k tons, not 20K tons.
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I wonder whether it'd be possible to augment the CO2 with something that would make it more detectable visually and aromatically, like we do natural gas. Natural gas is naturally odorless and colorless. Therefore, by default, it can accumulate to dangerous levels without anyone noticing until too late. We make natural gas safer by making stink, and we make it stink by adding trace amounts of "odorizers" like thiophane to it. I wonder whether we could something similar for CO2 working fluid this facility uses --- make it visible and/or "smell-able" so that if a leak does happen, it's easier to react immediately and before the threshold of suffocation is reached.
"First, a compressor pressurizes the gas from 1 bar (100,000 pascals) to about 55 bar (5,500,000 pa). Next, a thermal-energy-storage system cools the CO2 to an ambient temperature. Then a condenser reduces it into a liquid that is stored in a few dozen pressure vessels, each about the size of a school bus. The whole process takes about 10 hours, and at the end of it, the battery is considered charged. To discharge the battery, the process reverses. The liquid CO2 is evaporated and heated. It then enters a gas-expander turbine, which is like a medium-pressure steam turbine. This drives a synchronous generator, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy for the grid. After that, the gas is exhausted at ambient pressure back into the dome, filling it up to await the next charging phase."
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And I suppose the whole thing is a closed system? Which means, none of the CO2 would be released to the outside?
This seems almost too good to be true, and the equipment is so simple that it would seem that this is a panacea. Where are the gotchas with this technology? Clearly power capacity cost (scaling compressors/expanders and related kit) and energy storage cost (scaling gasbags and storage vessels) are decoupled from one another in this design; are there any numbers publicly available for either?
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Thermal energy storage is one gotcha. It will eventually leak away, even if the CO2 stays in the container indefinitely, and then you have no energy to extract. The 75% round-trip efficiency (for shorter time periods) quoted in other threads here is surprisingly high though.
I'm seeing round trip efficiencies around 75%. That's not terrible. These things would probably pair well with district heating and cooling.
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"I am seeing" as in do you use CO2 batteries at home or something?
Reasons not to become famous (2020) (tim.blog)
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Johns Hopkins is a loaded university with global backers. It doesn't need much more promotion. On the other hand there is probably some obscure college that does worthwhile research and gets little funding.
It's not a bad book. https://www.amazon.com/Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/B004C71SLM It's mostly about starting a small business by someone who'd started a small business selling nutritional supplements.
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I have my doubts: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
4 hour work week, rich dad poor dad, get rich quick books are nothing but trash but somehow they became best sellers.
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The “somehow” is obvious, innit?
I was once in a high up position for a somewhat popular project. I can confirm that it attracts obsessive people with anger issues. It scales with popularity and changes with demographic. I’ve known non-famous CEOs who needed security details when visiting any conference or public event because they had stalkers who would reliably appear and try to get close to them. Even on HN I had a stalker. With a previous handle I wrote a long comment about a subject that someone found insightful. They scanned my whole comment history until they found a comment where I mentioned a company I had worked for, then did a process of elimination to figure out who I was, then started contacting me through email and other channels demanding more conversation and writing on the topic to answer their questions. It was very unsettling. I’m now more careful to leave out any identifying facts on HN.
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This is why you throw in false details every once in a while online, to throw people off.
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