> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech

I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.

However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).

I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.

People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.

However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.

Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.

Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.

But something can be done.

The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.

They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.

The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.

The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.

I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.

Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.

> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.

This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.

Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?

But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.

I wrote assembler on pages of paper. Then I used tables, and a calculator for the two's-complement relative negative jumps, to manually translate it into hex code. Then I had software to type in such hex dumps and save them to audio cassette, from which I could then load them for execution.

I did not have an assembler for my computer. I had a disassembler though- manually typed it in from a computer magazine hex dump, and saved it on an audio cassette. With the disassembler I could check if I had translated everything correctly into hex, including the relative jumps.

The planning required to write programs on sheets of paper was very helpful. I felt I got a lot dumber once I had a PC and actual programmer software (e.g. Borland C++). I found I was sitting in front of an empty code file without a plan more often than not, and wrote code moment to moment, immediately compiling and test running.

The AI coding may actually not be so bad if it encourages people to start with high-level planning instead of jumping into the IDE right away.

> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas’ so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.

> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas’ own tallies.

> Aizenberg’s findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.

Also noted, re: the two sources cited:

* In November 2024, Honest Reporting Canada's assistant director, Robert Walker, was criminally charged with 17 counts of mischief for allegedly vandalizing several properties in a Toronto neighborhood by spray painting anti-Palestinian graffiti.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReporting

and

* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society

Anything coming from Hamas is certainly not trustworthy, but according to the ICJ, there were quite a few more indications that Israel did this. Just the blocking of food alone is proof of targeting non combatants.

I "cherry-pick" sources that do not spread lies. That excludes Hamas, as well as the circle around Netanjahu. The ICJ seems more interested in truth and you may criticize how that went for them, or are they anti western in your book?

I don't claim the bias was deliberate. The point is that we have internalized having to conform with the narrative of western (elite) interests, which in this case is to exert control on the region, resources and trade routes.

Not that old big non-AI software doesn't have similar maintainability issues (I keep posting this example, but I don't actually want to callthat company out specifically, the problem is widespread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941).

That's why I'm reluctant to complain about the AI code issues too much. The problem of how software is written, on the higher level, the teams, the decisions, the rotating programmers, may be bigger than that of any particular technology or person actually writing the code.

I remember a company where I looked at a contractor job, they wanted me to fix a lot of code they had received from their Eastern European programmers. They complained about them a lot in our meeting. However, after hearing them out I was convinced the problem was not the people generating the code, but the ones above them who failed to provide them with accurate specs and clear guidance, and got surprised at the very end that it did not work as expected.

Similar with AI. It may be hard to disentangle what is project management, what is actually the fault of the AI. I found that you can live with pockets of suboptimal but mostly working code well enough, even adding features and fixing bugs easily, if the overall architecture is solid, and components are well isolated.

That is why I don't worry too much about the complaints here about bad error checks and other small stuff. Even if it is bad, you will have lots of such issues in typical large corporate projects, even with competent people. That's because programmers keep changing, management focuses on features over anything else (usually customers, internal or external, don't pay for code reorg, only for new features). The layers above the low level code are more important in deciding if the project is and remains viable.

From what the commenters say, it seems to me the problem starts much higher than the Claude code, so it is hard to say how much at fault AI generated code actually is IMHO. Whether you have inexperienced juniors or an AI producing code, you need solid project lead and architecture layers above the lines of code first of all.

https://orf.at/stories/3417584/

I doubt Trump would have ever even thought of Greenland on his own. I think was told about it, and the narrative planted in his head deliberately.

This focus on "Trump" in Internet comments and media irks me to no end. Trump is not a failure and not the wrong person in the job - he is ideal for those behind him. The money does not like public attention.

(Yes the president can't tell Greenland from Iceland, but neither half of those "tech bros" who failed geography at school

The theories proposed here are merely examples of human brains ability to come up with a fantastic story for anything in the absence of data. Ex falso quodlibet - from zero follows everything, if you have nothing you can just say anything you want, and it will "explain" your non-existing data perfectly /s

The extremely narrow passages, only one exit, bad air circulation, there is nothing that hints towards this being used for hiding, quite the opposite.

> And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones

I know the article mentions why hiding doesn't make sense. My whole comment is about how the reasons it gives don't hold up.

You do not point that out every. Single. Time. somebody argues even though it is true, or do you? Because that is just too shallow, that is the basis, nothing can be below that, so there is no point in pointing to the ground every time. So when you do point it out, it is YOU who has an agenda.

You are trying to shift the framing.

If you add that information, if you really think it adds any value, after discussing what's actually in the study the comment would be sooo much better.

Isn't the only thing that could matter - apart from strategic considerations of financing a loss for a time - if the margins are big enough? Who wants to pay for people to take their products below the full cost of making them, apart from some investor-financed hype startups?

I wrote

> Isn't the only thing that could matter ... if the margins are big enough

2) No, the standard price elasticity of demand curve does not directly include profits. It primarily models the relationship between price and quantity demanded.

Supply curve??? The OP wrote "This is confirming demand is more inelastic"