YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

595 points fjfaase 6 hours ago 337 comments

solarkraft 5 hours ago | parent

Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)

In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).

AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.

mastermage 4 hours ago | parent

This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.

steinwinde 1 hour ago | parent

Isn't it counterproductive for every European country with a bit of extra money to develop its own open source software stack?

Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?

Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?

Forgeties79 1 hour ago | parent

I’m hardly an expert, quite the opposite, but I imagine coordinating all those groups across multiple countries that don’t have a unified bureaucratic system would undo any disadvantages of just working on them independently and open sourcing at all. In theory they could all start borrowing from each other eventually.

mastermage 1 hour ago | parent

Oh sorry that is what I meant i would like this to be a EU wide ecosystem working together.

skohan 2 hours ago | parent

I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!

The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.

But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.

fsiefken 2 hours ago | parent

one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv

for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...

kevincox 1 hour ago | parent

llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).

IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.

rgoulter 56 minutes ago | parent

> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software

May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.

e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.

With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.

If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.

rounce 27 minutes ago | parent

It requires rebuilding the nodes whose inputs have been affected by the change, not the entire tree.

nba456_ 1 hour ago | parent

I would not be so confident the people making these decisions are smarter than you.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

It’s also the easiest if you want to make your own “distro”.

A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.

opan 1 hour ago | parent

I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.

qubex 40 minutes ago | parent

“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” — Simonyi

vanschelven 4 hours ago | parent

For a second I was worried that the actual code behind this was dead in the water ("3 months ago") but it's just one more click away:

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS

ricardobeat 4 hours ago | parent

A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].

[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

NoahZuniga 4 hours ago | parent

Their instance is self hosted right, so this doesn't apply I think.

KomoD 4 hours ago | parent

And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.

But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org

sevenzero 4 hours ago | parent

Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.

danadam 1 hour ago | parent

They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?

From [1]

> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.

> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.

From [2]

> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084

[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078

graemep 4 hours ago | parent

Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.

KomoD 4 hours ago | parent

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:

> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.

galumptuous 4 hours ago | parent

Does this mean European governments have or will have an alternative(s) to GitHub as well?

lucideer 3 hours ago | parent

Forgejo (the Codeberg-maintained Gitea fork) is essentially becoming an EU-based community of familiar compatible alternatives to GitHub.

It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.

Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.

[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#publ...

streetfighter64 4 hours ago | parent

Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.

The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?

ricardobeat 4 hours ago | parent

Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.

gagik_co 4 hours ago | parent

It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.

edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?

utopiah 4 hours ago | parent

clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.

embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent

Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:

- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")

- https://forgefed.org/

athrowaway3z 4 hours ago | parent

Final piece of what puzzle?

We can do big federated/distributed development with git at the project level. See the linux kernel.

If the goal is fancy UI then there are alternatives.

If the goal is to do a big multi-git with cross repo issue tracker, then that implies either:

- you're a public site for random repos like codeberg

- you're a special purpose forge and identity management is a big issue you want full control over.

IMO - For this to work, they should go with the latter and not try to offload identity into some federated scheme.

xvilka 13 minutes ago | parent

Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).

[1] https://radicle.dev/

[2] https://tangled.org/

poulpy123 4 hours ago | parent

That's a recipe for drama as shown with mastodon when they got publicity few years ago

amiga386 4 hours ago | parent

That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.

It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)

    tsundere.love   Suspended (Hate speech)
    you**.**ve      Suspended (Inappropriate content)
Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)

    nadeko.pw      CP
    mk.fedcast.ch  Spam
    youjo.love     hosts at least one admitted pedo

fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent

A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.

numpad0 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn't work. People from different geographical areas just can't agree on categories. So even correctly applied labels are useless.

You'd think "no lolis" would be reasonable. It falls apart when people look 14 into 50s, to you and your local police, but not to themselves.

Akronymus 2 hours ago | parent

weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.

Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.

cornedor 4 hours ago | parent

They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.

gmueckl 1 hour ago | parent

But furniture is a one time sale, not an ongoing service. That's a bad comparison.

mitxela 41 minutes ago | parent

A third party supplies their electricity too.

schnebbau 4 hours ago | parent

Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).

max_streese 4 hours ago | parent

Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?

schnebbau 4 hours ago | parent

Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...

applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent

Yeah yeah, except LLM code is absolute dogshit and is not on a trajectory to ever not be dogshit.

dwb 2 hours ago | parent

I’m sorry, but this isn’t the case. I don’t like it, on balance, but managed responsibly and steered well, plenty of LLM code is fine.

fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent

> or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,

Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?

tmtvl 2 hours ago | parent

Because people generally don't like having bits of millstone in their flour.

EraYaN 1 hour ago | parent

At least where I am (the Netherlands) there are plenty of mills still milling.

gspr 1 hour ago | parent

Your analogy is terrible.

The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).

For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!

At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.

applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent

Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.

schnebbau 4 hours ago | parent

> If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't)

Keep huffing that copium my friend. I've set an alarm to follow up here in a couple of years.

applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent

Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.

schnebbau 3 hours ago | parent

I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.

And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.

Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.

As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.

applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent

Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.

schnebbau 3 hours ago | parent

This is just wishful thinking.

Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.

andersonpico 2 hours ago | parent

> Building the product was never the hard part

this is an absolutely insane take

gmueckl 41 minutes ago | parent

Is it? A lot of software is really just a pile of context-specific database front-ends. There is virtually nothing difficult in the implementation itself. Most businesses in this space survive because they know how to dress up their pile of CRUD for their customers. And it gets worse: a less reliable, buggier product may still be the better fit for a customer if it works well enough for what they use it the most.

gspr 1 hour ago | parent

You sound exactly like the cryptobros of yore. Just stop.

If you're right, the evidence will bear that out. Stop evangelizing. It's insufferable. And it's paradoxical that so many who believe this technology to be absolutely world-changing also feel that the technology needs to be pushed onto people actively. It reminds me of religious people ("my god is all-powerful, but if you meaningless mortal insult him he'll be mightily upset").

gmueckl 50 minutes ago | parent

I also hate preachy sermons about new tech with a deep passion and that transfers somewhat to the tech they preach about.

Despite this, there is a reality that LLMs for coding can create pretty decent results fast. There is something real and usable hidden in all that mess. It's like the dot com bubble in some ways: the bubble died with all the overhyped "x on the web" BS that had no real substance, but the web itself stayed. This time around, LLMs and agents will stick around as tools, but the hype will likely die a loud, messy death.

gspr 23 minutes ago | parent

Sure. But HN these days is the epitome of "x but on the web" in the AI era. It's insufferable!

Thanemate 4 hours ago | parent

>but not to achieve anything of merit

Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.

embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent

Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.

They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.

wafflemaker 4 hours ago | parent

Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

In the future, consider reading a policy before complaining about it.

ricardobeat 4 hours ago | parent

Quoting from the post:

    > If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
    there might be other places that better fit your needs:

    - Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.

Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.

rhamzeh 4 hours ago | parent

> "enough reason for me to move out"

And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.

Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.

embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent

> The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem

No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.

Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.

If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.

docheinestages 4 hours ago | parent

Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!

lucideer 4 hours ago | parent

I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?

rhplus 2 hours ago | parent

Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.

They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.

lucideer 1 hour ago | parent

That & the legal aspects of hosting code of questionable copyright.

The LLM revolution has proven that if you have enough institutional investors, the Berne Convention doesn't apply to you, but it's sofar unclear whether that exemption from international law extends to small EU-based non-profits.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

But they don't want to. They want to provide all needs for approved projects. They want that if a FOSS project legitimately releases 50 times a day, they want to make it work. If a slop project is wasting those resources that could be used for KDE, on nonsense, then they don't.

They're not a free for all, they do KYCP (know your customer's projects).

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.

lucideer 15 minutes ago | parent

Curious about your comment on two counts (genuinely, not being argumentative):

1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?

2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.

(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)

mcv 10 minutes ago | parent

Governments have a lot of laws that they don't enforce, or enforce only lightly. For example, weed is still illegal in Netherland, despite many decades of tolerating its use.

Muromec 3 minutes ago | parent

It's illegal but you can't be prosecuted for usage or possession (unless you do it in a blowverbod area in front of a village cop that is having a bad day) -- the judge will ask why this person specifically is prosecuted if everybody around is smoking and will throw it away. It already happened in fact.

rvz 4 hours ago | parent

I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.

There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.

Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.

teekert 4 hours ago | parent

It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.

lucideer 3 hours ago | parent

I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.

They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).

To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.

tcfhgj 3 hours ago | parent

AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated

TiredOfLife 2 hours ago | parent

People who act out of ideology very very rarely change their opinions.

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

They can however lose the means to enforce their opinions on others to the point those opinions don't matter.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

Did you read the actual policy? It isn't extreme in the slightest.

tapoxi 1 hour ago | parent

It's stricter than Debian's, which is one of the most conservative Linux distros out there.

amrit3128 55 minutes ago | parent

This is less about the code and more about load. It's community funded so allowing agents to willy nilly push and pull will be very expensive.

mcv 13 minutes ago | parent

I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.

lucideer 4 hours ago | parent

It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.

That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).

karel-3d 3 hours ago | parent

They have "migrated to codeberg" which is written in the repo itself.

However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

Codeberg does not forbid AI-generated code. It forbids AI-generated projects. You would know this if you read the policy.

llimllib 1 hour ago | parent

The specific language is:

> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools

And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...

tcfhgj 1 hour ago | parent

implies for me >50% - instead of >0% as suggested by @ricardobeat

WarmWash 45 minutes ago | parent

The hardest part of policy isn't coming up with smart policy, it's figuring out where and how to draw the lines.

ransom1538 10 minutes ago | parent

hahaha

parlortricks 4 hours ago | parent

This is great, would love to understand why Nix over Lix or Guix.

TheFuzzball 3 hours ago | parent

1. You can run NixOS with Lix (I do)

2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs

anthk 2 hours ago | parent

Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards). That's it.

KomoD 4 hours ago | parent

Site doesn't work for me.

www.dawo.community took too long to respond.

ndom91 4 hours ago | parent

Are you in the US? Hehe

KomoD 3 hours ago | parent

No, Sweden.

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

Your forgot to pay your local mafia to maintain the glass wires this week, so they sent a 12 year old with a grenade and scissors to throttle it to pre-2000 level

KomoD 24 minutes ago | parent

This is something on their side https://check-host.net/check-report/4d673fd6kfd9

bialyalibaba 4 hours ago | parent

Nixpkgs should reduce package count. Waiting 2 days for unbound CVE patch merge is unbearable.

bouk 4 hours ago | parent

You don't have to wait? You just have to compile matter yourself

pasc1878 3 hours ago | parent

They could improve that speed if they had more hardware to do the needed rebuilds.

I hope you are paying them something.

Diti 2 hours ago | parent

Ask your favorite LLM to write an overlay for whichever package you need patches applied for before they hit Nixpkgs.

amarshall 2 hours ago | parent

Use nixos-unstable-small branch or backport the change and build yourself.

shim__ 1 hour ago | parent

There needs to be another repository with less stringent standards, nixpkgs should be for core libs and system applications

Cyph0n 17 minutes ago | parent

That’s where flakes come in.

Flakehub is one attempt at solving the discovery problem. For example: https://flakehub.com/flake/nix-community/disko?view=usage.

einpoklum 4 hours ago | parent

What is it that they need/add above NixOS defaults?

flippingheck 4 hours ago | parent

They likely offer at least some of:

* typical deployments

* training/consulting

* compliance with Ditch regulations

* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs

askonomm 4 hours ago | parent

Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

MonkeyClub 4 hours ago | parent

Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.

throwaway270925 4 hours ago | parent

Too many people seem to have taken it as a todo list instead of a warning...

amiga386 3 hours ago | parent

I'm sure Black Mirror could offer up a cautionary tale like Don't Create The Torment Nexus

(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)

Thanemate 1 hour ago | parent

And it would still be shot down by optimists as "just fiction".

m4tthumphrey 4 hours ago | parent

Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.

janlaureys 3 hours ago | parent

Some episodes are currently being played out live in Ukraine.

maxschub 2 hours ago | parent

Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true. E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.

wartywhoa23 1 hour ago | parent

Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.

Thanemate 4 hours ago | parent

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

askonomm 4 hours ago | parent

Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.

yetihehe 3 hours ago | parent

Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.

ModernMech 2 hours ago | parent

One of the most telling quotes of our political era is this one from 2019:

  “I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
They voted for him to do “good things” where the expectation was he’d hurt the right people. This person stated it a little more plainly than most but I think this view explains the last 10 years or so.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

achenet 1 hour ago | parent

It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.

Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.

We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.

As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...

[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_r%C3%A9gime

edgyquant 56 minutes ago | parent

Every government has taxed its population, and past governments often used real violence to collect them. The level of taxes we see currently is abnormal and abusive imo, but taxing in general isn’t.

philipallstar 2 hours ago | parent

Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.

mitxela 2 hours ago | parent

I don't think it's easy to become a politician. Only a certain number of slots are available.

infinitezest 1 hour ago | parent

... Until they reach a certain size and then "customers" are just an annoying detail in the quest to maximize share holder value.

philipallstar 1 hour ago | parent

I don't want to challenge people's deeply held faiths, but I don't think we need the silly "maximise shareholder value" chant in every single conversation thread.

simonask 25 minutes ago | parent

But we do need “taxes are theft”?

(They’re not.)

noisy_boy 1 hour ago | parent

The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.

The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.

No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

It is basically downhill from here.

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.

> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash. You can see this with Trump, but also with DHH claiming "everyone loves me", after his "let's kill wolves" blog entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

achenet 1 hour ago | parent

While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.

Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.

I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.

On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).

Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)

Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.

jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent

I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.

not-my-team 3 hours ago | parent

I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...

PunchyHamster 3 hours ago | parent

a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.

jwrallie 2 hours ago | parent

Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

DanielHB 1 hour ago | parent

I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

lmz 46 minutes ago | parent

Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

mcv 26 minutes ago | parent

> I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.

xattt 31 minutes ago | parent

> I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

quacktopia 15 minutes ago | parent

Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.

johanvts 6 minutes ago | parent

Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.

Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.

You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.

I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.

johanvts 17 minutes ago | parent

Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.

hgoel 11 minutes ago | parent

My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.

Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.

valeena 1 hour ago | parent

I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen

jacquesm 11 minutes ago | parent

I should re-boot Camarades.

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

Agree with the quality, unfortunately not everyone has the privilege to take such position.

That means basically not getting a job, or a consulting gig, among most large corporations.

Also "just go get another job" isn't a position many of us can take in current times.

jacquesm 11 minutes ago | parent

It has yet to cost me jobs but it may come to that.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.

I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.

I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.

pelotron 4 minutes ago | parent

My wife and father-in-law used to use Skype all the time, and when it shut down, the stars aligned as I suggested they try Signal and they both loved it.

mcv 29 minutes ago | parent

I use it, but only through the web interface. I suppose websites spy too, but I hope Firefox with the right extensions offers sufficient protection.

quacktopia 13 minutes ago | parent

I just had to use teams to speak to the British government to get a passport. I don't think there is another option.

Maybe they should stand up their own gov jitsi or something, but then the public may not be able to work out how to use it.

pluc 3 hours ago | parent

I hope you're aware AI vendors are running the exact same playbook these days. Don't want AI? Fuck you here's some AI on your toothbrush

rpastuszak 3 hours ago | parent

Yeah, although, the word “just” is doing a lot of work here.

dbalatero 2 hours ago | parent

(as usual)

gspr 1 hour ago | parent

But why? Why do so many companies choose garbage?

1718627440 48 minutes ago | parent

> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal

That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.

otherme123 24 minutes ago | parent

I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.

I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.

artisinal 4 hours ago | parent

Error! Please drink a verification can.

DrBazza 4 hours ago | parent

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

rkuodys 3 hours ago | parent

I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.

embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent

Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.

fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent

I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.

In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.

The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

As Gamer's Nexus said, if you're drunk you can't consent to any contract.

Telaneo 1 hour ago | parent

I like the idea of taking a (couple of) shot(s) of vodka every time you sign up for a service or otherwise click accept on a EULA.

bluecheese452 1 hour ago | parent

Yup when courts no longer work at some point we go back to settling disputes the old fashion way. Lawyers and courts were the compromise because the old way can get pretty ugly, but it looks like we are going to have to relearn that lesson.

ishouldnotbutk8 2 hours ago | parent

>Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device

Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).

pseingatl 2 hours ago | parent

Where in the UCC does it say that? There may be a State regulation or a company policy, but I don't recall anything in the UCC about a "free" 14 day return policy. I can return a used car, no questions asked, after 14 days? Good luck with that.

mopsi 2 hours ago | parent

That's an European thing. Anything bought remotely (mail, phone or the internet) can be returned up to 14 days for a full refund.

Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.

rkuodys 2 hours ago | parent

Well, not really. If you have unpacked the iphone - I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be easy to return even within the 14 day window. You can return unpacked though, which is not the point of what I'm saying. Also for the benefit of the argument, change 2 days to 15 and you end up at the same place- you cannot legally return the device, User agreement has changed in ways you don't accept and you are forced to use device, for which you have paid or accept loss and buy another device. Oh and also, you cannot change OS to the alternative one for which terms might be more acceptable to you. How is this not a subject of investigation- I don't know.

bmacho 1 hour ago | parent

Well, yes really. If it is 2 days, and you've bought it online then you can just bring it back.

ishouldnotbutk8's message was mostly a joke since your argument would work with 15 days instead of 2. And yes, customers should be protected* against altering the deal.

Especially that it is so so common now, with the wide-spread of IT. Companies just push out malicious updates and changes in terms and conditions.

* they probably already are, but not many people try to bring remote downgrade cases to courts

impossiblefork 3 hours ago | parent

This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.

Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.

masfuerte 3 hours ago | parent

Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.

Someone 2 hours ago | parent

> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:

“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:

[…]

2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

I can confirm this clause prevented enshittification for EU customers at a former employer. The rest of the world still got it.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

I expect this is already covered by existing regulations but the only enforcement avenue is a lawsuit. They know you won't sue them for $20.

BobbyTables2 54 minutes ago | parent

I believe that’s why class action lawsuits can serve a purpose…

mitxela 40 minutes ago | parent

In a class action they give $1 to every user they scammed $20 out of, and the lawyers charge $2 per user so you actually get nothing.

StLCylone 3 hours ago | parent

I feel compelled to mention Oracle at this point. Isnt their entire business model suing their customers?

latexr 3 hours ago | parent

In addition to being the plot of a Black Mirror Episode¹, Sony also owns a similar patent².

I wasn’t aware of the Microsoft patent but was able to find it³. It was published less than a month ago.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

³ https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago | parent

I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.

fps-hero 3 hours ago | parent

You can patent a black mirror episode?

hn_submit 3 hours ago | parent

This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.

Meta and Google will follow soon after.

P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

askonomm 2 hours ago | parent

> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.

hn_submit 26 minutes ago | parent

And how about Meta's "pervert glasses"? Zuck himself probably conjured up the idea that everything you look at will result in your getting a "relevant ad" for that item. Yuck!

I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.

j117noai 2 hours ago | parent

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...

Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258

The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...

ForHackernews 2 hours ago | parent

"Drink verification can to continue"

tanepiper 1 hour ago | parent

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought exactly the same...

teddyh 1 hour ago | parent

I like to provide links so that other people can easily find the source: <https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2714117-mountain-dew-twitch-...>

philipallstar 2 hours ago | parent

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's just a patent.

NamlchakKhandro 2 hours ago | parent

It's just a delousing room

philipallstar 2 hours ago | parent

Indeed - delousing rooms are not evil.

bell-cot 2 hours ago | parent

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Theory:

Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.

parineum 21 minutes ago | parent

> Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Almost all of them.

red_admiral 2 hours ago | parent

I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then

  - I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
  - "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
  - The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads. 
  - Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.

darkwater 2 hours ago | parent

But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.

BobbyTables2 51 minutes ago | parent

Normally one practical solution would be to cover the front-facing camera on a phone.

Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…

wartywhoa23 2 hours ago | parent

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

There is a couple more wild things here:

1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies

2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.

atoav 1 hour ago | parent

A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:

1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max

2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system

I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.

flaunf221 55 minutes ago | parent

3. People who play games.

Because alternatives are bad. After decades of being great, Linux gaming community finally gave up on it working and accepted emulation of Windows as the way to go. (No need to nitpick on tech specifics of how Wine works)

mcv 31 minutes ago | parent

Gave up? There are more Linux games than ever. Most commercial games work fine on Linux now. Some through emulation of some sort, others completely natively, because most gamer engines support Linux natively, making it trivial to do so. And as a gamer, I can't really tell the difference between the two.

If you mean Linux-only classic open source games, like Angband or Battle for Wesnoth or something, they still exist, but the demand has clearly gone down because now almost all games work on Linux. Except the ones with anti-cheat systems that rootkit-style access to your system.

testerius 29 minutes ago | parent

What are you talking about? Lol, Linux gaming is fine and still growing.

c7b 27 minutes ago | parent

You're saying this as if emulation (which Wine isn't really, more of a Win32 API compatibility layer; WINE literally stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator') was a bad thing. In reality, a lot of games benchmark better on Linux than on Windows today.

flaunf221 12 minutes ago | parent

Emulation is not a bad thing - it gives users options. My point is that Microsoft were the only ones who managed to make a stable gaming platform.

Also "a lot of games benchmark better" - some games. And then some games don't work at all. And some games work with minor or significant issues. Which is not a slight against Wine and Proton as it's not an easy task.

OrangeRange 17 minutes ago | parent

Bad take, what actually happened was the realization that games wouldn't be released on Linux unless there were enough users there to warant it. Just as with ARM Windows not getting a single usable software when first released. What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.

By allowing a lot of people who are willing to take a performance-hit to transition to Linux, they sow the grass-roots necessary for the game studios to release native games on Linux.

joking 47 minutes ago | parent

I don't know if lobbied is the correct word, or they are directly bought.

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.

Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).

herbst 10 minutes ago | parent

Can you name examples how the EU or Germany is US addicted? From my POV in central Europe this has changed long long long ago.

Doing some trading with a shitty country doesn't imply any dependency

llm_nerd 2 hours ago | parent

> Microsoft just recently made a new patent

Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.

A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.

In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.

ericmay 1 hour ago | parent

> Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office),

I generally dislike Microsoft because they make crappy products, but does this add to your point? I don’t think so, and it’s largely incorrect.

For example I despise Donald Trump but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.

The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate - the ones who are a threat. Frankly, the Dutch have historically been the greater threat to humanity and we saw the devastation and destruction wrought by their colonialism (which the Dutch haven’t paid reparations for in total) unleashed upon the world.

llm_nerd 1 hour ago | parent

> but does this add to your point?

Yes? Donald Trump, and the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy, flailing around and trying to bully its way to a lost dominance that is fading away, is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this. It's quite literally the subtext of this discussion.

And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.

> but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.

I mean, I guess people actually vote for this pathological liar / megalomaniac who is a lifetime failure in every dimension, so true. They're even worse. But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person. It's actually astonishing now how he is basically a simpleton in the White House, lying with every utterance, and it's just another day. It isn't even newsworthy. Oh yeah, his big TrumpTM Arch is now going to have drones and snipers! Also, how about that fantasy deal with Belarus for all that potash that doesn't exist, was farcical nonsense on its face, yet everyone reports it because this foolish liar just makes up stuff endlessly so it isn't even notable. Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?

Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.

> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate

This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.

creaturemachine 1 hour ago | parent

>> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate

>This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.

No kidding. Donald Trump just opened the gate.

achenet 1 hour ago | parent

We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.

This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.

dominotw 1 hour ago | parent

Its not a good move. What about the opportunity cost. Is this really the best use of their time and money? Seems stupid and ideologically driven.

They can hold them criminally liable for surveillance and put the executives in jail if they are so concerned about some patents.

lelanthran 1 hour ago | parent

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.

I do not believe that anymore.

I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:

1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".

2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".

3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).

4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".

5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...

Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.

When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).

It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.

maxbaines 49 minutes ago | parent

The patent does not include monitoring using a camera or microphone. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

askonomm 32 minutes ago | parent

Yes you're right, that's my bad. I interpreted the "audiovisual" wrong. They are actually just monitoring the screen and system audio.

maxbaines 3 minutes ago | parent

The patent does not include monitoring the screen and system audio.

Aurornis 18 minutes ago | parent

> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,

You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.

Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.

As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2

jjulius 12 minutes ago | parent

>As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2

I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/6f/30/238c9d7...

https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...

lo_zamoyski 13 minutes ago | parent

It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.

panzi 10 minutes ago | parent

Black Mirror episode 2, IIRC.

damnesian 9 minutes ago | parent

wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.

jimnotgym 4 hours ago | parent

To save anyone else I asked Claude

"NixOS is a Linux distribution where your whole system is defined in one configuration file."

I didn't get that from looking at their website...

sevenzero 4 hours ago | parent

NixOS is also unnecessarily complicated and it's easy for someone that doesn't want to read 1000 pages of documentation to brick your system.

Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.

For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.

TitaRusell 4 hours ago | parent

The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.

When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.

Ylpertnodi 3 hours ago | parent

Literally.

brnt 3 hours ago | parent

Elk nadeel heb se voordeel.

dminik 4 hours ago | parent

Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.

chpatrick 4 hours ago | parent

The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.

sevenzero 4 hours ago | parent

I managed to brick my revisions/snapshots before

chpatrick 4 hours ago | parent

Sure you can make a bad one, but you can always switch to a different one.

rantingdemon 4 hours ago | parent

Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.

teekert 4 hours ago | parent

That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)

How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.

jimnotgym 3 hours ago | parent

I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.

tcfhgj 3 hours ago | parent

So far I have broken every Linux distro I used except NixOS.

And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.

And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.

j16sdiz 2 hours ago | parent

I would image in corporate / government deployment, declarative configuration is more efficient.

When you have that many users, you don't really configure individual system, you deploy up some per-configured module or setup.

Repeatable builds also make troubleshooting lots easier - and you can hand those task to front-tier helpdesk staffs.

shim__ 1 hour ago | parent

Arch is easier to start of with, NixOS is easier to maintain, especially at scale

vustagc 4 hours ago | parent

https://meatproxy.me/

jimnotgym 3 hours ago | parent

Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.

Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?

max-privatevoid 3 hours ago | parent

That's the wrong domain...

bigfishrunning 3 hours ago | parent

The nix website doesn't have the sentence that Claude gave you above, but it does describe the declarative approach to package management that nix is known for. "Having a single config file" doesn't really even describe what makes nix unique. Perhaps you should have read the website instead of skimming and asking Claude.

russfink 4 hours ago | parent

Hopefully the config is a little more descriptive than their README.md

hnb2137 1 hour ago | parent

It looks like a lot of nothing. All the READMEs are empty. What is being contributed here?

ritzaco 4 hours ago | parent

Workplace is such a confusing overloaded term.

They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.

I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?

But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.

[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...

[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra

[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...

hashar 3 hours ago | parent

France government has announced NixOS based systems some months ago:

- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os

- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )

nxobject 2 hours ago | parent

I’m glad multiple European agencies are giving this a whack - hopefully we’ll end up with a synthesis of the best aspects.

Lucasoato 1 hour ago | parent

I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.

The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.

Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.

nonethewiser 1 hour ago | parent

> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.

Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.

If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.

achenet 1 hour ago | parent

Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.

Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.

EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.

The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.

So. :P

Lucasoato 58 minutes ago | parent

Italianman here, I totally understand and respect your point. I just wish this was a collectively funded initiative, English-first but open to all translations. I’d be so happy if my country understood this and invested in this as well, so kudos to France for leading the tech here!

LeBit 15 minutes ago | parent

Je t’assure que ce besoin qu’on certains français de montrer leur capacité de parler l’anglais, de nommer leurs entreprises avec des noms à connotation anglophone, etc. est considéré très gênant ici du Québec.

RaitoBezarius 1 hour ago | parent

Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.

Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.

Lucasoato 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks for the amazing work, let’s keep pushing for independent EU-based technology!

LeBit 18 minutes ago | parent

J’imagine que c’est de plus en plus facile de le faire avec l’aide de l’IA!

bloak 1 hour ago | parent

> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost

Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.

flakes 27 minutes ago | parent

Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.

LeBit 19 minutes ago | parent

That’s not weird.

That’s pretty judgmental of you.

ctolsen 1 hour ago | parent

I particularly enjoy the Asterix-adjacent naming scheme.

yubblegum 1 hour ago | parent

The Dutch have ditched even github. They are thinking ahead.

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS

Yizahi 3 hours ago | parent

The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.

pastage 3 hours ago | parent

eIDAS is federated login between countries in EU. What is wrong with that?

Yizahi 1 hour ago | parent

It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

As usual, it's federated*1 login*2 between countries*4*5 in EU*6*7*8

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

eidas is an EU thing and is like 15 years old, what is this even about

Yizahi 51 minutes ago | parent

eIDAS 2.0 is 2 years old. An intentional dark pattern to confuse people.

sneak 3 hours ago | parent

I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.

Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?

ndriscoll 2 hours ago | parent

It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.

ndriscoll 1 hour ago | parent

You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.

Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.

Muromec 28 minutes ago | parent

You still need to have somebody half competent to ask the electric shaitan to the thing and validate the result and also demonstrate this ability during the hiring process. I'm not sure it's easier than actually finding a person who can do those two lines.

yearolinuxdsktp 1 hour ago | parent

Osquery https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/issues/92 via https://sextantfleet.org/ looks to be what they are using (run by main contributor)… all “policy” is via NixOS… how tenable that will be we will see, but the landing page is heavy on compliance with audits

fbn79 3 hours ago | parent

The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.

IlikeMadison 2 hours ago | parent

Completely agree. Before that I would have add the Adobe Suite as well for a lot of people but it's less a problem now fortunately.

ForHackernews 1 hour ago | parent

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.

They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.

rienbdj 1 hour ago | parent

The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.

ForHackernews 38 minutes ago | parent

I assure you the French government is large enough and obstinate enough that they will dictate to external parties what inputs they accept.

qubex 36 minutes ago | parent

When you’re a government you can mandate the file formats (and versions thereof) you are willing to accept.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, especially Excel.

LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.

I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.

qubex 37 minutes ago | parent

I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.

madjam002 34 minutes ago | parent

What version of Excel does your Nix Flake package out of interest? Is it current?

pards 3 hours ago | parent

> What DAWO stands for

> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.

But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for

_bent 3 hours ago | parent

digitally autonomous workspace (for the) overheid

gregsadetsky 3 hours ago | parent

"Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid", ie ~government digitally autonomous workplace.

See https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO

frzen 2 hours ago | parent

Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.

I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.

__MatrixMan__ 1 hour ago | parent

I think a whole nixified country would revolutionize the work. Just gotta take the off the shackles of proprietary software and let human nature do its thing.

anthk 2 hours ago | parent

Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.

achyudh 45 minutes ago | parent

Do you have a link to this ‘Fearware’ channel? I’ve only heard of nonguix.

koe123 2 hours ago | parent

FINALLY. I have been seeing other projects based on eg Fedora and I just think: why. Declarative, open source, and reproducible is the future.

mg794613 2 hours ago | parent

Thanks Trump, Europe was never this united before.

Not by your choosing, but still.

carlsborg 2 hours ago | parent

I hope someone is security scanning all those NixOS provider modules.

I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.

vincentkriek 1 hour ago | parent

How is that better than the nixos provider? The trouble is the links to the source code right?

armcat 2 hours ago | parent

The link doesn't work for me.

ourmandave 2 hours ago | parent

As long as it has a built-in "VBScript like" lang, they'll be fine.

Are they going with Copilot for Dutchies or Kaaskoppen.NET?

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

First off - decoupling from Trump-USA is a must. Canadians noticed this; european countries are still slow. The Netherlands is faster; the biggest slow-ass behemoth is Germany - no clue why. Germany is a big reason why the EU fails, but also the expansionistic agenda and what not (why do only poor countries want to join the EU; UK left, Switzerland and Norway are not going to join, so there are indeed INTERNAL problems, but let's go back to the dependency on the USA).

So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING. For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.

In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus, Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ? It can't be simpler than that.)

Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden, Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad. Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany, so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the EU.

mrits 40 minutes ago | parent

You can't even build your own website to go to discuss this.

Sha1rholder 56 minutes ago | parent

So, could this push more software to publish to the official Nixpkgs?

aliasxneo 56 minutes ago | parent

This thread seems hopelessly tone deaf to non-technical people's experience with something like NixOS. I can manage it just fine myself given my background, but I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS. I mean, good for them for trying, I just think HN is full of Nix purists who tend to gloss over all the warts that has kept this ecosystem from growing much over the last few decades.

madhacker 55 minutes ago | parent

Proactively making a move before getting Microshafted is smart play.

hnbad 44 minutes ago | parent

> alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.

The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?

kurtis_reed 41 minutes ago | parent

alternative TO Microsoft

dominotw 39 minutes ago | parent

euros have the biggest butthurt persecution complex . ironic given they were the ones doing all the persecution till 5 seconds ago.

FuriouslyAdrift 37 minutes ago | parent

The actual code repository: https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core

mcv 16 minutes ago | parent

https://dawo.community/ is definitely the most 'Dutch Government'-looking Linux community website I've ever seen.

gepardi 37 minutes ago | parent

I always enjoy stories about governments adopting open source and moving away from US big tech.

ofou 30 minutes ago | parent

why not just use linux/?

nazgulsenpai 22 minutes ago | parent

NixOS is Linux.

Kuyawa 17 minutes ago | parent

I want to know the answer too. A battle tested OS for decades, with a thriving ecosystem and millions of users, what is NixOS bringing to the table?

I am in favor of more options, always

ta20240528 22 minutes ago | parent

… and every government department starts writing up a letter asking for an exemption.

Which is always granted.

Unless its mandatory, it's just theater.

tedggh 18 minutes ago | parent

These are nice little initiatives that don’t seem to last anywhere I see them. But good luck to the Dutch, maybe they are different.

qwertox 12 minutes ago | parent

"Sir, i think we should no longer offer Opus or Astra to europeans because they're using it to decrease their reliance on Microsoft. It's helping them build solid Linux-systems."

ransom1538 10 minutes ago | parent

With AI now, I am suprised we are not seeing many new os systems built. Have fable build a secure OS..... hm...

Kuyawa 8 minutes ago | parent

I want to ask an honest question, why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?

I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner

Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?

We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...

joshuat 6 minutes ago | parent

Cost

flaburgan 3 minutes ago | parent

You mean paying twice to five times the price for something that is not configurable and on which you can run only a small subset of software, all very expensive?

axospaxos 2 minutes ago | parent

My experience is that small companies in particular fields do/did use Macs. Staying on Mac is difficult though since any customer can expect you to do what they do or support what they do if they are Windows oriented and will only start with a conversation about compatibility if they haven't chosen the most popular choice.

anExcitedBeast 1 minute ago | parent

Microsoft and Linux /do/ offer the same path to productivity. Buy 10-20 computers, zero config, native discovery services, download apps.

What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.