takluyver

7 ms·

1.
by takluyver 27d ago
In addition to what other people have said, the terminal interface is cross-platform and very stable, so TUIs need little or no maintenance to keep working.
2.
by takluyver 5mo ago
Certainly the app ecosystem was part of the challenge, and Microsoft spent a fair bit of effort trying to both encourage developers to make apps, and filling obvious gaps (like Youtube) itself. If their resources, retail connections and bra
3.
by takluyver 5mo ago
And to underscore the scale of that challenge, Microsoft couldn't make Windows Phone a significant competitor to Android & iOS.
4.
by takluyver 6mo ago
The XZ utils backdoor made it into Debian repositories undetected, although it was caught before it was in a stable version. Debian repositories are quite secure, but also pretty limited in scope and extremely slow to update. In practice, b
5.
by takluyver 6mo ago
If you get 'verified' by Google and sign your app, sideloading shouldn't change. That means money and ID checks, or a free 'hobbyist' carve out if you have <20 users. If you don't want to play their game, si
6.
by takluyver 6mo ago
There's going to be a lot of people who don't have a laptop/desktop handy right now - because they're out of the house, because it's unplugged in a cupboard, or because they borrow it from a friend or use an interne
7.
by takluyver 8mo ago
Huh, indeed. I still can't find much information about this, but this page is very informative: https://jwodder.github.io/kbits/posts/term-fgbg/
8.
by takluyver 8mo ago
They can? Is this a recent thing? I remember wanting to detect the background colour years ago, and not finding any way to do it.
9.
by takluyver 8mo ago
Also, power users are the ones who will find and change the setting - that's pretty much what being a power user means. Picking defaults that work for novices makes sense, even if that's slightly more inconvenient for me. I think
10.
by takluyver 8mo ago
Not unlike Firefox, Gnome has a lot of hidden options which aren't exposed in the regular settings UI. There has been an option to control 'primary paste' for 9 years, and it's exposed in Gnome tweaks. There's no ob
11.
by takluyver 8mo ago
A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password, that's a security hole even if you notice and del
12.
by takluyver 9mo ago
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but developing a browser engine and keeping up with new web standards is quite a bit of work. And web developers won't all test on a browser with 2-3% market share, so there's more
13.
by takluyver 9mo ago
That analogy doesn't really work, though: Mozilla's goal is not specifically to fight against online advertising. Ad-blocking is connected to their goals, definitely, but they clearly have to make compromises, and I'm not tha
14.
by takluyver 9mo ago
I doubt AI agents are going to greatly accelerate the development of something as big and complex as Servo. It seems more realistic that Firefox would be built around either Blink (from Chromium) or Webkit to lean on Google/Apple.
15.
by takluyver 9mo ago
I agree with all the people saying it would drive a lot of the remaining users away, and I hope they don't do it. But I'm not remotely surprised that they considered following what their biggest competitor (Chrome) already did.
16.
by takluyver 9mo ago
> starting from near total market domination That's not really accurate: Firefox peaked somewhere around 30% market share back when IE was dominant, and then Chrome took over the top spot within a few years of launching. FWIW, I thi
17.
by takluyver 10mo ago
My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on
18.
by takluyver 11mo ago
I'm sure they would love to. They've been trying to make their own app store (Galaxy Store) a thing for over a decade. But cutting ties with Google would mean no Google Apps and no Google Play Store, and that would probably be cat
19.
by takluyver 11mo ago
> we give up on the tools that companies use. UX, user research, graphic design, marketing and similar roles are pretty absent from these communities Some of the bigger open source communities, like GNOME, do some amount of these things.
20.
by takluyver 11mo ago
The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?
21.
by takluyver 11mo ago
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prose
22.
by takluyver 11mo ago
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case? Someone wrote it into the
23.
by takluyver 11mo ago
The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.
24.
by takluyver 11mo ago
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
25.
by takluyver 11mo ago
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
26.
by takluyver 11mo ago
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, b
27.
by takluyver 11mo ago
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's pro
28.
by takluyver 1y ago
They could add a developer option to bypass the new restriction, but as far as I know they haven't said they'll do that, and I don't see any reason why they would. The adb bypass is probably good enough for actual developers.
29.
by takluyver 1y ago
The current blog post does appear to say that you don't need to be verified to install and run apps with adb.
30.
by takluyver 1y ago
I'm guessing Windows gets a pass because you can still fairly easily bypass the signature check - it's effectively a warning rather than a hard block. It sounds like for (mainstream) Android, the only workaround will be to plug it

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