this is why i moved from Arch to NixOS. now i know what system packages are installed and can even leave comments in the config to remind myself what the heck cyme does, for instance

without checking, Gates’ wealth is probably tied up in a lot of MS stock, and he could probably walk into the office and ask the intern to get him a coffee. but yeah i think mostly retired.

Linus is still active is maintaining the Linux kernel.

and yes, this is fluff, not some kind of summit

if you really want to stick it to Google you have to go for Firefox or something derived from it. Chromium gives Google a ton of leverage to push features to all of their downstreams. not sure what engine these are using, but i also prefer to use Firefox because it’s open source. if these were open source you could easily see which engine they’re using.

it’s so much worse than the normal search. i would search for “dog” or “pasta” or “house” and get a pretty good result, but this conversational shit is just plain worse. and the “conversational” aspect is useless

pretty common misconception about how “AI” works. models aren’t constantly learning. their weights are frozen before deployment. they can infer from context quite a bit, but they won’t meaningfully change without human intervention (for now)

is there such a thing as “legitimate criticism” against an entire race of people? this writer is bonkers, and you can tell from the intro. seems like the actual content of the post was buried beneath the first paragraph where a rare few would find it. maybe it was wrong or illegal to fire this guy for being a racist asshole (being a state funded org or something?), but couching it in this narrative of “cancel culture” and “a violation of the first amendment” has fashy vibes to me. institutions should be allowed to control the narrative set by their employees. i understand that as part of my company my words reflect on them, and it’s up to their discretion whether they want to continue to associate with me based on the things i say. you have every right to say racist shit on your favorite fascist-owned platform, but everyone else has the right to tell you to fuck off.

also big downvote for posting this in a technology community

not really. using WASM as your full stack for your front end is just adding to the complexity and jank. WASM is there for compute heavy stuff. you can use it that way if you want.

i know i’m in the minority here so i’m not going to bury myself in this hole, but i do think those are addressable problems. many of them have been addressed. replacing Javascript is exactly what i’m talking about.

this is my most controversial take in computing in general:

i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant