I'm in the process of de-googling. It will take time (changing third party contact emails - banks, etc is annoying) - I honestly wish there was the equivalent of "moving" where emails could be updated the same way.
DDG - I love the premise, but their search relies too heavily on Bing which - worked for msft, etc... - no idea why it sucks so much.
Claude/etc for search - artificial guardrails. "Hey give me an example of Charlie Kirk being a homophobe" - "I can't do that". Contrived example, but realistic result.
Google started out as a non-opinionated (outside of link weight) search engine that is now gemini and bs. But even search is not useful. DDG tries, but responses are sub-par.
This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.
The majority of computer users are not on HN.
You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.
There seem to be more quarries in where I looked (near Reno) than mines. 16:1 in Allegheny is not on there - interesting place. It’s still semi active.
I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.
UPSs for power outages.
Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.
Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).
Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.
For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.
I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.
I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.
Agent memory can sometimes be handled with prompts, state output on completion, etc. Managing that can get messy if you aren't on the same system.
I think "provenance gap" or temporal history can be helped by understanding what you have asked agentic systems to write, understand things written, and verified them.
We aren't yet at a point where something large or extended is easily pushed to agentic coding management - your point of provenance and memory is key here.
I'm not sure how this guideline makes sense. LLMs are great at dumb things I shouldn't have to type but can be well defined before they write something.
This statement, makes almost zero sense - A perfectly reasonable rule in software organizations is: For greenfield code, LLMs are strictly required for 1st-pass prototyping (also required!). And then: Hand writes (within reason) for production code. Your company will not lose their competitive edge following this guideline, and this includes your hard-earned skills.
"Give me a proxy, written in go, that can handle jwt authentication" isn't your traditional crud stuff, but Claude answers that quite well.
It's super weird people are bitter about things that happened almost two decades ago. Much less there was no war. I think Ballmer said some mean words about Linux and Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility. The whole Windows v Linux "war" is completely contrived by some fans of Linux as some holy war.
That completely glosses over the actual behaviour of Microsoft, and ignoring the kinds of career, business, project, and reputational damage those tactics did.
MS’s attacks on open source, open formats, and free software impacted and still impact democracies, developing nations, general computing capabilities, and create vast market inefficiencies. Looking at it as pure tech misses the forest for the trees. The corruption of the Office OpenXml process alone is a daily pox on the developing world. The tax impact of those entanglements is recurrent, and frequently hurts education and healthcare.
Also: if someone got burnt by some industry jerks and have had to deal with the fallout for decades, “it was 20 years ago” completely misstates the problem. Some BS was started 20 years ago, sure, but with daily crap-bowls that needed to be eaten every day in between. Entire careers have fallen into those cracks, armies of IT staff forced into suboptimal and broken workflows to satisfy decisions based on establishing and abusing monopolies.
Breaking a spine, even years and years ago, impacts the every day. Bitterness can be well deserved with an understanding of what was lost.
You're just throwing out a lot of vague statements. You're not helping your case. What specifically did Microsoft do to open source, open format and free software? You're making some huge accusations that Microsoft made some decision that impacts democracies today. Such as?
How is Open OfficeXML a daily pox? Why not use ODF if it's such a disease?
Fallout from what exactly? Again this vague language is not helpful. What exactly was lost 20 years ago?
> As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before.[4] Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims.[5] The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark.
> In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000 (equivalent to $33,294,574 in 2024), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.
> completely contrived by some fans of Linux
I mean there are absolutely some fanboy fantasies of grandeur here but I don't think it's the "fans of Linux" who are delusional mate.
I'm not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that meant a literal war. Of course there was no literal war. And Microsoft did not do everything it could kill Linux and OSS. That is some serious revisionist history. Instead of speaking in generalities like "Microsoft hates Linux" maybe use actual examples and facts.
I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.
Appreciate you calling me delusional for not echoing vague statements to make an OS a victim.
> I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.
What you said:
> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won.
What actually happened:
> Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark
> Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows
> Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000
How is taking someone to court for trademark infringement, and then resorting to paying them $20M dollars to settle because the Judge is about to invalidate your trademark "winning"?
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