Exactly. I was cringing so hard because he kept engaging with the rep on lines of questioning that were so obviously going to go down the path they did. I've cancelled my NYT account in the past and it was rather painless because I was consistent in my response and communicated clearly that I just wanted to unsubscribe. I've since renewed my subscription, but cancelling service with an ISP or even Amazon Prime at this point is way more annoying.
So many comments here are missing the point of the rant. If it doesn't work for you, fine, move on. But it takes a special type of asshole to go around harassing maintainers and continuously putting down their hard work and in many cases just making overly broad and incorrect generalizations or propagating outright lies. There is a big difference between constructive criticism and what drove the author to write that rant in the first place.
It boggles my mind how people can be complete assholes to people writing FOSS because the sense of entitlement that users have when it comes to FOSS is staggering, and the more technical someone believes themselves to be, oftentimes, the more caustic they tend to be in how they interact with FOSS developers. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but having been a silent observer on Github issues for many FOSS projects as well as reading the rants on reddit and HN against FOSS technology <X>, it really pisses me off even though I have no skin in the game.
These are real humans and people devoting their own free time to build something they are passionate about and believe in. It may not work for you, you may even think what they are doing is a terrible idea. Then provide constructive criticism if you wish and move along. That's all too rare though. In reality, what people really want is they want Wayland (or insert Technology <X> here), but they want it the way they would wish it to be, and so they will essentially engage in negging developers and their decisions trying to beat them into submission. It's despicable behavior and no one should be defending this.
Measured criticism is fine, but then move the fuck on. Let people passionate about FOSS they care about, continue working on it. But don't be an asshole and keep trying to tear them down just because you selfishly want what they are building, but you want them to really build it the way you want it and to meet your specific use cases.
I suspect it is related to them pushing a much thinner bezel to squeeze in a 16" screen in a 15" chassis. If true, I'd happily accept that tradeoff since screen realestate is far more important to me than a jump from 720p to 1080p for my webcam.
Couldn't agree more. Calibre is Kovid's labor of love and he wouldn't be so active on it if it weren't, especially considering there is little to no monetary incentive for him to spend the amount of time he does on it. It's also open source. Literally every whiner has the opportunity to fork it and do with it what they please, but instead, they just want to sit by the sidelines and criticize him for his decisions.
As Neil Gaiman so aptly wrote on his blog [1] - "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch". I feel the same needs to be reiterated in this case - "Kovid Goyal is not your bitch".
Edit - Ouch, OP, I guess you struck a nerve with the HN crowd by saying it like it is...
It's more insidious than that though. The most damaging aspect of it is that these anxieties are evoked 24/7 thanks to social media companies trying their best to get their userbase addicted to their product to maximize user engagement.
Back in the day, you might have felt those social pressures, but only in limited settings and ultimately you could control the situation by removing yourself from anxiety invoking situations. There was ample room for getting a mental break from these situations.
But social media completely destroys any respite anyone could possibly have. They exploit the FOMO feeling as best they can to essentially guilt their users to constantly "engage" on their platform, which leaves the end user pretty helpless in being able to seek respite from these negative social pressures. I'm only 35 and I haven't used social media in any meaningful way for 5+ years and it has been the best decision ever. I don't really miss out on much and I definitely am much happier than when I had to wade through all the crap people post on social media just to keep up appearances in the social media rat race.
Yup, I've had my XPS15 for over 3 years and the keyboard (and webcam) are the weakest elements. The keyboard still feels terrible...somehow it has the worst of both worlds, poor key travel and too large a spacing between keys. Typing has always felt very awkward. In comparison, I absolutely love the Surface Pro 4 keyboard which has wonderful key travel and spacing.
I hear you about Finder. Windows File explorer seems a lot easier and more feature rich compared to Finder. The single most annoying thing is that there is no easy/ obvious way to grab the path to a file/folder in Finder, which seems like the most basic of features. I did figure out a keyboard shortcut at some point, but Finder feels so dated as a file manager.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.