Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy.
This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.
Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. Corruption is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a choice.
In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.
> Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see.
This is an uninformed non-sequitur. In China or Mexico for example, it's well known that to get certain things done you have to bribe local officials. The central government is against corruption by policy, but nevertheless corruption is endemic. It's only "inaccessible" to some because some people are poor and can't afford the bribes.
Yes, exactly. I went on holiday to Cairo a few years ago. Small bribes (bashish) is 100% normal there.
My tour guide was this bright 22 year old who dreamed of going to the UK to be an uber driver, so he could make enough money to get married. I told him if he went to the UK, he needed to know to never bribe officials, ever. He made the most adorably confused face - like his brain was blue screening. He had no conception of how a society could function without bribes. “But … how does anything get done?”
Greece is kind of the worst-of-both-worlds for this. Nothing works properly, but you also can't pay someone to make it work. In a country with good honest corruption you pay someone else to wait in line for you at the post office while the folks behind the counter smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. In Greece you can't do that, you have to wait while they smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. The friend of mine I was visiting also did the brain blue-screen when I asked who you paid to wait in line for you.
On the upside, a country that undergoes the transition from highly corrupt to well functioning inevitably goes through the stage you describe. My native country was going through that as I was growing up, starting with the Soviet "corruption is just how everything works" to being a fairly well functioning European society now.
Somewhere in between, there was definitely what you described. I've heard people with the remarkable complaint "there isn't even anyone to bribe". Of course if a society gets stuck too long at this stage, it turns into a different problem altogether.
I can't speak to China, but having spent most of the past decade in India and Sri Lanka I can say the problem there is that nobody is willing to unilaterally disarm. Everybody agrees that bakshish is deadweight loss and inefficient, but if Person A stops doing it and Person B doesn't, Person B gets more of whatever the finite resource in question is (slots in a school, permits, gasoline, whatever).
Xi Jinping has disciplined millions of officials as part of his anti-corruption campaign. That cannot be some corrupt way to silence dissidents while being popular with an allegedly corruption-omniscient citizenry.
As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat. It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow the official rules. You get what you need through corruption, and your ability to do so strengthens your trust in your personal network.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.
It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.
Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.
None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to me that the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are privately held goods and surely the possessors of those goods can dispose of them how they want?
Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?
The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem.
You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.
Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption.
The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them.
And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!
Would you say the scarcity is what starts the corruption?
Like you can't get a plumber so you have to use your personal network or there aren't enough tickets so you have to obtain one through your personal network, etc?
It's probably better to look at a system wide level than any one shortage. For example is there no plumbers because school loans to learn apprenticeship were robbed by the rich, and the actual plumbers aren't able to get more licenses because of the graft they' have to pay for an additional one.
None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing which you've now specified as additional context. I could just as easily specify another context where each of these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are part of the theater worker's perks.)
If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.
My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.
That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The next reply was agreeing and expanding on that. This strongly suggests that each step in the description involves corruption in some way.
That said, hopefully you're now clear that these blat networks involve pervasive corruption.
When a community that is used to blat networks moves to a different country, the blat network doesn't go away. Throughout US history, it has been common to see blat networks in immigrant communities turn into straight up organized crime. The most famous example being the rise of the Mafia. But it is hardly an isolated example.
Yes, the context was talking about what we would call corruption, but given that I read the comment as trying to explain things to a western reader, I think it's worth calling out the unstated assumption that makes this actually bad rather than just friends swapping favors.
Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?
Then you get worse good and services. Lower quality or longer wait, or don't get it at all depending on the good. The effect isn't that different from being poor in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, it's mostly money that determines what you can buy. In the Soviet blat-heavy economy, money didn't matter as much connections.
It was perfectly possible to have a decent salary but nothing to spend it on because the better items just aren't available. Maybe there's some delicacy you enjoy, or a special item you want like a cassette player and you could afford those if the store actually had them, but they don't. In that situation, your ability to buy more desirable items depended more on your connections or perseverance in doing things "the hard way" like queuing for hours to buy bananas, or recycling enough kilograms of paper to buy a book.
> My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.
Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these cultural differences shine through.
To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the first place). Of course it means the plumber is working on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate side business.
Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other favors?
What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society as rules that you're supposed to follow?
It starts as favors.
By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's blat.
By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud, it's still blat. But also its starting to look like something else.
Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called organized crime. But the underlying blat is still recognizable.
From the sound of it (I have never heard of blat before this post), the important distinction is that the owner is on board with it. If he could eat for free because he knew a server who would give him the employee discount, it would be blat. If he worked as a mechanic and took parts from his employer to repair his friend's car, it would be blat.
It's pretty tiring seeing so many people push the bounds of acceptable behavior. It's pretty simple: should someone in your chain of management discipline you for setting aside that cheese? If yes, you are engaging in corruption.
That action is basically stochastic theft from the grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a possibly scarce good.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but they gave you some "toy" examples; let me give you some real ones.
My grandmother was ill. My grandfather, her husband, was sufficiently well connected that she got good medical coverage. Then he died. And so we lost our connections to the good doctors, to the good healthcare she was getting, and her care got significantly worse.
We have a family member with some property that's in a weird state, paperwork-wise. We were working on it, because another family member had a friend in the bureaucracy - think, the local tax office - who could have helped us sort it out on paper. Then he died. So now, we have to do things by the book, which is incredibly difficult without having a friend there to cut through the red tape.
It's not about getting the plumber to prioritize your work, or getting the nice slice of cheese. It's about making sure grandma's osteoporosis gets treated, it's about not losing your house.
Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store.
But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.
In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they are reselling phones that belong to them, they can dispose of them however they like.
I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.
Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have entirely legal business models that I would argue are equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that chooses to sell its products or services only to a select group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those customers not exclusively based on their finances but based on what else they can provide. Such as access to certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO ethically questionable.
But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.
This is 100% how working people everywhere survive. I'm a middle aged person who grew up lower-middle class in an unassuming town in the US midwest, and this is how everything got done. Our kitchen was remodeled by the guy my Dad knew from the bar, who was introduced to him by their mutual bookie. He later did some work on our basement (a tree root was growing in) and needed a backhoe. The husband of my Mom's coworker had one and was looking for a place to park it for a few months, so we could use it but had to keep it parked in our yard afterward for a while. My Dad was a bureaucrat and helped all these people file for the government program he was a representative for. My Mom watched other kids for free when needed so that they would watch me if she needed. I missed the deadline for applying for drivers' ed one summer and, rather than wait, she called up somebody she knew at the schoolboard and they were able to get me in. The owner of the corner store across the street from our house also had an unpaid sideline in connecting people in the neighborhood who could help each other. Nobody would think of taking their car to a professional mechanic until they'd asked around to a few neighbors, who would never accept any money. We knew what kind of beer our garbage men liked to drink so, when we went to throw away something that was on the borderline of whether or not the city should let you (e.g. throwing away a mattress on a day that isn't one of the scheduled "large items" days), we set out a 12 pack of it (and a case at Christmas time, just to keep good relations). At a certain point in my childhood, the programming of pirated DirecTV cards became a vital currency in this web -- my Dad bought a card reader/writer for our family PC and I went to work trawling through sketchy IRC channels to get the latest images to flash onto them. Sometimes I would get paid a nominal amount, but it felt good just to be useful.
This wasn't the global south, and we weren't even especially poor (though some in our neighborhood were). We were prosperous citizens in the core of an empire at the peak of its uncontested power. This is just how a community works, and has since the beginning of time. The extremely marketized nature of modern upper middle class life is the aberration in human history, and presumably will not last forever.
Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter network since the straightforward exchange of cash for services has broken down, so you need to know the right people with skills or access to, and something of value to offer them in return.
They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have unrelated origins. блат is borrowed from Yiddish, while блядь has a Slavic root.
That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us "я"and "а" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard sign т versus the soft sign on дь. But hard versus soft isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening for it.
I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very close. They're not etymologically related either, and to a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly similar.
It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia, considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia, I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much - in the context of development, they don't really mind if you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes over blindly following processes.
They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work.
I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc.
It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows.
Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.
This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.
I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture.
The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.
In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.
One interesting effect of LLMs getting so good at generating code, all of the process related things you mention take up a greater and greater percentage of the overall time to develop and deploy a feature, making them even more salient.
They always have. I would guess the majority of people employed and salaries paid on a given project basically goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort spread across people.
One thing that I want to add - Westerners have experience of this sort of corruption, every day.
Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it is seen when working for companies.
Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft skills")
If the managers are not taking bribes or favors for better treatment that isn't corruption...its just bad management. Those aren't he same thing even though you might have the same emotional reaction to them.
> If the managers are not taking bribes or favors for better treatment that isn't corruption
You have a very narrow definition of corruption here. A manager using his management powers to intentionally make his life easier at the cost of the company is corrupt regardless how he does that. He could do that via bribes, but also could do things like hire a lot of deadweight people to bloat his org and raise his own salary without making the company more productive, that is also corruption since he hurt the company to benefit himself.
That isn't "bad management" since it was done intentionally, he knew what he did was bad for the company and good for himself. Corrupt management often masquerades as bad management to avoid getting sued, but it is still corruption.
> If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life.
I think increasingly this describes how things work in the US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to include things like corporations stealing your data, charging hidden fees, etc.
I'd add tipping system for various services, but specially restaurants etc in definition of corruption too. Here blame pass around between employees, owners, restaurant associations, govt officials making/ passing laws etc. But end result is customer keep paying extra charges or being labeled as worst customers.
I love how media is in this game , printing endless articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips because poor server. And even when customers are revolting against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a way of speaking truth to power.
This is also where I'm at. I don't care what protocol or whatever is running underneath but I just want things to work and Wayland doesn't do that. It has lately been better, previously I would try Wayland and run into problems within minutes, recent attempts have given me hours without running into a problem. And as an end user I don't want to care that the problems I get aren't with Wayland but rather a particular compositor/WM implementation or whatever. I want it to work but it's only in the last year or so that basic functionality like screenshots has become reliable.
What gets me is how old Wayland is. It's now older than Linux itself was when Wayland started. It started in the era of 2.6 kernel series, when most software was still 32-bit, systemd didn't exist, when Motora Razr was more common than iPhones, when native desktop applications were still the norm, Node.js didn't yet exist and Google Chrome was a completely new beta browser. Wayland is now reaching feature parity and some kind of "it works out of the box, usually" state when it's from a completely different era of computing.
The nearest point of comparison is perhaps systemd, another Linux project that is very large in scope, complicated, critical and must interface well with lots of pre-existing software. Four years after Poeterring's "Rethinking PID 1" post that introduced systemd, it was enabled and in use on many distros. The conservative Debian adopted it within five years. Now it's been clearly a major success, but Wayland has been perhaps the slowest serious software product to be in development.
You have some weird memory, screenshots have been a solved issue for something like 6 or 7 years at the very least, if not a decade. I remember taking screenshots on wayland during the Covid era for instance.
Wayland experiences seem to vary wildly. It was most certainly not working fine for me six years ago. Well, six years ago I don't think I got as far as trying screenshots, I'd run into basic window placement or rendering issues that made the system unusable.
But say a couple years ago, I definitely had screenshot issues. Sometimes it just wouldn't capture a screenshot. Or I could only capture one monitor and not the other. Or I had graphical artifacts while drawing the snipping rectangle. Or the screenshot would be taken fine and fail to copy to the clipboard.
I'm well aware people's experiences are very different based on their setup and the implementations used but for me, last year was the first time I could do some work on Wayland without running into major issues, at least until I got to the part where I'd normally use ssh -X.
You have always been able to do ssh -X from a wayland client to a remote X as long as xwayland was running locally.
And waypipe has been solving this need to run a remote app on a wayland remote system. And it performs way better than X forwarding actually. With ssh -X you also need to remember obscure environment variables (looking at you QT) to not have unusable blank windows on some apps.
I saw it on SVT a few hours ago. DN and Expressen have also reported. The details about what exactly it is that got leaked are unclear (some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO) but this is certainly being reported domestically.
some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO
No. CGI has nothing to do with BankID.
IMO the most credible reports suggest that the source code and data involved are related to these four services:
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst...
"Mina engagemang offers a user-friendly and flexible solution that allows your customers to manage their cases directly through a personal portal. Here, users can view, track, and interact with their ongoing cases, which enhances both transparency and efficiency in the communication process." -- some kind of ticket/case management system for gov't agencies
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/elektron...
"With our secure end-to-end e-ID and eSign services, we can help you streamline document and contract management, gain access to all desired e-ID issuers, and improve cost efficiency." -- this sounds like a bad thing to compromise, but is to the best of my understanding a system for digital signatures on documents, and has no relation to BankID
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst...
"Gain better control over your organization’s representatives with our easy-to-use representative registry. By automating the identification and verification of representatives, you’ll gain a clear overview and enhance the security of your processes." -- sounds like some bullshit CRUD app for managing who can "represent" a gov't agency
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst...
"SHS is Sweden’s common standard for information exchange, enabling secure and efficient communication between government agencies, businesses, and organizations." -- this might be bad if real data was leaked
These are services used by various Swedish government agencies and it's pretty bad to have even a test instance of them hacked, but let's calm down. The entire Swedish state has not been compromised here.
That's incorrect. Skatteverket used CGI for BankID-login, I don't know if they still do. I have personal experience working on a BankID-login using CGI for another company and it is still active.
Edit: I just confirmed Skatteverket still uses CGI for BankID-auth. "funktionstjanster" is CGI.
OK, let me rephrase that: CGI, while they may "have something to do" with BankID in the sense that they have developed systems that integrate with it, does not itself develop BankID and does not hold any private keys for BankID.
Interesting how LLMs have their own preferences too. Those in particular are very often used by ChatGPT, while Claude until recently couldn't stop saying "You're absolutely right!"
I also have a problem now with "it's worth noting", I use it a lot, I still like it, but now it's a dangerous phrase because of LLM associations.
I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.
But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need actual technical skill to spot.
Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office politics can create a product demo, change the output formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.
Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?
> I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold.
It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one who feels this way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to sonnet 4.6. I’m about to have to start lobbying for more tokens or buy my own subscription because it’s just that much more useful now.
Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to be the only model that produced reasonable results, but now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by changing tests to expect the current output, it does a good job planning features, and I've been impressed by this model also telling me not to do things - like it would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module but the resulting code would be much harder to read so it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes, and more, and more.
I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025 models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.
This is one of the most interesting questions to me about human brains, and as far as I know no significant progress has been made in answering it.
Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful.
It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?
I'm sure Apple has data showing that their extremely lockdown strategy is good for their business but I feel like I'm one of the potential customers Apple could gain if they didn't have that.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
I doubt that any company actually cares about what any of the myriad of metrics they collect mean at the C-suite level. I mean, "maybe" I just think it is unlikely. I bet 9/10 times someone just makes a decision about how things "ought" to be and then that's the way it is going forward.
The assumption that this is a triangulated and well researched strategy doesn't match my experience in "real-job" world. I mean, maybe Apple is different because of their history, but I am not convinced anyone listens to anyone that articulates any math ideas beyond Algebra outside of some niche specialties because they don't understand it. And it's not that I'm some math god - I mean, that's what I studied, but there are people SO much more knowledgeable and capable, and they seem to get ignored too.
Like, I'm sure the guy who runs an insurance company listens to the actuaries about relative risk, but mostly, what I've just seen is someone makes a decision, and then finds post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationales for why this was a good decision down the line when they have to account for their choices.
For instance, it took my like a year at my old job, but I finally got most of the KPIs we were using to set strategy cancelled. The data we were using to generate those KPIs? Well in a few cases, after you seasonally differenced the data was no different than white noise. No autocorrelation whatsoever. In ALL the cases the autocorrelation was weak and it was all evaporated after a month or 2. You could MAYBE fit an MA model to it, but that seemed dodgy to me. And like, I'm not a major expert - I took 1 time series class in gradschool, and frankly, time series is kind of hard. But management had ZERO idea of what I was talking about when I was like, "hey, I don't think these numbers actually mean anything at all? Did anyone run an ACF?"
Then each month someone higher up the chain would say, "why is this number low?" And then they go out and search through the reams of data they had to come up with an answer that plausibly explained things. Was the number particularly "low?" No, it was within expected statistical noise thresholds, you are probably going to have at least have 1 number out of whack every 20 cycles or so... You still had to spend an hour in a meeting coming up with reasons for why it was low that went beyond "ummm, well, this is kind of random, and we'd expect to see this sort of thing ever couple years once or twice, we won't know if it's a trend for a few more months."
Anyway, this is a long anecdote to explain why I have no confidence that most companies do any sort of actual introspection. CEO creates targets and underlings build models that show how they're meeting or not meeting those targets. Now, hilariously, with Apple in particular I might be wrong, because in Tim Cook's defense, I'm pretty sure his education is in Industrial Engineering? So if any CEO is thinking about that stuff, it's him. Still, I am totally and completely unimpressed with the C-Suite sort of thinkers.
They're not dumb - like I've never really had a straight up dumbass manager outside of shitty lower jobs or small-mom-and-pop businesses? But I have seldom met any company that actually cared about the numbers - most say they do, but most just use those numbers to justify decisions they've already made.
Am I just unlucky? I'm I the witch in church here?
The environment is why I quit my job and started working for myself in January. I hated it. And not to sound like an arrogant ass because there were a LOT of way smarter people than me at $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, but having to have meetings to set our meetings, having to explain things that aren't statistically meaningful to people who don't understand stats anyway, and getting code reviews (when I could get them scheduled) from dudes who hadn't touched a keyboard in 5 years was... soul sucking? I'm not doing that anymore. Or ever again.
I mean, maybe it's because I had a more hands-on blue-collar adjacent job before I got into tech? Maybe it's because I'm a fool and couldn't play the game of "pretend to work and look busy. But - and I know this might be kind of messed up - I really like not having to explain things in a series of emails to people other than the customers. I really like not having to answer to anyone but my self and my customers. If I want to do something, well, I just do it now? That's a nice place to be. Riskier for sure, but I think the prior environment would have killed me, so maybe not.
Also, I have time to do shit that's interesting? Who would have guessed how much more time I'd have in the day when I didn't have 4.5 hours of meetings per day? Hell, I'm taking 2 classes at the university for fun (weird right?!) - I never could have done that before because I would have had to make a slide deck for Thursdays All-Hands or whatever and couldn't have missed the SUPER IMPORTANT MEETING that Jake has on the schedule that he'll show up for unprepared or just not show up to.
Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.
In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.
GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.
man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.
Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.
Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.
Proton is amazing and it's really three different subprojects that deserve a lot of credit each.
First is Wine itself, with its implementation of Win32 APIs. I ran some games through Wine even twenty years ago but it was certainly not always possible, and usually not even easy.
Second is DXVK, which fills the main gap of Wine, namely Direct3D compatibility. Wine has long had its own implementation of D3D libraries, but it was not as performant, and more importantly it was never quite complete. You'd run into all sorts of problems because the Wine implementation differed from the Windows native D3D, and that was enough to break many gams. DXVK is a translation layer that translates D3D calls to Vulkan with excellent performance, and basically solves the problem of D3D on Linux.
Then there's the parts original to Proton itself. It applies targeted, high quality patches to Wine and DXVK to improve game compatibility, brings in a few other modules, and most importantly Proton glues it all together so it works seamlessly and with excellent UX. From the first release of Proton until recently, running Windows games through Steam took just a couple extra clicks to enable Proton for that game. And now even that isn't necessary, Proton is enabled by default so you run a game just by downloading it and launching, same exact process as on Windows.
Yes. The unique point of ReactOS is driver compatibility. Wine is pretty great for Win32 API, Proton completes it with excellent D3D support through DXVK, and with these projects a lot of Windows userspace can run fine on Linux. Wine doesn't do anything for driver compatibility, which is where ReactOS was supposed to fill in, running any driver written for Windows 2000 or XP.
But by now, as I also wrote in the other thread on this, ReactOS should be seen as something more like GNU Hurd. An exercise in kernel development and reverse engineering, a project that clearly requires a high level of technical skill, but long past the window of opportunity for actual adoption. If Hurd had been usable by say 1995, when Linux just got started on portability, it would have had a chance. If ReactOS had been usable ten years ago, it would also have had a chance at adoption, but now it's firmly in the "purely for engineering" space.
"ReactOS should be seen as something more like GNU Hurd. An exercise in kernel development and reverse engineering, a project that clearly requires a high level of technical skill, but long past the window of opportunity for actual adoption."
I understand your angle, or rather the attempt of fitting them in the same picture, somehow. However, the differences between them far surpass the similarities. There was no meaningful user-base for Unix/Hurd so to speak of compared to NT kernel. There's no real basis to assert the "kernel development" argument for both, as one was indeed a research project whereas the other one is just clean room engineering march towards replicating an existing kernel. What ReactOS needs to succeed is to become more stable and complete (on the whole, not just the kernel). Once it will be able to do that, covering the later Windows capabilities will be just a nice-to-have thing. Considering all the criticism that current version of Windows receives, switching to a stable and functional ReactOS, at least for individual use, becomes a no-brainer. Comparatively, there's nothing similar that Hurd kernel can do to get to where Linux is now.
Hurd was not a research project initially. It was a project to develop an actual, usable kernel for the GNU system, and it was supposed to be a free, copyleft replacement for the Unix kernel. ReactOS was similarly a project to make a usable and useful NT-compatible kernel, also as a free and copyleft replacement.
The key difference is that Hurd was not beholden to a particular architecture, it was free to do most things its own way as long as POSIX compatibility was achieved. ReactOS is more rigid in that it aims for compatibility with the NT implementation, including bugs, quirks and all, instead of a standard.
Both are long irrelevant to their original goals. Hurd because Linux is the dominant free Unix-like kernel (with the BSD kernel a distant second), ReactOS because the kernel it targets became a retrocomputing thing before ReactOS could reach a beta stage. And in the case of ReactOS, the secondary "whole system" goal is also irrelevant now because dozens of modern Linux distributions provide a better desktop experience than Windows 2000. Hell, Haiku is a better desktop experience.
"And in the case of ReactOS, the secondary «whole system» goal is also irrelevant now because dozens of modern Linux distributions provide a better desktop experience than Windows 2000. Hell, Haiku is a better desktop experience."
Yet, there are still too many desktop users that, despite the wishful thinking or blaming, still haven't switched to neither Linux, nor Haiku. No mater how good Haiku or Linux distributions are, their incompatibility with the existing Windows simply disqualifies them as options for those desktop users. I bet we'll see people switching to ReactOS when it will get just stable enough, yet long before it will get as polished as either Haiku or any given quality Linux distribution.
No, people will never be switching to ReactOS. For some of the same reasons they don't switch to Linux, but stronger.
ReactOS aims to be a system that runs Windows software and looks like Windows. But, it runs software that's compatible with WinXP (because they target the 5.1 kernel) and it looks like Windows 2000 because that's the look they're trying to recreate. Plenty of modern software people want to run doesn't run on XP. Steam doesn't run on XP. A perfectly working ReactOS would already be incompatible with what current Windows users expect.
UI wise there is the same issue. Someone used to Windows 10 or 11 would find a transition to Windows 2000 more jarring than to say Linux Mint. ReactOS is no longer a "get the UI you know" proposition, it's now "get the UI of a system from twenty five years ago, if you even used it then".
"UI wise there is the same issue. Someone used to Windows 10 or 11 would find a transition to Windows 2000 more jarring than to say Linux Mint. ReactOS is no longer a «get the UI you know» proposition, it's now «get the UI of a system from twenty five years ago, if you even used it then»." "A perfectly working ReactOS would already be incompatible with what current Windows users expect."
That look and feel is the easy part. That can be addressed if it's really an issue. The hard part is the compatibility (that is given by many still missing parts) and stability (the still defective parts). The targeted kernel matters, of course, but that is not set in stone. In fact, there is Windows Vista+ functionality added and written about, here: https://reactos.org/blogs/investigating-wddm although doing it properly would mean rewriting the kernel, bumping it to NT version 6.0
I'm sure there will indeed be many users that will find various ReactOS aspects jarring for as long as there are still defects, lack of polish, or dysfunction on application and kernel (drivers) level. However, considering the vast pool of Windows desktop users, it's reasonable to expect ReactOS to cover the limited needs for enough users at some point, which should turn attention into testing, polish, and funding to address anything still lacking, which then should further feed the adoption and improvement loop.
"No, people will never be switching to ReactOS. For some of the same reasons they don't switch to Linux, but stronger."
To me, this makes sense maybe for corporate world. The reasons that made them stick with Windows has less to do with familiarity or with application compatibility (given the fact that a lot of corporate infrastructure is in web applications). Yes, there must be something else that governs corporate decisions, something to do with the way corporations function, and that will most likely prevent a switch to ReactOS just as it did to Linux based distributions. But, this is exactly why I intentionally specified "for individual use" when I said "switching to a stable and functional ReactOS, at least for individual use, becomes a no-brainer". For individual use, the reason that prevented people to switch to Linux is well known, and ReactOS's reason to be was aimed exactly at that.
> There was no meaningful user-base for Unix/Hurd so to speak of compared to NT kernel.
Sure, but that userbase also already has a way of using the NT kernel: Windows. The point is that both Hurd and ReactOS are trying to solve an interesting technical problem but lack any real reason to use rather than their alternatives that solve enough of the practical problems for most users.
While I think better Linux integration and improving WINE is probably better time spend... I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility (without bug fixes since)... that seems to be the last Windows version people remember relatively fondly by most and a point before they really split-brained a lot of the configuration and settings.
With the contempt of a lot of the Win10/11 features, there's some chance it could see adoption, if that's an actual goal. But the effort is huge, and would need to be sufficient for wide desktop installs much sooner than later.
I think a couple of the Linux + WINE UI options where the underlying OS is linux, and Wine is the UI/Desktop layer on top (not too disimilar from DOS/Win9x) might also gain some traction... not to mention distros that smooth the use of WINE out for new users.
Worth mentioning a lot of WINE is reused in ReactOS, so that effort is still useful and not fully duplicated.
> I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility
That's not going to happen in any way that matters. If ReactOS ever reaches Win7 compatibility, that would be at a time when Win7 is long forgotten.
The project has had a target of Windows 2000 compatibility, later changed to XP (which is a relatively minor upgrade kernel wise). Now as of 2026, ReactOS has limited USB 2.0 support and wholly lacks critical XP-level support like Wifi, NTFS or multicore CPUs. Development on the project has never been fast but somewhere around 2018 it dropped even more, just looking at the commit history there's now half the activity of a decade ago. So at current rates, it's another 5+ years away from beta level support of NT 5.0.
ReactOS actually reaching decent Win2K/XP compatibility is a long shot but still possible. Upgrading to Win7 compatibility before Win7 itself is three plus decades old, no.
maybe posts like this will move the needle. If i could withstand OS programming (or debugging, or...) I'd probably work on reactOS. I did self-host it, which i didn't expect to work, so at least i know the toolchain works!
Basically if you do the math, it means a whole generation got tired of being on the project and focused into something else, and there is no new blood to account for that.
The history of most FOSS projects after being running for a while.
This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.
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