Frankly this is a very easy choice. Unless you need to make images, Claude wins over chatgpt on every realm. For writing and coding there is no match. It's one of those times where you can do the right thing and get the better product.
I was one of the early paying adopter of chatgpt but when Claude came around I switched and never looked back. I've been on the max plan for a while.
Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.
Tell me, oh sage, how it was possible to become a hacker before "capitalism" created the computers needed to do so? And no, hacking was not "an extremely political and ideological movement", it was (and is) the a[c,r]t of going down as deep the rabbit hole of whatever the was to be hacked as time and the hole allowed to see what lurks there. The term was eventually co-opted by the media - not "capitalism" - to identify those who broke into networks and computers but that does not need to bother you. There have been and are those who combine - usually anti-authoritarian - politics with hacking but they were and are only a part of the whole.
Don't you ever get tired of spouting that grade school "muh capitalism bad" pablum, of being what Lenin supposedly called a "useful idiot"? Also, who are the "we" who you think should "take back" the word hacking? In what way would this be "taking back" instead of "taking over"? If you think it should be "extremely political and ideological" it would surely be the latter. Would your definition of hacking have room for those who dared to venture beyond your "extremely political and ideological" boundaries or those who just want to hack without needing to wear the right buttons, pins and clothes?
The hacker philosophy did not even start with computers, it started with rail models and lock picking. Read a book every now and then.
And please don't fall in the trap that capitalism created things. Science and engineering creates things. Capitalism makes them more accessible, at a price that is often heavily confounded by externalities.
Ah yes, I knew someone would go there, though 'shall I mention that hacking did not start with computers nor with railways but when the first person with a suitable frame of mind dedicated himself to getting the best axe or arrow head out of a piece of flint no matter how much effort it would take' but decided against it, surely they'd understand? Clearly not. Read a book indeed, preferably more than one.
How does 'science and engineering' create things without the funds and the drive to do so? How do you think science-as-a-profession got started?
Stop throwing about those silly slogans - muh capitalism bad - and start thinking for real. Realise that you're able to discuss on this here site thanks to 'capitalism'. If you want to play revolutionary that's fine but at least realise what it is that gives you the opportunity do to so.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I don't see how their analogy is stupid. Aeropress and french press are pretty similar from an "enthusiast coffee device" perspective. Lots of room for variability in grind size, coffee choice, and specific brewing technique with both methods.
Aeropress is a brand, one I've never heard of. It fits in the Linux ecosystem (maybe as one of the Red Hat flavors?) but as an analogy it is simplified. Linux is so much bigger than that and there's everything from LFS (grow, grind and brew with tools you've sourced and put together yourself), to Android (plain old drip machine). Reducing everything that's the Linux ecosystem to a niche brand of a specific type of coffee maker is dishonest.
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
I am too lazy and not enough of a snob to write several paragraphs on why Aeropress is objectively better and different from French Press, but it is, and I hope someone can step up and do that here.
> Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
The exploitation of labor in developing countries in the electronics supply chain is a serious issue, and worth discussing, but it's not the dimension of the subject my comment was addressing.
> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
> Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story.
The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
I'm sure most people feel the opposite way. I've been using Windows and Macs for 20 years and I don't ever see myself ever using Linux as a desktop OS.
Among the subculture that would be the type to visit Hacker News (or Slashdot back in the day), this attitude emerged around 25 years ago. In the late 90s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the Linux desktop. I remember those days fondly. It was glorious. Then macOS (or OS X as we called it) swept away a lot of people. A lot of them would get hostile or angry or mock people when they would mention they didn't join the Mac bandwagon.
Same here. Using Linux Mint for about 15 years now. Same for various computer illiterate family members. As far as I am concerned it is significantly more pleasant to use than Windows and MacOS.
This is something I see repeated everywhere but I've been using Linux daily on all sorts of laptops for a little over 15 years and never struggled with this issue.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
My colleagues run linux laptops and they don't struggle with this issue either. They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere. That's how they trust their OS.
>> They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere
Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
My development machine is a macbook air, which is fantastic for me because I can work anywhere without a power outlet for long hours. Production target is usually debian servers, they just work reliably. And my game/music machine is windows (all the games, all the vsts). I don't like trade-offs.
Battery life is great on a mac, but then I would have to use my macbook / macOS. For me that is a tradeoff as I would prefer to use Arch / Hyprland, kernel support for cgroups, etc.
Can you understand why someone would buy a $20 Mr. Coffee coffeemaker from Walmart and not a $2000 DeLonghi Eletta Explore superautomatic espresso machine?
I have multiple computers with multiple operating systems, but I still need my gaming machine to be windows because some of my favorite games require it.
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
I got a Gemini API key once. I was overcharged £350, took me ages to find a way to file a complain, and at the end they refunded me only the google charges and not the VAT.
In a landscape where every week we have a different leading model, these systems are really useful for the power users because they keep the interface and models constant and allow to switch easily using API via openrouter or naga. I have been using openwebui which is under active development but I'll give this a try.
No. Science is inherently human-centric. If a line of academic research has no conceivable way of benefitting humans, at least indirectly, it is eventually halted.
It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.
It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account and FORCE them to buy the game again.
I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.
If one company becomes massively profitable despite offering literally zero consumer level support, then why would any other company, that covets the same scalability, make any attempt at consumer level support at all?
Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.
Had one of the first 10k Minecraft accounts or so. Never changed the name or anything. When Microsoft bought it they spammed me that I would loose my account if I don't transfer it. So after the 3rd email or so I did. It got hacked a few days after that, took several weeks to resolve for whatever reason. Ive had the account a few months after that until it was "hacked" again.
The very few times I played Minecraft since then I just used a hacked client.
I have a friend who bought Minecraft for the full price of 30 USD, and one day microshit decided "hey you know what? fuck you, we're deleting your account". so he went to a 3rd party site and bought a 2nd hand account, sketchy as fuck but it worked and this time he didn't have to pay full price again; but the fact that he had to pay *again* is simply outrageous.
On the other hand, last time I got actually hacked was in 2015, when I intentionally shared the password for a popular kids game that I used to play back then. And I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all, I don't follow the best security protocols, heck I don't even have good passwords, but I have never been hacked in 9 years.
As a bonus, you can can get completely stuck if you made the mistake of creating a MS family when signing into Minecraft. In the forums there are hundreds of problems like mine where the family becomes completely uneditable and Minecraft offline-only.
But I should've never attempted anything that complicated with MS. They can barely manage simple cases, groups of users is way too hard.
Just going through that myself. My son's Microsoft account was hacked, we contactes customer service and all they did was acknowledge the account was compromised, close it indefinitely asking us to buy the game again, and locked my account as the family manager. Fortunately I am a Linux guy and the last Microsoft thing I've touched was windows xp some 20 years ago. But imagine thinking this is acceptable?!
I guess they still suffer from monopoly syndrome. The EU should get them again.
The business incentive is funneling new users into their walled garden. If they could, they would assign a MS account to every newborn. There are still loopholes to protect your children from Minecraft's new "features" (at least for Linux users, ask privately), but it's only a matter of time until they are closed to appease the gods of enshittification.
The problem is that my kids want to play on online servers and for as much as they are learning to hate Microsoft, they still love Minecraft. I don't think loopholes can help with that, can they?
Huh, you actually are an expert in this area. I’m curious to hear more too.
> There, I studied the early stages of neuronal development in the Drosophila embryo…
> I graduated with my Ph.D. in September 2006 and decided that I would continue my research activity on sleep, using flies as the animal model.
The conclusions are pushed and hyperbolic exactly to get this type of reaction from the public, at best conflating control with function (we solved sleep) while the sleep phenotype itself is basically non-existing.
Proper rebuttals will come up in due time on the appropriate channels. all the colleagues I talked to are as pissed off as I am about this way of doing science.
This is what got me started with claude-code. I gave it a try using openrouter API and got a bill of $40 for 2-3 hours of work. At that point, subscription to the Anthropic plan became a no-brainer
I tried quite a few of them, including the cheap / free models but the only one that was really working was claude. The others were hanging whenever the model needed a confirmation for action. Mind you, this was some time ago.
I was one of the early paying adopter of chatgpt but when Claude came around I switched and never looked back. I've been on the max plan for a while.
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