vanderbilt
@vanderbilt@lemmy.world
Sometimes I call the numbers on missing dog posters and just bark into the phone. I learn from the mistakes of those who take my advice.
- Comment on WITH ads? Fuckin awesome coupon, thanks! 2 months ago:
Would be a real shame if your wife were to suffer an allergic reaction and die after you agreed to this free trial, leaving you with no legal recourse despite our restaurant’s demonstrably inadequate precaution!
- Comment on The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine 3 months ago:
I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.
Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.
- Comment on Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative 4 months ago:
Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.
- Comment on Microsoft Account to local account conversion guide erased from official Windows 11 guide — instructions redacted earlier this week 4 months ago:
They are pushing hard on the developer experience because greenfield projects aren’t being built using Windows centric tooling anymore. If it’s server it’s Linux, and if it’s client it’s either electron or a web app. What will kill Windows is when there is no reason to buy Windows. MS recognizes this fact and has been pivoting to service offerings for that reason. They want users to make an MS account so they can herd people into their ecosystem.
- Comment on Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs 5 months ago:
I firmly maintain that if Microsoft gave a shit about ARM, they would be defaulting every one of their compilers to produce fat x86/aarch64 binaries. The reality is, however, that they don’t care about the hardware so long as it is good enough.
- Comment on Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs 5 months ago:
Nobody will buy the hardware if they can’t commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company’s laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool we weren’t willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It’s gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.
- Comment on After 7-Year Hiatus, Western Digital Unveils 6TB 2.5-Inch Hard Drives 5 months ago:
OMG is it bad. We used a couple WD drives for a surveillance camera array and they didn’t last a year. Two drives failed 9 months apart. Ended up going on Blackblaze and picking what looked best for our XFS Raid 10 having learned that lesson the hard way.
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 5 months ago:
This 1000%. Since basically High School I’ve been on Ubuntu for the machines I need to work, because at the end of the day it usually does. Some of the people I meet see that I use a Chromebook with the containers enabled and have similar reactions. “How can you use that it’s not even real Linux?”, as if it isn’t literally a Linux kernel. The Steam Deck is popular because you don’t need to know Linux to use it, and Ubuntu is popular because you don’t need to know a lot of Linux to use it.
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 5 months ago:
I have a lot of love for OpenSuse. Back in my teenage years, I used it and Ubuntu a lot. zypper is the best package manager, and YaST made configuration easier since I didn’t know config files yet.
- Comment on That time when Microsoft bought and killed Nokia phone unit 6 months ago:
Japan too. The U.S. Congress threatened Japan with a trade war if they didn’t shutter their TRON project to create a domestic Unix. Nowadays it’s almost entirely Windows, and Japan has stagnated in terms of technology. They might have another chance at it with the world searching for an alternative to Taiwan for semiconductors and the potential legal status of AI training in Japan.
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 6 months ago:
I don’t care whose indexes they use so long as the results are good. The problem isn’t the index, it’s how the contents get prioritized and presented. Kagi happens to do so well for me.
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 6 months ago:
He offered to start a conversation about his blog post and give his perspective. The only thing I see here is the author refusing to stand on their post.
- Comment on A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. 6 months ago:
Having done my time as an Army medic, this is incorrect. It takes more force than that, but less than you might think. A good 25 kilos with some velocity (and mass) behind it will easily sever a phalange. Up it to 50 or 80 kilos and you can claim an arm or shin. Mass is the real killer. I’ve seen a vehicle at comically slow speed absolutely yeet someone because it had several tons of momentum behind it.
- Comment on It's important to get a good interest rate 6 months ago:
Micro-financing is a concept that should be violently uninvented.
- Comment on Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking 6 months ago:
In an old job I had rolled them out to all employees. Six months before me getting onboard they had already given up, but we still had to support the ones out in the field. Fun fact about Surfaces, despite it being MS hardware running an MS operating system, the Windows 10 and 11 base system does not have drivers for the keyboard or mouse. You have to use a special image for the Surface devices. That meant maintaining two custom WIM images for deployment and keeping them in sync. We scrapped the remaining Surfaces and gave people the choice of Macs or ThinkPads instead. You can guess which was more popular among the office folk.
- Comment on Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking 6 months ago:
I used to have a black XBox sitting beneath the TV gathering dust. I think it is a One by the shape. As for the new ones I have no idea off the top of my head which is the best. I’ve seen some on sale in places, but the impulse buy isn’t there because I have no idea what I would be getting. I don’t own a PlayStation, but if I wanted one I know that 5 is the newest, and you can get the small slim one or the big Pro one.
- Comment on Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ 6 months ago:
The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it’s Raghaven who’s being enabled by Sundar to do it. They’ve been hit with the problem that Ads isn’t growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it’s no wonder why. It’s clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it’s enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he’s deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.
- Comment on The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem 6 months ago:
Something I appreciate about Lemmy is that garbage links get downvoted into oblivion like they observe. Unlike the alien site where people don’t even open the clink and just argue about the headline.
- Comment on Texas Attracted California Techies. Now It’s Losing Thousands of Them. 6 months ago:
A company made me an offer last year when I was looking for startups, but they required me to move to Austin. Austin is a nice place, but it’s unfortunately surrounded by Texas. Fast forward to today and they are moving out of Texas because it’s too expensive and they are having trouble retaining talent. The incentives the city has been offering to foster their own Silicon Valley are stalling because it’s not much cheaper and the state legislature is a Barnum circus of inhumanity.
- Comment on End of coding? Microsoft framework makes devs AI supervisors 6 months ago:
I use Claude to write plenty of the code we use, but it comes with the huge caveat that you can’t blindly accept what it says. Ever hear newscasters talk about some hacker thing and wonder how they get it so wrong? Same thing with AI code sometimes. If you can code you can tell what it does wrong.
- Comment on [Gamers Nexus] The MSI Claw is a Mess: Gaming Handheld Can't Compete | Review & Benchmarks 6 months ago:
Incredible how OEMs keep fumbling this. Just give me a Steam Deck with prosumer performance and decent battery. Accomplish that how you want. Slap SteamOS on it then let me buy it. No, I don’t want to figure out Armor Crate or MSI launcher or whatever. I just want to play games without having to babysit the thing.
- Comment on Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks 7 months ago:
WinAPIs are rife with weirdness like this that has stuck around for backward compatibility reasons. The day MS finally kills win32 will be the day Windows’ security improves tenfold.
- Comment on US to award Samsung up to $6.6 billion chip subsidy for Texas expansion, sources say 7 months ago:
There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell they’ll be allowed to that’s why. In the Texas panhandle is the Pantex plant, which services the military’s nuclear warheads. You saw what Uncle Sam did to the people who touched his boats, now try touching his nukes.