When I visit the US everything strikes me as overbuilt to the point of being dull or in the case of vehicles, downright dangerous. The dullness part, especially, is a real pain. Cheap concrete sidewalks. Cheap looking infrastructure everywhere, etc.
There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.
I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.
I would say white listing will have to happen for everything in the near future: applications, ports, URLs (including fragments!), filesystem hierarchies, basically everything.
I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.
- you need to specify the rules before starting an application. How one is supposed to guess what application will do? Figuring out the correct rules may take lot of time and is impossible for non-programmers. Imagine I want to install 10 apps per day and they should work perfectly, how much time will I be spending writing rules?
- the rules cannot be changed in runtime, for example, giving access to a camera for 1 minute
- the rules are too limited. You can restrict access to a file, but can you restrict access to a DBUS bus? Can you restrict access to audio, video, GPU etc? To /proc filesystem? To a DNS domain? The rules feel like they were written for computers with teletypes from 70s and not for modern machines.
- they do not allow providing fake data, for example, a fake list of WiFi points so that the app thinks it has the access to your geolocation while in reality is doesn't.
So it is some outdated technology unfit for modern day.
What does a user want? The user wants to be able to run anything without any risk and without writing any config files. Obviously it takes a skill to write such OS, and there is definitely a lack of people with this skill among Linux distribution creators.
A system where installation is done using "curl + sudo bash" is the opposite of a safe OS.
Either you're engaged in some large-scale testing operation and your automation already handles it, or something has gone terribly wrong and the inconvenience of the sandboxing UI is the least of your concerns.
No, the point is that the amount of friction you can add to new app installs is much higher if you don’t optimize it for the unlikely case that your user is an app reviewer.
No, the point is that every time your computer isn't doing something you want it to do, you should be able to download a software package to make it do that.
It's just continuing the process. Most of the internet these days is TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, etc and those are basically image + video sites at this point.
And that is incredibly unfortunate to their business strategy.
But... food for thought: people are good at detecting slop, because it looks like slop. If it does not, people won't detect it. So there is a confirmation bias, where the "obvious slop" looks obvious, but the "better slop" goes by undetected.
1. I would argue that human directed and edited "better slop" is just... average content. Which leads to my next point.
2. LLMs have raised the floor of digital content creation ("democratized content creation"). Before lots of things would have not been created due to lack of knowledge, interest, motivation. Now the baseline for making something is a 10 word prompt. Personally I think it's a huge loss. Yes, we will get 5% "diamonds in the rough" who would have never approached a field due to gatekeeping, discrimination, whatever. Will that outweigh the other 95% of lazy creators flooding every field with around average content? I'm not convinced. There is a cost to that flood.
There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.
I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.
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