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I'm not exactly sure of the details, but isn't this similar to DigiD in NL? There too you can "prove your Identity and log in" via the govt app. The server side of the 3rd party has to handle the rest (eg user account information etc.), nothing is shared beyond "this is the guy who's signing in, verified by the govt".

Slightly tangential, how good/bad is 4o compared to the modern (5.3 I think?) one?

TBH I personally find non-thinking replies quite poor for the type of questions I ask so I haven't touched chatgpt for months (ever since Gemini 2.5 Pro I think.) (And even Gemini 3.1 Pro tends to still be too literal at times instead of understand the implied meaning lol. We've got more place to improve.)


Totally get it, I too only understood it "theoretically" till I had a (fairly minor!) dental operation.

... Suddenly I'm maintaining a continuous note of when I'm taking which medicine to avoid crossing safe limits (which I anyway was crossing most days).

I was only told to take 2 paracetamols a day (bullshit dose, I'd be waking up from the pain even with more pain meds).

"Diclofenac for rare use" - well, if nothing else is touching the pain, is it an emergency?

Eventually after forever I was able to transition to Ibuprofen + paracetamol. And I already have a health condition which is heavy on my kidneys... pain management can be absolutely crazy.


Pain management can be crazy but in your case it sounds like they simply didn't prescribe the appropriate medication presumably due to the anti opiate hysteria that has taken hold.

While that's quite possibly true, I forgot to mention that I'm not in the US but India. I was conscious the whole time, with only local anesthesia. Also the dentist in question is actually our "family" dentist, and he's a pretty knowledgeable/skillful guy (easily more knowledgeable than many GPs on health matters of the body).

Fun fact, you can totally get them to pause the procedure without saying a word. All you have to do is end up in a lot of pain, have your heart rate skyrocket like anything, and get everyone in the OT very concerned ;)


I had severe nerve pain due to a herniated disc. While awaiting a surgery, I was prescribed an opioid (Tramadol) but it didn't seem to help much at all. Acetaminophen actually worked better than the opioid for me...

> Apparently for some people it also helps with lessening tolerance for their ADHD meds, but I'm not so sure about that.

I'd believe it. I first heard of NAC on the nootropic subreddit in a past lifetime. The benefits vary, but generally it's a safe thing with a low chance of making anything worse, but a possibility to improve things. Many neurodivergent folk have written about how they benefit.

I'd give more info on the exact benefits they found (iirc OCD and rumination loops could be broken more easily), but unfortunately my memory is failing me.


You'll find a detailed description oft potential effects and uses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine (aka NAC)

> I'm more concerned that Signal incorporated in US is having easy life.

To add - ironically, it was Durov (Telegram founder) who got arrested in Paris.


I don't find it ironic at all. Zero trust for anything Russia related.

Zero trust does not mean government pressure is okay

he is not pro-Putin, the Telegram team was forced to leave and it has been blocked several times in Russia.

Not being pro-Putin doesn’t really matter to Putin. If he tells Durov to sit and be a good dog, Durov will sit and be a good dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Kk7kobMQY


Unlikely the case, Telegram is the app that Russian government is most focused on blocking right now, it's almost impossible to use without proxy or VPN.

Not saying Durov is perfect but video you linked is about guy who has all his assets in Russia while Durov has none.


Follow the money. Not the person.

https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

https://www.ft.com/content/36a37387-cb71-4851-a56f-de2571d52...

Also, I disagree with Durov having no assets in Putin’s direct reach.

https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...

The man looks on photos like he genuinely loves his long-term girlfriend and the three kids he has with her. Kids are stupid tho. They climb on everything and fall out of windows frequently.


Durov is about as anti-Putin and russia in general as one can get. He go fucked hard in russia and has been going extremely hard against the censorship in russia. TG is one of the few chat apps that can avoid russia's suppression measures, when everything else working over internet fails.

Durov has been going hard against censorship because the pressure on Russians to switch to MAX might consign his own app to oblivion. But to call Durov “anti-Russia” when Telegram development and servers remained in Russia, is to ascribe to him a dissident status that he doesn’t actually deserve.

(Durov himself is known to regularly visit Russia, while denying he ever visits Russia. Telegram opened a Dubai office claiming that it was now a Dubai-headquartered company, but that was a mere legal formality; no one was actually there at that office, and journalists visiting it found that not even the building staff knew anything about Telegram. In practice, the company continues to exist out of Russia.)


Do you have a source for any of this? Wikipedia and news that I can find support that he fled Russia after government conflicts. It’s also well known that he keeps his and the dev team’s location secret, so anybody going knocking on incorporation addresses in Dubai then feigning surprise is acting in bad faith.

This was all over the news a couple of years ago when Russian entry/exit records were leaked. Doing a Google search for “durov visited russia frequently” will get you plenty of reportage.

"so anybody going knocking on incorporation addresses in Dubai" The point is that Telegram has repeatedly countered claims that it is a Russian app with "Actually, Telegram is a Dubai company”. People reasonably interpret that as more than a mere incorporation address, and it isn’t being emphasized enough that development is still largely done from Russia, and servers are also located there.


Half of Russian military uses it in the field. I do not care what story that guy is spreading around about his affiliations or lack of with Russia. Zero trust. Never touching Telegram.

Could you share a link or something about this?

> ...responding to that with sustained, coordinated attack campaigns online. That's what Micay's history is.

For the rest, in general, I'm tempted to give grapheneOS the benefit of the doubt. Running any FOSS project is hard, running it against the (implicit) wishes of OEMs/Google (who throw in things like Play Integrity) is even harder, and doing it when 3 letter agencies at the US govt actively hate you is harder still.

Being paranoid in responses to FUD campaigns isn't ideal, but save coordinated attacks, I'd say fairly understandable.


I don't intend to be a contrairian purely to be one, but Apple is the same company that (to paraphrase) wanted to "see Saurik cry".

This being hackernews, I hope to be excused for siding with a white hat code-hacker over a trillion dollar corporate.

(And that's not getting into all the other morally questionable stuff they've done.)


trying to find the context, saurik seemsto be Jay Freeman[0], known for Cydia[1]; i'm guessing apple was 'unhappy' about his work around software for jailbroken iphones, but nothing immediately popped up, what did they do?

oh i guess it's from a court hearing[2] when his company was suing apple over app store monopoly ("... they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon.")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Freeman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...


Yeah thanks, I think that's the right quote.

I think I found the original comment I had read (featuring a reply by saurik himself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853055


Forget about saurik; they wanted to countermand their own customers using his code to do things on their own phones they bought from Apple.

The contempt for their customers is palpable these days.


How dare you insult the forty gazillion company! Stand back ma'am I'll protect you from this handsome hacker ruffian!

Jokes aside, I have started to see Microslop as the lesser of two evils (two evils being MSFT and AAPL, Google being its own parallel universe abomination). Their commitment to backward compatibility really paved the way to cheap PCs for the masses. That said, every day Macroslop is working diligently to prove me wrong.


Microsoft doesn't give 2 cents now on desktops and desktop software. They care about selling cloud and cloud products.

Since they can't charge a subscription for Windows (like Adobe does for its products), they don't care about it anymore.


Do they no longer charge annual licenses for Windows Server?

On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.


>On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.

Agreed! My $DAYJOB is an Apple shop and the Apple "Business" offerings are horrible. No support for a proper business developer account is annoying. A single human is responsible for this and when that human moves to a different company or role then you have to reassign the account to a different human. Configuring SSO is another trap. You have to capture a domain to add SSO but after you do that your users can't access the Apple App Store (for some reason).

There are so many places that Apple could improve their "Business" business, but they seem hell bent on not doing that. Maybe Mr. Ternus will address this issue.


The issue is that nobody (relatively speaking) uses Windows Server.

I don’t even think Microsoft is all that adamant that their customers use it.

It’s just not competitive with Linux and that ship has sailed. Linux is better and costs $0. Microsoft lets you run .NET applications on Linux and they’re better there.

I think the same thing happened with SQL Server. Nobody’s choosing it for new projects, its niche is basically legacy software.

I agree that Apple is missing an opportunity with business and enterprise but I think the issue is that they’re so far behind that catching up would be a massive investment that might never pay off.

This is similar to saying that Microsoft missed an opportunity with smartphone ecosystems. They could spend billions on getting a smartphone back on the market and it would arrive and everyone would ask the question “why am I buying this when my iPhone has X million apps on its store and is a nearly perfect device?”

If Apple Enterprise Cloud was available today who is switching and why? Apple would have to undercut established players to convince businesses to switch via a massive migration effort.


I work with fortune 500 clients, and all of them use Windows server for something. Usually a lot of somethings. For example: Active Directory.

If we look at Microsoft's revenue I think it's pretty clear that they do in fact care an awful lot about Windows Server - or at least should.

In fiscal year 2025, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment:

    Devices: $17.31 B
    Dynamics Products And Cloud Services: $7.83 B
    Enterprise Services: $7.76 B
    Gaming: $23.46 B
    Linked In Corporation: $17.81 B
    Microsoft Three Six Five Commercial Products And Cloud Services: $87.77 B
    Microsoft Three Six Five Consumer Products and Cloud Services: $7.40 B
    Other Products And Services: $72.00 M
    Search Advertising: $13.88 B
    Search And News Advertising: $13.88 B
    Server Products And Cloud Services: $98.44 B
    Server Products And Tools: $98.44 B
    Windows: $17.31 B

I don’t think this is clear at all because the segments are lumped together and highly unclear.

What’s the difference between “server products and cloud services” and “server products and tools?”

I assume the former is Azure and the latter is on-premise.

In that case if we lump 365 in with server products and cloud tools then it shows that 2/3 of the enterprise revenue is going to cloud and 1/3 is on-premise (and I assume that 1/3 is declining over time)


You only need a couple of Active Directory and Exchange servers here and there. But who's using IIS or SQL Server these days? Sharepoint also seems to be on a downturn.

IIS was always the black sheep of web hosting. Nothing has changed there.

Windows Server is used for more than just directory services and web hosting though.


> Linked In Corporation: $17.81 B

Hwat? How does LinkedIn generate revenue (as much as "Windows")?


All recruiters get paid accounts.

> If Apple Enterprise Cloud was available today who is switching and why?

Not sure about others, but I would switch if it meant I no longer needed to rely on Google Workspace.


You’re talking about LAMP-type set ups and I’m talking about Windows Desktop integration services. Smaller orgs will use cloud services but many larger organisations, colleges, and the like will likely have a fleet of Windows servers running in VMs (traditionally VMWare but that might have changed since Broadcom bought them).

However if you do want to talk about services outside of fleet management, then there are plenty of niches where Windows Server has a surprising foothold. Though typically they’re domains which haven’t been disrupted by “tech bros”, which is why you don’t read about it much on HN.

> This is similar to saying that Microsoft missed an opportunity with smartphone ecosystems.

They did. But we are talking specifically about fleet management and not any random tech-adjacent industry.

> If Apple Enterprise Cloud was available today who is switching and why? Apple would have to undercut established players to convince businesses to switch via a massive migration effort.

The existing players only exist because Apples default offering is basically non-existent. Apple wouldn’t need to undercut them, just be comparably priced. The reason being that if you already have a business account with Apple then you don’t need to go through the pan of getting a new supplier approved by the board (etc).

As for existing businesses, if they’re already large enough that fleet management is a concern then they’re large enough to have people on payroll who manage that fleet. And thus to perform that migration. It might even be part of their laptop refresh program.

And if Apple had an enterprise fleet management service then they’d be able to offer tools that are locked to their fleet management (eg remote wipe). Which would heavily incentivise businesses not to go with 3rd parties.


I get the impression they care very much about windows because they can sell ads on it.

Why can't they charge a subscription for windows? It could be only a small yearly fee.

Because Windows is a garbage product and they would quickly wipe out its userbase by doing that.

It's primary benefit is that it comes free with the laptop they bought on Amazon.

Once there's friction there, it'll make other friction seem less bad.


Maybe they could find another way to market it, e.g. Windows is free but with ads, and there is a subscription which makes ads go away. Or something else. Some creativity is needed.

I don't disagree. A big reason 2026 is the Year of the Desktop Linux is that MSFT lost any interest in the Desktop PC platform. Outside selling more of my data and filling it with AI Slop.

But if, say, AAPL had won the PC wars, we'd be staring at a much more locked-down, much more expensive OS experience.


4 kings.

Wipe if you think you can do better :) It can and has been done.


4 horseman, you're welcome.

Apple basically spearheaded the war on general computation. Before them, phones used to be more or less open, Apple cracked down on that very quickly.

Well, before Apple, most phones were appliances with fixed software; there was no openness to speak of. That said, I wish they hadn't continued this trend and instead took inspiration from Windows Mobile.

Sure, at the start, yes.

But then came Java and Wap. You could, in theory, download a jar from a site and try to run it. God knows if it would run. But it wasn't a locked-down app store that bypassing would land you in hot water.


Before iphone mobile phones were running Java applets, which were sometimes even compatible across different phone manufacturers and users even could exchange them over infrared. In contrast first iPhone initially had no support for third party software, only web apps.

> Before iphone mobile phones were running Java applets, which were sometimes even compatible across different phone manufacturers and users even could exchange them over infrared.

"Sometimes" doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Nokia had an app store, and before you could see the available apps you have to first choose your phone: because even with-in Nokia's own product range there was so much variation in screens, keyboards, and general capabilities that they had to pre-apply a filter to show you what would actually work.


Functionally nobody was doing any of those things.

Before them, phones used to be more or less open

Wow. Just… wow.

Excuse me while I get permission from sixteen levels of managers inside Cingular, U.S. Cellular, Cincinnati Bell, PrimeCo, and the fifty different regional carriers calling themselves "Cellular One" to offer my app on their networks.

I'm not claiming that iPhones are open to the extent that HN griefers want it to be, but you must have been freshly hatched in the years before the iPhone to think the ecosystem was open.

I say this as someone who developed some of the first mobile phone weather apps. (Before "app" was even a word.)


Or, you know, there's more than one country in the world.

I could flash my Nokia 6210 with whatever firmware I wanted, but I guess that doesn't count, because Nokia and Ericsson aren't American companies.


I may be guilty of the same thing you're mentioning (I'm in the USA), but my Nokia 6210 came with a carrier lock and I wasn't even able to visit websites via the WAP browser unless my carrier approved of them because WAP acted like a sort of mandatory vendor operated proxy that allowed them to see and filter everything the phone did. They would, for example, filter out websites about ringtones to try and force you to buy theirs for $0.99/piece.

My experience with a Nokia 6210 was very much the opposite of what you describe.


[flagged]


It was exactly like the GP described in the UK too. All-powerful carriers at a time when Apple was almost bankrupt, before Google was a verb and before Microsoft made phones that would crash just sitting waiting for a call.

That's very much a product of the American oligarchy

And yet it happens in dozens of other countries that are not America.

You may be surprised to learn that the whole world is not Europe. The colonial era is dead.

with Apple, MSFT and Google at the forefront

None of those companies had phones in the era we're discussing.


I guess that doesn't count, because Nokia and Ericsson aren't American companies.

The discussion is about Apple. Which is an American company.

But if taking discussions off-topic is what gets you off, have at it.


> Apple basically spearheaded the war on general computation. Before them, phones used to be more or less open, Apple cracked down on that very quickly.

Not +1, but +100 to your comment (fellow ADHD'er here). Even a virtual friend who'd help me stay on track would be excellent, and if I had a physical human assistant... that would legitimately make many aspects of my life much better. (Simple example: I could ask them to nag me to exercise.)

> Also, you certainly got some brass, linking an entirely AI generated article in a forum where extreme distaste is registered for entirely AI generated posts.

> How is your comment not downvoted to oblivion?

I'm sure there's a polite way to say things.

I heavily dislike LLM content, but if you read the content, it's actually got information of value.


> I'm sure there's a polite way to say things.

That was the polite way of saying things. The phrase "if you couldn't be bothered to write it why would anyone bother to read it" was a saying from usenet times.

The truth is it took the author less time to "write" that piece than you to read it. It's a blog. There's no deadline, and yet they couldn't take the time to actually type out their own thoughts.

> I heavily dislike LLM content, but if you read the content, it's actually got information of value.

If it was so valuable the author would have written it themselves.


I think you're broadly correct and that's definitely a reason, and I have another example to support it.

Mumbai too has a very similar structure (the core city is basically a peninsula that goes north-south). Our railway lines run N-S as well, with (till the recent Metros) feeder roads connecting them.

Mumbai is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world (#2 by some metrics).

Our local railways have an annual ridership of 2.26 billion [1]. Pretty much everyone agrees they're vital to the city.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Suburban_Railway


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