namingthingsiseasy
@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
- Comment on Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.' 1 hour ago:
Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I’m practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.
- Comment on Using Signal groups for activism 5 days ago:
Really? That’s interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn’t know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?
- Comment on Using Signal groups for activism 5 days ago:
But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 5 days ago:
Wikipedia is quite resilient - you can even put it on a USB drive. As long as you have a free operating system, there will always be ways to access it.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever 5 days ago:
But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.
Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 5 days ago:
Whatever. The next generation will have to learn to trust whether the material is true or not by using sources like Wikipedia or books by well-regarded authors.
The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context. Anyone trying to address the facts and information produced by these models is completely missing the point.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
The bigger problem in my opinion is more about the fact that all elections that select a single winner will always end up in stupid degenerate systems like this where flaws and imperfections exist.
The best thing to do (again, my opinion) is to abolish all single winner races and have multiple winners with proportional representation. Get rid of directly elected presidents and have a prime minister selected by a proportionally representative parliament instead. All presidential systems suck, and the larger the number of people voting, the harder and harder it sucks. It’s not just a USA problem - you also see it in France and Turkey, where they also have an all-powerful president that is elected nationally and the election is a complete shit-show every time without fail. On the other hand, having a prime minister selected as the head of state from a proportionally elected parliament is a much fairer and more stable system in my opinion. It has downsides too of course, but nowhere near as bad as nationally elected presidential systems.
In any case, the situation is a potential danger, but I don’t think it’s very likely to happen. First of all, it would require all those voters in the second round to conspire a particular way, which isn’t very likely. Secondly, there’s the fact that the numbers would have to line up in a very particular way which has a very low probability of happening - tweak a few numbers here and there, and the spoiler effect vanishes. Sure, the scenario you point out is a hypothetical flaw in approval voting, but I think it’s a much smaller effect and probability of actually influencing anything - definitely nowhere near as much of a strategic voting effect as in plurality voting systems.
- Comment on That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing 1 month ago:
B-b-b-but my convenience!!!
- Comment on I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server 1 month ago:
On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it’s easy to download the entire website as a single archive.
So they’re not really that smart…
- Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025 1 month ago:
I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn’t make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that’s a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.
- Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025 1 month ago:
Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.
- Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025 1 month ago:
Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn’t have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the “conspiracy” you’re talking about - but it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.
But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.
- Comment on Google is shaking up its compensation to incentivize higher performance 1 month ago:
And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.
Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.
On the other hand, it’s also really sad to see what they’ve become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.
The good Google is dead. I’d love to see them get completely buried.
- Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025 1 month ago:
This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.
Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.
- Comment on Judge in Epic v. Apple bans Apple from charging commission on purchases made outside App Store 1 month ago:
Good. Operating systems should be neutral. The people who make them should not be allowed to dictate the terms that others use to interact with their platforms.
- Comment on EU fines Apple $568m for deterring third-party payment methods on App Store 2 months ago:
I didn’t read the article, but I presume this is under the DMA which has provisions for increasing fines for repeat offenses - something like 10% of global revenue or something like that. I’m also a bit discouraged by how small the number is, but there is still some hope that it will either increase or get them to change their practices. But it is quite frustrating how slowly it’s going.
In fact, chances are that Apple is going breaking the law until the last minute so they can squeeze every penny they can out of this scheme until they can’t do it any longer.
- Comment on Elevated 2 months ago:
Milk has always grossed me out for weird reasons. Reading comments like this makes me glad for that.
And for anyone that has some kind of gross facts about oat milk, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT THANKS!!!
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 2 months ago:
When is the last time anything Microsoft made was an upgrade…
- Comment on Reddit’s 50% Plunge Fails to Entice Dip Buyers as Growth Slows. 2 months ago:
There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.
- Comment on It's 2025 now, what are the games you'll be starting the year with? 5 months ago:
I’m working my way through Valheim. I started last year and then stopped shortly before fighting the second boss and never got around to picking it back up. Now I’m back at it and working through the third biome. I still have a long way to go and hope that I can continue to sink at least 100 more hours into it.
I also got Metro 2033 and Last Light on the Steam winter sale. I started Metro Exodus a few years ago and also stopped pretty early, so I’m hoping that this time I can stick with it through the whole series. I also got Grim Dawn and it doesn’t play great on the Deck, but hopefully I’ll be able to get used to it with a bit of effort.
Outside of those, Wildermyth and Brotato are my main chillout games and I’m pretty sure they’ll also get 50-100 hours each this year.