The best thing you can do with an enterprise Onedrive is having long long file and folder names. The moment it exceeds 255 characters, the software application dies. I am ready to hear easier fixes but so far this worked:
- Rename the offending folder from the web
- Unlink the folder from the user's machine
- Delete the existing onedrive folder
- Relink and resync
The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.
Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.
My workplace has named (forcefully) the onedrive folder with around 35 characters. You add to that the path to that folder on the computer that is (forcefully) not on the root of a disk. I now mostly need a flat structure for my files. 4-5 subfolders and a file and onedrive dies.
Yes, you can but then if you have any older software in your system (for company reasons) will not play ball. And it is a workaround, not a permanent solution. Because we still do not have that fabled WinFS so...
Eh, NTFS supported long paths since forever, the problem is with applications using Win32 APIs that are limited to MAX_PATH (260 characters) path length.
There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.
Win64 lacks the problem with 255 characters [0]. However, stuff like File Explorer, which the vast majority of my users actually use, can only pass the first 255 characters to the registered application [1], so will Explorer will display stuff with huge long paths, double-clicking that file, or right clicking and "Compress to..." will cause an error.
0 - 32 bit windows will always have this problem.
1 - This is because File Explorer uses a hodgepodge of Win32 and Win64 stuff behind the scenes when running 64 bit windows.
Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.
Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.
I had the same issue, but after contacting support, I was able to re-claim the email address from my trial account and use it as an email alias of my main Fastmail account.
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think?
As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back.
As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer.
As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it.
Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.
There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.
It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.
Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.
Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
Is probably the Sputnik though commenters mistake it for backhanded-diss of Yandex. Conjures an alternative universe where Russian potatocraft lands live lobsters on Mars before Elon's spacesedan reaches Mars orbit.
I am intrigued by the possibility of minimalist defo of "enshittification" that tweaks "the purpose of a system is what it does".
"The purpose of a search engine system is to keep you searching" etc
I think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.
I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-supported search engine. They all serve the same dumb top-10 lists and AI-authored blog articles about the same stuff ad-nauseum instead of inferring that I'm trying to research the answer to a question. The results all presuppose that I'm looking to buy something.
I searched for “plumber’s bread” on DuckDuckGo and this was the 3rd result which seems to match what you’re looking for - https://www.finehomebuilding.com/forum/plumbers-bread-sandwi.... I do see the other kind of results you’re talking about too, though.
I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave.
DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.
Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.
We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.
I'm sure they would be happy with any combination of these 3.
1. fmhy.net
2. reddit.com/r/freemediaheckyeah
3. github.com/fmhy/FMHY
As for Anna's, it changes often, but it would be good to only allow the ones listed on the Wikipedia for sites that are posing to actually be Anna's Archive, rather than accessory sites like Github, link directories.
As for my allegation of terrible results. I think it mainly comes down to low quality sites being prioritized. I didn't want to make up search queries, so I decided to just go through my history to find my searches on Brave and compare the results with DDG.
"scientology speedrun instagram"
Brave returns mostly news articles in the main results and only a specific Instagram reel. Brave has an area for videos which is particularly relevant, but DDG has a carousel thing for news. DDG returns an Instagram and Tiktok area for the topic and an X account. Then Wikipedia and Knowyourmeme.
I would say DDG actually wins here because it is very much more on topic with the social media sites being resulted (X, IG, TikTok), but the results feel less clickable to me because those social media sites are so unfriendly to adblocking, VPN using, not-signed-in users.
"fisa news"
Brave shows a really nice variety of specific news article updates as well as primary sources like a .gov. DDG does similarly, but it's really only news and it is really a smattering of different mainstream news websites. That's fine, but then there's also that carosel which is 100% filled with Yahoo and Foxnews, which I consider both to be low-quality.
Another big problem with DDG in this specific search is there are quite a few simple links to news website's tag on fisa, which isn't helpful to me.
I'm not the happiest about either results, but Brave wins because of the lack of slop from yahoo as well as the primary source results.
who is the highest level scientologist who left
Neither DDG nor Brave returns any immediate actual answers in websites, but by automatically returning the AI summary, I get a satisfying answer from Brave's AI.
"sovereignty"
I was surprised, but DDG totally wins this one. Brave doesn't have that built in dictionary result, DDG does. Brave also has a news carosel which is not relevant. Pretty comparable with the other results, but definitely a win for DDG.
Actually, what's the deal with putting the "search assist" at the bottom. That's pretty weird.
I think a lot of my bias against DDG comes from the UI. Brave seems friendlier, rounder, easier to read.
Yes, super helpful, thanks. Hear you on the overall problem of lower-quality sites.
On the Assist question, it can appear at the bottom when we think it has a good answer but something else beats it. Curious what was weird about it? Just not expecting another answer?
I use DDG as my daily driver and quite like it. Then again, I don't really see much difference between DDG and Kagi, so I may be some sort of pleb. I will say that, sometimes, DDG gets "stuck" on certain sorts of close-phrase matches, rather than showing me the thing I'm looking for, but I've learned to recognize that behavior and append !g to it.
Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.
I've been a ddg user full time for 15+ years and I did see it improve quite lot over time. But quality dropped when Yandex was cut off.
Lately, I've noticed YET AGAIN being trapped in a bubble with results being to clever for their own good ... I did leave Google PRECISELY for the bubble effect ...
Not even mentioned the AI shenanigans with ridiculous results at times. DDG is not immune to enshitification. Way too many managers thinks they know better than the user ... they don't.
The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.
This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder.
It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.
Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably.
Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?
A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default.
Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.
Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.
I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's.
Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.
I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions.
Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..
Google Maps is hellbent on giving you ANY results. I can’t think of any recent search where it doesn’t zoom out to most of Belgium and ignores the “open now” filters if it wants to.
“Oh, you’re looking for a pharmacy open now? What about going to McDonalds, which is closed, and in a completely different city?”
My experience with Google Maps is very different. We got burned so many times going to a closed restaurant that was open according to Google that we just use the listing to find the phone number now, and we call ahead
I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether
> I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether
The owner probably never signed up for that expectation.
Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.
That being said a giant corporation like Google releasing free but amazing research like AlphaFold or (less so) something like Gemma is still cool. They're the ATT PAC Bell or IBM of our age it seems
I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'.
For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google.
And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car.
Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life.
On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that..
The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.
I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.
Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.
Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable.
For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.
Mail is terrible. The central conceit of Gmail, and unfortunately what made it immediately popular, is that you should not have to care about deleting emails because you “have enough” storage. Over time this evolved into an awful incentive structure that results in 100s if not 1000s of spam/useless/irrelevant/garbage marketing emails a day and a reminder that the next tier up is just $1 a month (for now). In the end, the state of mail is emblematic of the whole problem with that company.
As technical people we tend to have a technical outlook to this. However, after a certain threshold - say $1M - these projects become political things rather than a simple technical issue.
From a creator's standpoint, a software project exists to solve a problem - or at least make the lives of the software users easier. But the moment a company bigwig clique decides to make money out of company, "bad" projects pop up.
To my chance, I experienced this for three times. The signs are nearly the same. The company has a lot of workflows - usually handled by excel and/or internally developed apps that actually reflect those workflows. Then comes the buzzword team proclaiming miracles, snake oil and an app that will even cure the dandruff - just sign here. Of course, the clique has their cut - that's why they say yes or advice the board to say yes.
Then begins the grueling process of "analyzing workflows". Do they contact the actual users who are doing the work? Hell. No. What they do is, create a "Project Team" - usually hired anew, with no information about how the company does its work - and they try to "understand" the workflows. Then it becomes like that game, user says one thing, project team understands another and says a different thing and the outcome is a different product that solves a problem but not the user's problem.
Of course, this process burns money. You gotta do development, you gotta have a server to run the app, you have to book meeting rooms in hotels to train the users, you have to create fliers internally to promote the app - and create pdfs, many many pdfs to make the users understand how the app works. And no one asks "hey, if this app is reflecting our workflows... why are we getting this training?"
Because at the end of the day, this app only exists to make some people money. And after a certain point, no one dares to say anything because of all the money spent. An ambassador who says "the app we spent $10M does not work" will be get shot. People get retired with the f-you money they gained and the company tries to work with the app they "built" usually it ends up hiring an internal team and do it from the zero - and the expensive shit becomes a thing nobody talks about, a company omerta so to speak.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel Bazzite (and immutable distros in general) is the future for the normal users. Yes I know, they take the freedom of messing with the system core but for most people this is fine. All they need is a device that works without any problems.
First time I switched to asus kernel from the generic one was magic - I know asus-linux exists and following the instructions probably would have ended up in a working system, but with bazzite I wrote only one command and everything worked. It still feels weird not to monkey around with package installations (and this was a dangerous path, usually ended up with more work for me) but this is a tradeoff I can live with. The software I used - luckily - already moved to Flatpak so everything was a breeze. Also the fact that I can switch to a working state with one keypress is a stress reliever.
I agree. Linux is good now - for the common user. I still can't see immutable distros can be used for all scenarios but for gaming/home use, this is a methodology I can easily recommend for my friends and family who only want a computer that works without messing with console.
To be honest, I do not understand this new norm. A few months ago I applied to an internal position. I was a NGO IT worker, deployed twice to emergency response operations, knew the policies & operations and had good relations with users and coworkers.
The interview went well. I was honest. When asked what my weakness regarding this position I told that I am a good analyst but when it comes to writing new exploits, that's beyond my expertise. The role doesn't have this as a requirement so I thought it was a good answer.
I was not selected. Instead they selected a guy and then booted him off after 2 months due to his excessive (and non-correct like the link) use of LLM and did not open the position again.
So in addition to wasting the hirers' time those nice people block other people's progress as well. But, as long as the hirers expect wunderkinds crawling out of the woods the applicants try to fake it and win in the short term.
This needs to end but I don't see any progress towards it. This is especially painful as I am seeking a job at the moment and thinking these fakers are muddying the waters. It feels like no one cares about your attitude - like how geniunely you want to work. I am an old techie and the world I was in valued this rather than technical aptitude for you can teach/learn technical information but character is another thing. This gets lost in our brave new cyberpunk without the cool gadgets era I believe.
This is definitely not unique to software engineering. Just out of grad school, 15 years ago, I applied for a position with a local electrical engineering company for an open position. I was passed over and later the person I got a recommendation from let me know, out of band, that they had hired the person because he was fresh out of undergrad with an (unrelated) internship instead of research experience (that I would have been the second out of 3 candidates), but they had fired him within 6 months. They opened the position again and after interviewing again they told me they had decided not to hire anyone. Again, out of band, my contact told me he and his supervisor thought I should go work at one of their subcontractors to get experience, but they didn't send any recommendation and the subcontractors didn't respond to inquiry. I wasn't desperate enough to keep playing that game, and it really soured my view of a local company with an external reputation for engineering excellence, meritorious hiring, mentorship, and career building.
I posted a job for freelance dev work and all replies were obviously ai generated. Some even included websites that were clearly made by other people as their 'prior work'. So I pulled the posting and probably won't post again.
Who knew. AI is costing jobs, not because it can do the jobs, but it has made hiring actual competent humans harder.
Plus, because it's harder to just do a job listing and get actual submittals, you're going to see more people hired because who are hired because of who they know not what they know. In other words if you wasted your time in networking class working on networking instead of working on networking then you're screwed
The arts and crafts industry has the same problem. If you wasted your time in knotworking class working on not working instead of working on knotworking, then you're screwed.
if you're still looking and it's a js/ts project, I can help. I'll use a shit ton of AI, but not when talking to you. my email is on my profile. twitter account with the same username.
Same thing where I work. It's a startup, and they value large volumes of code over anything else. They call it "productivity".
Management refuses to see the error of their ways even though we have thrown away 4 new projects in 6 months because they all quickly become an unmaintainable mess. They call it "pivoting" and pat themselves on the back for being clever and understanding the market.
Old man time, providing unsolicited and unwelcome input…
My own way of viewing interviews: Treat interviews as one would view dating leading to marriage. Interviewing is a different skillset and experience than being on the job.
The dating analogue for your interview question would
be something like: “Can you cook or make meals for yourself?”.
- Your answer: “No. I’m great in bed, but I’m a disaster in the kitchen”
- Alternative answer: “No. I’m great in bed; but I haven’t had a need to cook for myself or anyone else up until now. What sort of cooking did you have in mind?”
My question to you: Which ones leads to at least more conversation? Which one do you think comes off as a better prospect for family building?
Agreed. Time and time again, I wished I'd knew Ruby and/or RoR. Do you know any good (and "boring" as in time-tested & practical) tutorials/learning resources?
"Programming Ruby" [0] ("the pickaxe book") and "Agile Web Development with Rails" [1], both from Pragmatic Programmers.
I learned Ruby and Rails through them in the late 2000's; they are still being released as new editions. It has been a while since I bought new books from PragProg, but they used to have a recurring sale of ~40% off around late autumn (thanksgiving?).
Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
With W11, they seem to really gung-ho about creating that achilles heel. As for myself I am tired from having an unstable OS on my devices which may or may not bork without any intervention from me.
Thanks to this (and Steam Deck for a great deal) I jumped to Mac and not regretting it. The system boots in seconds, has great eyecandy and just works for me. My work pc uses Windows and its taskbar behaves weirdly, right now, and its quarter shows the desktop image. Update breaks the soundcard and I will need to install it again. Oh and I see another update queued in - which may or may not be a false alarm.
I am not sure which was the most stable one, Windows 7 or 10. But 11 is a mess and nobody dares to admit it because sunk-cost fallacy and with the invention of recall it will act as a data collection agency for AI - as far as I followed the discussion.
- Rename the offending folder from the web
- Unlink the folder from the user's machine
- Delete the existing onedrive folder
- Relink and resync
The best part is, the web side of onedrive has practically unlimited length, the windows part has. As long as you don't sync, you don't experience anything but god forbid if you try to do it.
Also do not get me started on "Add a shortcut/Sync" debate. All in all, onedrive feels like a system that works but will feed you to the wolves the moment it hiccups. But on the enterprise side that's the only game in town so... we suffer altogether.
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