I am pushing myself to learn nix and get rid of base images altogether.
The syntax is hard without a functional background but I strongly believe this is the next logical step to harden containers and have reproducible builds.
As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.
For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.
I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.
You have a core team member of the Azure Linux group invite you to ask/tell them what you want to see in what they are working on and this is what you choose to say? Smh
They referred to Microsoft’s known practice of embrace, extend, extinguish a “conspiracy theory” in a sibling thread, so they’ve essentially lost credibility. I don’t think genuine feedback is going anywhere useful.
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.
I would have to write a book on it, but start with allowing people to create an azure account for an organization without having to buy O365. I kid you not I had to find a sidedoor portal in a Reddit post to do it otherwise it's simply not possible.
Every interaction with Azure is a pain. Just 3 weeks ago I was trying to use Artifact Signing, after spending one hour on outdated doc on how to set it up I get hit with Identity validation. I did all steps and still "in progress" still to this day. You charge 40$/month for "support" on Microsoft Q&A which we all know is a joke otherwise its 100USD just to get a ticket in to know why your process is so broken.
At this point I get better support on GCP which is telling.
But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.
But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.
My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out.
The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not.
And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described.
I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
I have worked with AWS, Google and Azure. Google Cloud has the worst UI of them, it slow, broken and just horrible. UI in AWS may be faster than Azure, but overal layout and organization feels a lot better in Azure. I would strongly recommend clearly separating builds from deployments, if you don't want bad surprises. In the age of containers there should really be no difference in how, where or what you deploy.
Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day.
Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years.
A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year.
1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service.
2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with.
3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
The key to get better quality AI PR is to add high quality Agents.md file to tell the LLM what are the patterns, conventions, etc.
We do that internally and I cant overstate how much better the output is even with small prompts.
IMO things like "dont put abusive comments" as a policy is better in that file, you will never see comment again instead of fighting with dozen of bad contributions.
I want even worse restrictions on my parent phone so they dont install spyware. I want "install ONLY from fdroid". I trust their one server in a basement more than Google at this point.
Honestly just install grapheneos on your Pixel, that is what I did and bought a Pixel for that reason alone. I use all Google play services and it works great, only payment with phone doesn't work.
Yes I agree: if you already have a Pixel, try GrapheneOS on it. Then if it can wait (Pixel 7 is still supported for a while, isn't it?), GrapheneOS may support a non-Google phone in 2026, so it may be worth waiting.
I think the usage is so widespread now that the law will adapt to customs. It is untenable now to say code generated is uncopyrightable IMO. Maybe copyright as is defined right now is not enough, but then the legislation will change it. There is enough pressure on them from the business community to do so.
When it is ready for production and they implemented DDL to alter tables that D. Hipp just refuses to implement for some reason then I am in. People that feel attacked by this didn't have to deal with the antagonist behaviour of SQLite maintainers toward the community.
The problem is that Europe doesn't have a European bond market to compete against the US bond market. It has the economic size and stability but not the will right now. Europe did try it a bit during COVID but financial services are just not there yet. The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
That’s a weird problem to have. The US has a huge bond market in part because the US has an absolutely enormous amount of debt, and the bonds are the US debt. The EU doesn’t have bloc-wide debt, for better or for worse.
As an interesting thought experiment, imagine a central bank associated with a debt-free country issuing bond-like instruments. They would set an interest rate (perhaps with no auction, because they have no actual obligation to sell a predetermined amount, although an auction could still be used), sell bonds, delete the money used to buy the bonds, and issue new money to repay them with interest when they mature. This could be used as a way to act efficiently as a reserve currency and to exert a degree of control over inflation and the economy, kind of like how the Fed does it. The bonds would likely be considered extremely secure on account of the issue being entirely debt-free.
I would be surprised if the EU did this as such, since the EU probably does not want to be in the business of competing for capital with its own members, who do have a fair amount of debt that they need to finance.
[American perspective] In February I looked toward Euro bond markets as a safe haven for increasing Treasury yields, but the choices did not look good. For starters it appears to be impossible to even trade in foreign bonds with traditional brokerage accounts in the United States (hosted by E-trade, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, etc).
Additionally, French bonds, while likely less-correlated with US Treasuries than other instruments, suffer from its own government having high debt levels; it's not a suitable safe-haven asset. Swiss and German bonds appear to be obvious alternatives. However, Swiss and German bonds' interest rates are low and in practice are little different than holding cash.
While gold appreciated in the short term, it is not simply inversely correlated with the value of the US Dollar. Its volatility is also driven by investors mitigating strict currency controls, mining productivity, and central bank activity. An unrelated downturn in one market could lead to a sell-off and wipe out gains. Gold also has no yield. Personally I think it's useful only in its physical form as a hedge for medium-term catastrophic events. Even then, a stockpile of food and clean water is likely far more valuable, if not substantially more difficult to store and maintain.
I ended up giving up, learning to love the S&P 500, and white-knuckling it ahead. Of the investable markets, the US one still generates the highest returns. (Chinese GDP growth is higher but its equities have low returns compared with other markets, due to political risk.)
> For starters it appears to be impossible to even trade in foreign bonds with traditional brokerage accounts in the United States (hosted by E-trade, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, etc).
Try Interactive Brokers. They are US-based, but offer accounts in most other countries. (Insane list here: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/open-account-...) I frequently recommend them here, so much so that I must look like a shill. I assure you that this is not a sponsored post! I have been a customer for 10+ years. I describe their service as institutional in breadth, but offered to retail customers. The number of international stocks markets, futures and options markets, and fixed income markets (all types of gov't and corporate bonds) is stunning. The numbers look similar to a Tier 1 investment bank, like Morgan Stanley, could offer their institutional clients. It is unmatched for non-institutional (retail) traders in my experience. It also has crazy low fees and is wildly transparent about them. To me, the only negative point is the website is a bit slow and feels about 5 years out of date, but that's not a deal breaker for me. I can trade all equities on the website, and the more complex things (like bonds or futures) I trade using their (I assume white-labeled) Java trading app that is cross-platform.
+1 for Interactive Brokers. You can migrate super easy by having them filing a full ATAC. I came from Charles Schwab, which I have to keep because my employer sends GSUs to either Schwab or Morgan Stanley.
Additionally, the UX is much better (IMHO) than Schwab, both on mobile and desktop.
And even if you tried to sidestep these restrictions you'd quickly find that your ability to deal with the EU financial system evaporates as soon as they find out that you are American.
Is it at all realistic to expect the stable and/or fiscally conservative countries to accept the high bond yields imposed by the more fiscally loose or perceived-risky countries? Could this ever happen without the EU centralising more control over fiscal policy?
No, it wouldn't work without the bond repayments being owed by a single fiscal entity, and hard to imagine Europe doing this for the foreseeable future even if they agree more tax harmonization and budget deficit rules.
But from the bondholder perspective, being able to pick and choose which countries to hold Euro denominated debt according to their risk tolerance is an advantage anyway.
> It has the economic size and stability but not the will right now.
The european union's GDP is a solid 50% behind the US (20 trillion vs 30 trillion). But more alarmingly the growth in the european union since the 2008 financial crisis has been totally anaemic: the growth doesn't even counter inflation and that growth only came at the cost of gigantic additional public debt. Meanwhile both the US and China's GDPs grew like mad.
I also dispute the stability of the EU: in many countries the people aren't happy at all and the far-right are winning elections everywhere. And it's only through tactics (like the center-right siding with the ultra far left in France to counter the far-right party who won the election) that parties that aren't the far-right are managing to prevent the far-right from reigning already.
For example in the European Parliament 36% of the 720 seats are for far-right parties. And that's after all the other parties colluding (including with the far left) to prevent the far right from having more seats.
And as people are more and more dissatisfied with the current situation in the EU, the far-right keep winning more and more voters (sounds familiar?).
> The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
The Euro is only 27 years old, is a badly conceived currency and may turn out to be one of the shortest lived currency ever. There's no way it's ready to take on the role of the USD. France's finances, the eurozone's 2nd biggest economy, are crumbling (gigantic public debt and insane public deficit) and may very well be overtaken by the International Monetary Fund (like it happened to Greece) soon.
Germany is trying very hard to ban its far-right AFD party from the elections for they know they could very well win. If I'm not mistaken the leader of the AFD said if they won, they're out of the EU. Think it cannot happen? UK left the EU already.
It's not just the EURO that may be the shortest-lived currency ever: the EU is actually in trouble.
Thanks for the heads up on the code reselling risk. That was my biggest worry with generic coupon codes too.
To solve this, I decided against just using a 'coupon' on the main checkout. Instead, I set up a completely separate payment flow (Topmate) specifically for India that requires local UPI payment methods.
My theory is that the requirement to use a local Indian payment method acts as a 'natural geoblock' against arbitrage. Interesting to hear that India didn't convert well for you even with PPP—I'll keep my expectations in check.
The syntax is hard without a functional background but I strongly believe this is the next logical step to harden containers and have reproducible builds.
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