namingthingsiseasy

@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”

  Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.

  So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do we have No Man's Sky fans here?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, and it feels like a waste of so much great potential when you consider the fantastic development they poured into it. Such a shame.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s hard to beat the last one, but he somehow managed to pull it off.

  Then again, Mitchell Baker is still on the board of directors if I’m not mistaken, so it sounds like the rot is too pervasive for just one CEO to change.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was having issues with Librewolf on a work computer a few weeks ago, so I decided to try Firefox to see if it was LW’s security settings.

  Holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck Firefox has become! It’s so bad that I can’t honestly recommend anyone use it anymore. The first time I started it, I saw all kinds of ads and trashy “news” articles that had no relevance to me whatsoever. Plus I had to reinstall all my extensions because they weren’t signed and there’s no way to disable that requirement. I was so horrified and offended, I just dumped it immediately and tried Chrome instead. What difference is there at this point?

  It’s just insulting at this point. I understand that they trying to find new revenue sources, and things are still better today than they were with Mitchell Baker as CEO, but it’s still horrific how poorly Mozilla is being run. I’m so grateful we still have usable forks from the amazing people running projects like Librewolf. Without them, the web would just be flat out unusable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet he takes a bath in a swimsuit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This has been very obvious to a lot of people since mobile devices were originally invented. The notion that you are sold a product that you “own” but is still 100% controlled by the vendor - anyone who thought about it for more than a second knew that it would eventually come to this. Of course, nobody gave even that tiny amount of thought about it. Or they were too naïve to think that a corporation could ever be evil.

  I miss the times when spyware was considered uncoool. Mobile devices are the undoubtedly the worst invention of the information age. (And social media is probably the second worst.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do we have No Man's Sky fans here?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I enjoy it. It’s a relaxing, peaceful game. I just wish there were more objectives. The idea of just exploring and finding things doesn’t appeal to me all that much. The game has a lot of potential for combat, both in the spaceship and as a FPS, but both of these areas feel like they could be expanded a bit. Overall, I just wish that there were more combat-focused missions after completing the main storyline.

  But it’s still pretty good and I enjoy it when I want to relax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I dunno⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I fell for it. It’s crazy to think how heavily I’ve been trained to believe everything I see is wrong in the most embarrassing and laughable way possible. That’s pretty depressing if you think about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows president says platform is "evolving into an agentic OS," gets cooked in the replies — "Straight up, nobody wants this"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Straight up, nobody wants this”

  And they don’t fucking care. They’re going to do it anyways.

  You can either do something about it, or just bend over and let them fuck you. That’s what you get for depending on someone else’s platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The funny thing is, before Google existed, people had no idea if their marketing attempts were working. Maybe they had some ways of knowing or guessing, but there was no way to know how accurate their metrics were. Internet-based advertising, and tracking-based advertising in particular was supposed to change that.

  And now that we sit here with a duopoly of advertising giants, we’re back to the stage where marketers just have to trust that their provider is giving them good helpful information. And how are they supposed to know whether they really can believe it or not? They can’t of course! So we’ve come right back to where we’ve started.

  But considering they still spent tons of money before Google and Facebook gave them these “analytics”, it looks like they probably don’t even care that much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pathlib is very nice indeed, but I can understand why a lot of languages don’t do similar things. There are major challenges implementing something like that. Cross-platform functionality is a big one, for example. File permissions between Unix systems and Windows do not map perfectly from one system to another which can be a maintenance burden.

  But I do agree. As a user, it feels great to have. And yes, also in general, the things Python does with its standard library are definitely the way things should be done, from a user’s point of view at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.

  Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know

  University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.

  Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don’t just jump for a salary increase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not to mention tone-deaf. Maybe you shouldn’t talk about life-saving technology when your technology anti-saved a life…

  And that’s ignoring the fact that they’re using inferior technology. Saving lives still seems to take a back seat (pun intended) to cutting costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair, but to me, the cost of a new device isn’t how much I pay for it - it’s the time I invest in using it and maintaining it, as well as how much I rely on it. The biggest reason that I think open hardware and software is important is not just the cost, but the reliability - the fact that it will still be working tomorrow. That is worth a lot more than money to me!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.

  You’re probably right in a legal sense, but I think that’s a bit stupid. It’s very difficult to draw a line that delineates between when a company has the ability to exclude competitors or not. It requires a lot of costly legal battles and a length appeal process to prove, and nobody will create that court case without significant financial means to be able to prove all of it. And if the court rules against you, all of that time, money and effort achieved nothing and just leaves you with a heavily damaged reputation.

  From a practical perspective, it sounds like a very weak legal framework.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. All these devices can just be bricked the moment some corporation decides they’re not worth supporting anymore. Never buy a device that is so heavily dependent on running on another company’s services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.