Depends.

You can argue that it’s basically art/political speech. You’ve done it to draw attention to flaws in the approach and to highlight how ineffectual the current system is, and that if you actually wanted to do make fake IDs you’d take a much less high-profile approach. As such, there’s no actual criminal intent required.

Don’t know if a judge would buy it though.

Ok, but one of the most important use cases is non-local access.

If I’m at home I can just go to the door.

Go on, drop a rocket on Zuck’s Bond villain hideout.

Let’s see what happens.

Commercial versions of these systems exist in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-facewatch-watchlist-39p-paracetamol-london

The Gdpr makes these things harder to do, but not automatically illegal.

Surely you have noticed that there is a lot of criticism of the GDPR and EU tech regulation.

Yeah, and some of it is even true.

Ubuntu is deployed all over the place for data science.

I’m fairly sure this is because data scientists got used to running it on their personal machines and can’t be bothered to learn another distro.

I mean if everything is ephemeral and the users are anonymous and don’t log in, the federation wouldn’t actually do anything.

Wasting other people’s time.

If you want to use an LLM that’s fine, but if you’re cutting and pasting it into a discussion you should warn other people that it’s not human generated.

And most of it isn’t wrong, it’s just a giant wall of text that’s largely irrelevant to the conversation.

As a heads up, the person you’re arguing with seems to be using an LLM to generate text.

I would down vote and move on. It’s not a real discussion.

Oh that’s good.

I’ve often wondered how could I make my instant messaging less instantaneous, while giving a new app access to my banking emails.

It was seen as very applied and not particularly fundamental research at the time.

But with the benefit of hindsight this was one of the many starts of modern machine learning.

Technically it died and was resurrected.

There was a bunch of weird rebadged Ubuntu derivatives back in the day.

Ubuntu satanic edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/

Ubuntu Christian edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-christian/

Hannah Montana Linux https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

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Although it’s federated nature is kinda dying.

If you’re not on one of the major providers good luck getting people to see your email.

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Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.

the UI conversation around git has been going on long enough (here included) that there has to have been a significant global productivity cost due to the lack of a better UI.

I don’t think this is true.

Git is ugly and functional.

People love to complain about it being ugly, but it does what it’s meant to. If there was actually a persistent productivity hit from its interface, one of the weird wrappers would have taken off, and replaced it.

But the truth is, those wrappers all seem to be written by people learning to use git in the first place, and just get abandoned once they get used to it.

It’s very true on a Mac. Almost every time you click the green button, it jumps to full screen and then you can’t drag another window on top of it.

It’s a pain in the arse because my workflow is to have a reading screen with documents and emails on, and a work screen with whatever I’m actually doing. But if outlook is full screen, you can’t drag any other windows on top of it.

Don’t know why the first guy was saying this is a Windows thing though. I only run onto it on macs.

Lots of the cheap Chinese watches Xiaomi, amazfit etc do a rectangular face. Rectangular lets you use standard screens and is cheaper and easier to get.

Dev jobs and data scientists often get a lot of leeway.

Very big tech companies tend to be more open to it. When I was at AWS their threat model was basically to treat every end user device as untrusted, which then meant that they didn’t rely on keeping laptops locked down for security.