The biggest "evil" that has been committed (and is still being committed) against computing has been normalizing this idea of not having root access to a device you supposedly own. That having root access to your computer, and therefore being the ultimate authority over what gets run on it, is bad or risky or dangerous. That "sideloading" is weird and needs a separate name, and is not the normal case of simply loading and running software on your own computer.
Now, we're locking people out of society for having the audacity of wanting to decide what gets run and not run on their computers?
Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
- Aristotle uses modern AI techniques heavily, including language modeling.
- Aristotle can be guided by an informal (English) proof. If the proof is correct, Aristotle has a good chance at translating it into Lean (which is a strong vote of confidence that your English proof is solid). I believe that's what happened here.
- Once a proof is formalized into Lean (assuming you have formalized the statement correctly), there is no doubt that the proof is correct. This is the core of our approach: you can do a lot of (AI-driven) search, and once you find the answer you are certain it's correct no matter how complex the solution is.
I like the android way of security, where "rooting" your device to install updates is insecure, but using a horrifyingly out-of-date android (because your manufacturer, the only one who can update your device, didn't bother) is secure.
I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy.
In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction was something like = I provide logistics and you provide content; like the story of your cross-country bike trip.
Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed. We have largely replaced the P2P protocol of kindness with a sort of centralized platform of service. We stripped out the human latency and the requirement for social reciprocity and replaced it with currency and star ratings. It makes me surreal to think about this.
Who could have guessed that the greedy, opportunistic, evil corporation whose sole intent is to invade our privacy in the name of "security" would be run by incompetents in the security realm?
This is a finding that keeps coming up, and I've certainly found it true in my life, but there's a significant chicken-and-egg problem in that depression frequently precludes the motivation to exercise, and if you don't already have a deeply-disciplined routine to overcome the lack of motivation, people won't do it.
Exhortation to develop those good habits in the good times, I suppose.
This is a healthy thing to happen to the Linux browser ecosystem imho.
We talk a lot about browser diversity, but on Linux and Windows, it is a lie. You have firefox (gecko) and fifty flavors of chromium. Webkit on Linux has essentially been relegated to embedded devices or the GNOME epiphany browser, which I'll admit while is a noble effort, lags a bit in the stability and power-user features department. Big reason for that is that it lacks the commercial backing to keep up with the modern web standards rat race.
Kagi bringing orion to Linux changes the calculus. It introduces a third commercially incentivized, consumer-grade engine to the platform. Even if you never use orion, you want this to succeed because it forces WebKitGTK upstream to get better, which benefits the entire open source ecosystem.
The sticking point like always will be media playback (read: DRM/widevine). That is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die. If Kagi can legally and technically solve the widevine integration on a non-standard Linux webkit build, they win. If not, it will be a secondary browser.
Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text.
No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035.
I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell it to look at the code in this server repo and make me a API_documentation.md and it'll grasp that I want a text based summary of how to use this endpoint
It's a choice. I go to the supermarket twice a week, not shopping for much. I switched the store I use three, four months ago, but I can already talk about some of the employees at the store I visit. Louis is back where he grew up right now because his 97-year-old grandfather died. Among other things, he feels lucky grandpa's passing came after the new year because of his time-off allotment. Nikki had great holidays, mostly because her adult daughter was here for a week. Nadine ("Shh.") has decided she's going to retire at the end of the month but hasn't yet told anyone at the store.
Raffy, the UPS delivery guy I see maybe five times a year? He's doing well, finally feeling things slowing down some after the holidays. His fiancé will finish her graduate degree this spring, then they're going to decide if they want to stay here or move back to the state where they were born. They like it here, but think job opportunities will be better back home.
I'm sure many here are familiar with "This is Water," the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace. Many often cite his line, "Everybody worships," his observation that we all hold aspects of life in reverence, whether religious things or otherwise. It's a valid, pithy point, but I always thought the key part to his speech comes later and has been widely overlooked:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
He delivered that speech in 2005. Before the modern smartphone. All those people I mentioned earlier were strangers. That's no longer the case because all of us chose to interrupt what we were doing and open up a little to someone unfamiliar. It's a choice. Or, as Bob Dylan once sang,
```
The rights holders also declared, under their own responsibility, providing
certified documentary evidence of the current nature of the unlawful conduct, that the reported
domain names and IP addresses were unequivocally intended to infringe the
copyright and related rights of the audiovisual works relating to live broadcast sporting events
and similar events covered by the reports.
```
So, I'm not sure anybody verified that what the right holders claimed was actually true. While I understand what AGCOM (the italian FCC, more-or-less) is trying to do, it seems that, as usual, a law was created without verifying how the implementation of such law would work in practice (something very common in Italy), and this is the result.
Cloudflare CEO seems irate, and some of his references are not great, but I'd be inclined at thinking he's got at least _some_ reason on his side.
The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
It seems to me that Wasm largely succeeded and meets most/all of the goals for when it was created. The article backs this up by listing the many niches in which its found support, and I personally have deployed dozens of projects (both personal and professional) that use Wasm as a core component.
I''m personally a big fan of Wasm; it has been one of my favorite technologies ever since the first time I called malloc from the JS console when experimenting with an early version of Emscripten. Modern JS engines can be almost miraculously fast, but Wasm still offers the best performance and much higher levels of control over what's actually running on the CPU. I've written about this in the past.
The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps. In this regard, I'd have to agree. It could be the continued lack of DOM bindings that have been considered a key missing piece for several years now, or maybe something else or more fundamental.
I've tried out some of the Wasm-powered web frameworks like Yew and not found them to provide an improvement for me at all. It just feels like an awkwardly bolted-on layer on top of JS and CSS without adding any new patterns or capabilities. Like you still have to keep all of the underlying semantics of the way JS events work, you still have to keep the whole DOM and HTML element system, and you also have to deal with all the new stuff the framework introduces on top of that.
Things may be different with other frameworks like Blazor which I've not tried, but I just find myself wanting to write JS instead. I openly admit that it might just be my deep experience and comfort building web apps using React or Svelte though.
Anyway, I strongly feel that Wasm is a successful technology. It's probably in a lot more places than you think, silently doing its job behind the scenes. That, to me, is a hallmark of success for something like Wasm.
The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.
Recall the unsavoury episode with taviso, when they lobbied the FTC to investigate him after he helped clean up their mess during Cloudbleed. They always pivot to aggression when challenged.
I agree with others here that focusing your eyes on _using_ open source is, at least, an incomplete view of the problem.
What we (European software engineers) have been arguing, is that software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak. Thinking that open source software will help solve your budget and/or political problem is not something we're interested in doing for free. This excerpt here:
> In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has
suggests they see it as free candy, rather than the result of love and hard work, provided for free because it's nice. Pay for what you use, especially at the government level.
Of course, I strongly encourage the European governments to invest in open source. And if you're interested in giving money, I'm interested in doing work. Same as ever.
Let's be a bit more honest here, I think the Italian law is badly defined, but I also think the american perspective is wrong.
We (all tech people everywhere me included) argued for a lot of time for free speech on the internet, but the result currently is that we built a system that is free speech for Russian and Chinese bots and actors. In Europe we are under daily attack from Russian accounts that spread massive amounts of desinformation, deep fakes, just emotional appeals with the goal of destroying liberal democracy. The US government is actively trying to support them by fighting against any kind of European rules and spreading their part of desinformation.
This is not about normal politics, Europe is under siege.
So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy?
The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own hardware. The genius of the modders in that XDA thread is undeniable, but they are fighting a war against the fundamental architecture of modern trust and the architecture is winning.
Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme.
Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs.
There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel.
Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft.
Improving accessibility to compute power would hurt Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Improving control and freedom over your device would hurt apple and Google.
Why should we be sympathetic to the middleman again?
If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. See the irony?
"Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology", geohot said something like this and I truly appreciate. Technology will heal finally
I use oh my zsh for exactly one reason: I can get a good shell experience out of the box and immediately start working on stuff productively, whether it's a new machine, a new remote host or a container.
I could spend hours figuring out all those things, bit I'd rather use that time for something more important.
It's a very cool little game! One suggestion: could you make it so you can noodle around on the keyboard without submitting the answer and then once you've worked it out, have a submission mode? Right now, it's frustrating that if you enter a wrong note, it shows a message, so you can't experiment on the keyboard to try to work it out.
It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer.
This is taking place in a larger geopolitical context. He is applying whatever pressure that Cloudflare can apply on its own (not much), and he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe. Tech and speech regulation is a central feature of that conflict.
IMHO this is a time when there are no good players. I support CF’s fight to keep the internet open against encroaching EU regulation while also acknowledging that the US has been a recurring bad actor here. I am not as anti-Cloudflare as some (I have no problem with their pro free speech policies) but I do think centralization of infrastructure is a bad thing, and CF encourages that.
I find the S&P500 to be interesting as a demonstration for currency risk. Denoted in US, it went up ~18% or so. For me as an EUR investor, it went up just 4.6% when accounting for the loss of the USD. Comparing that to indicies that usually do not perform that well, Euro Stoxx 50 is up ~22% and MSCI Emerging Markets ~21%.
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
ChatGPT has made a material difference in my ability to understand health problems, test results, and to communicate with doctors effectively. My wife and I were talking last night about how helpful it was in 2025. I hope that it continues to be good at this.
I want regulators to keep an eye on this and make smart laws. I don't want it to go away, as its value is massive in my life.
(One example, if you are curious: I've been doing rehab for a back injury for about 10 years. I worked with a certified trainer/rehab professional for many years and built a program to keep me as pain-free as possible. I rebuilt the entire thing with ChatGPT/Gemini about 6 weeks ago, and I've had less pain than at any other point in my life. I spent at least 12 hours working with AI to test and research every exercise, and I've got some knowledge to help guide me, but I was amazed by how far it has come in 12 months. I ran the results by a trainer to double-check it was well thought out.)
I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
Now, we're locking people out of society for having the audacity of wanting to decide what gets run and not run on their computers?