This is pretty much what I meant. Even if the browser is what comes up, the fact is the user isn't interacting with the browser as a browser. They're interacting with their phone through an app (voice => search). They don't understand website URLs, or what search engines are doing. That makes it harder for them to return (engagement metrics!) than tapping the icon on their phone that opens up directly to the app.
It's also why so many websites try to offer push notifications or, back when it seemed like Apple wouldn't cripple it, the "add to home screen" or whatever CTA was that would set the website as an icon. Anything that gives the user a fast path back to engaging without having to deal with interacting with the browser itself is what PMs and marketing want.
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
I only have my own observations of their products and secondhand info but my understanding is Microsoft simply doesn’t care about engineering. They have a sales pitch (product idea), then they build and ship the MVP that can earn money. If something sells, they figure they can solve scaling by throwing enough money at it. Classic b-tier tech company (and startup) garbage. They never work out the unit economics, etc.
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
Idk man… people have mostly decided they’re fine with sharing their data.
People use Google Maps even though their location is bought and sold openly. People put their deepest secrets into ChatGPT even after their CEO warned that they use it to sell you ads, keep all of it even after you delete it and may even be required to produce it during a lawsuit. People still buy new cars even though they track their movements.
What you feel is a deeply offensive ethical violation probably is fine with the general population. In general, people are willing to trade their data for good quality services.
What you're describing is "revealed preferences theory", and it requires a truly free set of choices—essentially, when looking at it in relation to companies like Google, it relies on "free market theory", the kind that only works with a spherical market in a frictionless vacuum.
People "have decided" this because they're not given good choices, they're not well-informed about what their data is going to be used for, and their real buying power has been going down for decades so they don't have the disposable funds to put toward the much more expensive options that would allow them to retain their privacy (even in the rare cases where such options still exist).
Then GitHub will train on their inputs, which includes your code.
Doesn’t seem to leave non-enterprise projects with much choice but to ban contributors from using copilot (to whatever extent they can - company policy, etc.)
I avoided using Wine (and Linux for gaming generally) for years on the sole basis that I assumed what they were trying to do was impossible to do well. Occasionally I’d try wine for some simple game and be impressed it worked at all, but refused to admit to myself that it was something I could rely on. (This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.)
Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.
Now if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!
I'm in Africa, when I go to the steam deck page, it says it is not available in my country. Not interested in buying from a third party importer. So until then..
What about buying from a fellow Hacker News nerd? I'm willing to handle shipping a new unit for you, based in USA. :-)
I also have a used 1st-gen model, upgraded with hall-effect joysticks and a 2TB SSD with a glass screen protector that I am willing to part with. Apart from a few barely-visible scuffs on the plastic housing, it's in great condition. If you're interested, let me know how to get in touch!
Requires PayPal or credit card. The suggestion was to pay with your Steam Wallet or whatever payment method already used when you buy a Proton-based game on Steam.
IMHO this supports the original point that payment via Steam would be an upgrade:
Sending cash to a postal address isn't low-effort nor low-risk.
Payment by cheque is something I have never done, nor would I know how to do it. I'd have to ask at my bank -- not low effort. I don't know if I'm an outlier here but I have never heard from any of my peers who ever did such a thing.
The same or even worse is true for international money orders. The whole concept of making a money transfer to a postal address is something I have never heard of. Where's the IBAN?
The Wine team is right to put even PayPal before all of these.
Yes, I do. It just means that you have to manually "recharge" your Steam wallet when it runs low. That's some effort, but it limits the possible damage if something goes wrong.
You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.
> if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies
Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.
As far as I can tell, Valve makes significant contributions back to Wine via Proton development. Isn't that essentially them supporting their upstream dependencies with their own profits, by using some of those profits to pay people to contribute work to their open source dependencies?
Valve pays over a hundred open source developers to work on the various open source projects that they rely on so heavily, so yeah Valve's 30% of your Steam purchases is already contributing to these open-source projects (like Mesa, the Linux kernel, Wayland, etc.)
Forwarded donations are not tax-deductible (in the US); That's a lie that's been spread around the internet. If you give a company money with the express purpose of them forwarding it to someone else (the company acts as a "collection agent"), it's not their income or donation.
So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them
It's not better, because being revenue and donated away and tax-deductible all cancels out. It's as if they never saw the money, just like forwarding it.
And even if it was, all "tax deductible" would mean is that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on that money. Which, you know, they don't get to spend. So it's kind of defacto tax deductible in the same sense that my friend's income is "tax deductible" for me, I guess.
A lot of people online have convinced themselves that "tax deductible" means that the government would refund you that dollar amount. That's a "tax credit"... If forwarded donations were a tax credit, then yes, rounding up is giving the company "free" money! But you're not.
I really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.
Ironically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.
Does windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.
Wine doesn't emulate the NT kernel; Just the NT and Win32 userspace APIs. For example, Wine provides a `kernel32.dll` that maps API calls into the appropriate Linux ones. Anything kernel level is operating "below" Wine.
I read the person I was responding to saying they avoided games with root kits for moral, not technical, reasons. So I assumed they were on Windows, and AFAIK, windows just offers binary "changes" permissions which covers anything from installing in the slightly protected Program Files directory to installing a rootkit. In other words, can they even detect they are about to install a root kit?
Hate to be the one saying this, but that rootkit is there to prevent you from molesting/cheating other players. So its not an one-sided issue. It is unfortunate that the developers found no other way of fighting cheats, sure.
And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.
agreed. if a condition of attending an event was that I had to wear a chastity belt that prevented guests from raping each other, I'd think twice about attending alltogether.
I don’t care if my shooter game “community” is toxic. I don’t have any interaction with the “community” other than to try and virtually kill its members. I wish my chess app had anti-cheat, there are just some people who will cheat and any game is more fun if they can be prevented from playing.
Yea it seems very variable depending on hw / config etc. And the most recent patch at the time (I think this was during summer?) broke it for a bunch of other people on desktop that had it working before.
For me it crashed after the first click in the menu.
> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.
It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!
By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.
With Proton especially, which is WINE really optimized with all of the right options and a few other things, I play literally any game on linux and never worry about support. It hasn't steered me wrong yet in the last 3 or 4 years I think.
To be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains.
Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol
The hype/performance mismatch was significant in the 2000s for Wine. I’m not sure if there was any actual use case aside from running obscure business software.
Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings.
I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along.
Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?
I used WINE a lot in the 2000s, mostly for gaming. It was often pretty usable, but you often needed some hacky patches not suitable for inclusion in mainline. I played back then with Cedega and later CrossOver Games, but the games I played the most also had Mac ports so they had working OpenGL renderers.
My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.
Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.
But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.
I remember it being surprisingly decent for games back then. Then a lot of games moved to Steam, which made it way harder to run them in Wine. Of course there was later Proton for that, but not on Mac.
Games are one of the easier things to emulate since gaming mechanics are usually entirely a compute problem (and thus not super reliant on kernel APIs / system libraries). Most games contain the logic for their entire world and their UI. The main interface is via graphics APIs, which are better standardized and described, since they are attempting to expose GPU features.
I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.
Also these apps changed, A lot of windows programs were simple executables and I remenber for a moment it was very popular for developers to write portable apps that were just a .exe that you ran,also excel and other programs worked fine, but then microsoft and others started to use msxis or whatever it's called and more complex executable files and it was not longer posible, and microsoft and adobe switched to a subscription based system.
It's an unfair fear since architecturally Wine sits at the same position as the Win32 API on Windows, which also in the end merely uses the underlying native system calls. The only difference is that Linux aims to keep its system call interface stable.
If you're utilizing undocumented APIs that aren't meant for public use, sure... but the core Win32 APIs have been pretty stable for going on 3+ decades now. You can take a lot of win32 apps from the early 90's and they'll run without modification in windows today... though, they'll probably run in Wine and likely a better chance there... but still.
I fully agree with that. Sadly there is always the odd application out there that uses the lower level stuff and is therefore tricky to get to run on Wine. Or more recent Windows versions for that matter.
win32 dates back to 1993. OP doesn't know Windows history. Maintaining backwards compatibility was always a huge priority for Microsoft, even if it couldn't be perfect.
If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.
Meanwhile I've been impressed with Wine since I discovered it. One of the few things that was keeping me from moving to Linux was MS Office suite. I struggled to get used to OpenOffice. And wine was able to run it. Sure I had to faff around with it, but I was just so impressed. I was telling all my family, but they just didn't get it.
Anyway, I later stopped using it because Google Docs and then later libreoffice was good enough. I still followed it, and I continued to be impressed by all the announcements.
The first time I seriously used wine it was to run Forscan (https://forscan.org/home.html) to interface with my car via OBD2 port. It quite literally just worked. Installed via the executable MSI installer, finished install, booted right up, and worked with the USB device.
I have been using Wine on Mac for fifteen years now since I moved to Mac for work. There's always been a couple Windows programs I just can't seem to replace fully, namely RegexBuddy, and I continue to run them in Wine to this day. Everything has gotten so much better as the years have gone on, that this is a perfectly acceptable solution.
You seem to have missed this part of the comment you replied to:
> This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.
Personally I stopped using Windows for gaming because it literally doesn't work anymore. I installed Windows 11 on my gaming VM and DLSS and FSR were just completely broken, didn't work at all. Couldn't figure it out. Switched to Linux (Bazzite for now) and I have no regrets; the only games that don't work are the dangerous time-wasters (live service games with invasive anti-cheat) that I have less and less time for as I age.
IMO, the trajectory was set back when they removed the option for monthly payments. Minimum US$450 to play made it a non-starter for my projects (even with commercial ambitions). They changed this just as I started to integrate (~2024, I think) so I kept to the free capabilities. Have been waiting for the other show to drop and here we are.
Edit: looks like they’ve reintroduced monthly billing within the last few months. I guess that’s a sort of win, even if not for the OSS community. But I’d still be reluctant to get into bed with them at this stage.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
I find myself wondering about this though. Because, yes, what you say is true. Transformer architecture isn’t likely to handle negations particularly well. And we saw this plain as day in early versions of ChatGPT, for example. But then all the big players pretty much “fixed” negations and I have no idea how. So is it still accurate to say that understanding the transformer architecture is particularly informative about modern capabilities?
Huh, and there I would have assumed this was defensive architecture akin to the Great Wall of China (albeit more rudimentary). I’m guessing that was ruled out early.
So you open safari first. I think that’s a step further than what’s being described.
Many people it’s just “hey siri, book a table at Miguel’s.” And then click whatever app, web result, or native OS feature pops up.
It’s a chaotic crapshoot that I have never been able to stomach personally. For others, that’s just called using their phone.
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