ItsBob

> I think it should be OK for LMS to guess but only if it clearly tells the user it's answer is just a guess, when it is.

Or, alternatively, it shows us the confidence level of the answer, e.g. a value between 0 and 1, with 1 being 100% confident.

That would work for me.

This post has come along at an interesting time as it happens...

I was at my mum and dads yesterday and I was asking my dad if he'd seen any messages or nag screens about upgrading his computer from Windows 10? It's ancient and I wouldn't put Windows 11 on it, even though I can burn a copy with Rufus to remove all the requirements. As it happens, he had. In fact, he thought Microsoft wanted him to pay for it, such is their confusing marketing!

Now, my dad is no dumbass. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, all his faculties are still present and correct and he's used computers for years and he won numerous awards as uni for being smart af! Anyway, I put him off the idea of Windows 11 and onto the idea of a Chromebox instead. He seemes keen to try it.

Also, my dad only uses the web, the odd spreadsheet to keep track of his money, the odd YT video and that's about it: he's not a power-user.

My reasoning for the Chromebox is that I can't be about all the time when he needs tech support and I'm worried he's scammed by someone wanting him to "install an anti-virus, quick, before all his money is gone" or something. Plus, he has an Android phone already... it makes sense I think.

Next week I'll drop off my Chromebook and set it up for him to try. I think it'll work out, and if it does, I'll buy a Chromebox for about £300 and that'll do him for ever I think.

On a side-note, I've switched back to Windows 10 a few weeks ago: specifically Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I used the Massgrave script and it's valid until 2038 or something. I've had it with the latency and general dystopia (and the broken printer... ffs Microsoft!) around Windows 11, which I'd been using for a couple of years until last week.

It may sound trivial but I still can't get over the volume slider latency in Windows 11: When you change the volume slider in the quick launch area and the "ding" sound happens 400ms later, not at the same time, it drives me nuts!

Anyway, my £0.02

I remember a time when the internet was ran by techies and hobbyists for zero money, zero expectation etc. Sure, there were some banner ads on some websites but very few mega-corps wanting their pound of flesh like today.

A hobbyist-run internet can still be done today too... no need for mega-corporations to run every website when it costs a few ££ per month to run a web server that could easily handle millions of monthly connections.

Also, it's not my job to validate a scummy business model like advertising: if they (the corporations with ads) want to use them as their primary revenue source that's on them, not me!

Ok, total shower thought but what if the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus etc. got together and said "Guys, let's form a consortium to create a new OS (based on Linux, of course) to break the Microsoft hold".

Would it work? Would there be demand?

Hell, I'll run it for them: I just want Windows 2000 with some security fixes :-)

Just a crazy thought but hey, you never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Linux lacks designers and product managers

I don't think that would be enough: adding those people to a team won't matter if the overall vision isn't there.

It needs, and I'm about to choke on my words here, a Steve Jobs at the helm saying "No, it needs to be like this".

Yes, I know that won't achieve perfection but there needs to be a coherent vision of what the OS is trying to be, or who it is aiming for.

Linux, right now is pure techie-driven. There isn't any vision at all! Every distro is subtly different and reflects the wants of the team that work on it.

It needs a company to take a distro and pick a direction, e.g. Linux for normies would have to remove almost all traces of command line, hard disk partitions, configs, package managers etc. All that shit would have to be hidden away, still in the background and available if wanted, but to use the OS it should not be a requirement.

Anyway, Linux is what it is :)

I've said it many times in the past: the OS is a toolbox, just like a carpenters toolbox.

I use it to keep my apps (tools) in. I use the apps (hammer, saw, screwdriver etc.) to get a job done, then I put them away. The job of the OS isn't to recommend that I use Hammer v2.0 or to update my toolbox to the latest version.

The OS is, or should be, out of my way.

I agree with others here: Windows 2000 was peak OS for me!

Genuinely, I won't care what the ruling is: my computer, my rules!

:)

Ok, I'll bite... what if an "ad" on a website is a bit of javascript that mines bitcoins using my GPU? Does this mean I have to let it do this?

What if it does it while showing me an ad for something at the same time?

How does running a bit of software on my computer concern anyone other than me?

I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the court's rulings but this seems assinine!

The Netflix documentary was great and the thing that I took away from it most was that in fractions of a second all the passengers literally blinked out of existence: They were here and then within a ms, they literally vanished (I assume... they didn't elaborate on it but I can guess!)

The temperature and pressure in that tiny fraction of a second was probably 10s of thousands of degrees and hundreds of jumbo jets smashing into them so fast that their bodies didn't even register the trauma.

Blew my mind.

Nearly forgot that they heard the explosion on the surface ship, 2 miles above the sub... that kinda screws with my head tbh!

Interesting you should say that. I found a Substack post earlier today along those lines [0].

I almost never take my phone with me, especially when with my wife and son, as they always have theirs with them, although with elderly parents not in the best of health I really should take it more.

But it's something I see a lot these days, in fact, the latest Vodafone ad in the uk has a bunch of lads sitting outside a pub and one is laughing at something on his phone. There's also a betting ad where the guy is making bets on his phone (presumably) while in a restaurant with others!

I find this normalized behaviour somewhat concerning for the future.

[0] - https://abysspostcard.substack.com/p/party-like-it-is-1975

> Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.

Something I have long said when talking about operating systems is that I consider them tool boxes. The same kind of tool box a carpenter would have.

I don't "use" the OS per se. I use the OS to hold my tools in a manner that makes it easy for me to access them.

So, it's like a carpenter's toolbox where he carries around his saw, hammer etc. and can easily grab them when he needs them. He doesn't need to hear about Hammer v2.0 AI-edition or any of that shit!

I don't need my toolbox doing anything other than holding my tools and fucking right off out of my way!

In The Peoples Republic of Scotland, all primary kids get free lunches now, I think (Primary is aged 4/5 to 11/12).

When it was introduced, my son was in P1 or 2. We spoke to the head and asked if we could pay for our son's lunch as we didn't need the freebie. She said there was no way to pay for it: it was free whether you wanted it or not.

Crazy.

I'm a rampant capitalist, every man for himself and all that but there is something about denying kids the fundamentals, like shelter, food etc. that rubs me up the wrong way. There should never be a situation where they are denied proper lunches. Never.

School lunch debt is an adult-designed problem that we shouldn't be passing onto kids.

Side note... I just went to the Figma website there (never used it before, had no idea what they did) and they have one of my pet hates: They changed the cursor to some dark stylized thingy! Leave it alone!

It's so off-putting! Why do they do that?

Oh, my other peeve is messing with scrolling but they didn't appear to do that, at least!

Does it even need to be screenshots?

Surely when I open up a chat in Whatsapp it would be as easy as doing a foreach on every msgElement.text value on screen and copying it to the mothership in plain text. After all, when I am reading them, they're decrypted.

Or, when I send a message, as soon as I press the "Send" button, send a copy to the mothership.

Perhaps I'm not seeing it right but it must be this simple. Right?

At least with an open source app you can inspect the "Send" code and see if it calls "SendToMothership" when it also calls "SendToRecipient".

> Even though they can't read your messages

I've long wondered if this is actually true.

If I have a closed-source app and claim (and can verify!) E2EE, surely I could still read every message from my closed-source app, within the app itself, and you'd never know.

I've never been a mobile app developer but I've been a desktop and web developer since the 90s so I don't know what apps can and cannot see but in a desktop app or web app, if it's on the screen, it's decrypted and I can put code in to read/steal it.

Am I missing something here?

> Doesn't mean they don't need investigation.

True. But there was a time when we managed to program software and not send every keystroke back to the mothership.

It's possible to have a daily/weekly/monthly popup that says "We've detected a few bugs over the last week, can we send the reports to the mothership?"

It's as simple as zipping the text files and sending them to an API endpoint.

I have no issue with this. Hell, you could even make it automatic where I can check a box that says "Automatically send weekly crash reports".

I have a massive issue with the devs thinking that it's ok to send telemetry back about every single thing I do in the software I've installed on MY computer so that they can "improve my experience" or whatever bullshit they use to justify it.

It's time for that to stop.

$250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.

The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.

I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)

I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.

Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)

Not sure where the Chromium part comes in but I'm talking about Firefox here.

Anyway, all the heavy-lifting is done: The JS engine, the CSS engine and so on.

I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many.

Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more!

The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on too.

So, I'd argue that 20 good devs (again, a number I pulled out of the air!) split into, say, 4 smaller teams could achieve a shit load of work under the right circumstances, with the right leadership and so on.

I'm currently a senior architect with over 50 devs below me. Most are mid-level at best (not a slur, just where they are in their career!) but the few good ones are very good. A team of 20 of those could pull it off!

It'd be a tall order building a browser from scratch with 20 devs maybe but it's already built.

I don't consider things like crash logs and debug stuff to be telemetry. This can easily be dealt with by a popup saying "want to upload the crash log?". It can just be a text file with a bunch of data.

I'm fine with that.

Telemetry to me is knowing what I'm doing, like clicking a button, using a feature etc. They record that shit! Also, sending data about my websites back to the mothership so they can sell ads (or sell to ad companies... same thing).

That's what I mean when I talk about telemetry.

Let's do some back-of-a-napkin maths here and see if we could... Just for fun of course :D

=== ANNUAL COSTS ===

20 developers at $150k each = $3M

Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M

Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it)

Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M

2 x Marketing peeps = $250k

Other expenses (travel, rubber ducks etc.) = $1M

I literally pulled these figures out my ass (as you can no doubt tell!) but lets add it up:

$3M + $1.5M + $0.25M + $1M + $0.25M + $1M = $7M per year.

That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!

Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.

Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)

I'd fund a browser that has the following:

1. Zero telemetry. I mean ZERO: remove all telemetry code from the codebase. They can ask me about features the old-fashioned way - surveys!

2. Focus on privacy and security. Put these to the top of the list.

3. Stop paying your CEO millions! Not worth it imo!

4. Stop with all the other Mozilla shit! I am interested in a browser (and perhaps an email client... I'll let you work on that too!). No more Pocket, VPN and all that other shite.

5. ZERO, I mean ZERO data capture at all! Nothing. Not a single bit except when someone clicks the link to download Firefox, you can capture their userAgent and whatnot. But the browser, Firefox, should not be capturing a single byte of data from me once installed (except perhaps a periodic version check and you can pass in the version like this: https://firefox.com/update?v=123.568).

6. For sync, allow me to sync an encrypted file to Dropbox, OneDrive, Local drive, Whatever.com. That way my passwords, bookmarks etc. can be sync'd from MY location that I control, not yours!).

7. Have a "Block all shady JS tactics" button. This would include fingerprinting, location and such. Perhaps you could send bogus, random data when it's asked for instead. That'd be fine too.

I think that's it :)

For a browser that did this, and was properly audited to prevent anything shady from creeping in, I'd pay $30 a year for it.

Edit: To clarify - I wouldn't pay the current Mozilla a single penny!

True. I'm a .NET dev and for the most part that's always worked on Windows really well so bugs (apart from the ones I introduce) are pretty rare.

True, I never thought of that one.

I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.

I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas.

I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.

I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.

That was it for me.

I reckon it depends on what kind of experience you want from your OS: there may be a variant that works for you already.

Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox).

In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.

I'm genuinely curious why anyone would download a beta of Windows... can someone enlighten me?

I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose.

But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users.

This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss.

Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!

> AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.

FTFY: AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes.

By "appearance" are they talking about a guy wearing a hoodie must be a hacker or are we talking about race/colour/religious garb etc?

I'd rather they just didn't use it for any kind of criminal application at all if I have a say in it!

Just my $0.02

I'm a senior developer so I spot the bullshit, like sometimes it makes up table names in the sql. Things like that.

It's definitely not fire-and-forget: more like extreme autocomplete (at least that's how I use it)

Anecdotal but here's how I described using the likes of Copilot to my sceptical colleagues (they were late to the party!):

It's like having a senior software dev over your shoulder. He knows pretty much everything about coding but he often comes to work drunk...

And that was the best analogy I could come up with: I think it's sped up my work enormously because I limit what it does, rather than let it loose... if that makes sense.

As an example, I was working on a C# project with a repository layer with a bunch of methods that just retrieved one or two values from the database, e.g. GetUsernameFromUserGuid, GetFirstnameFromUserGuid and so on. They each had a SQL query in them (I don't use ORM's...).

They weren't hard to write but there were quite a few of them.

Copilot learned after the first couple what I was doing so I only needed to type in "GetEmail" and it finished it off, (GetEmailAddressFromUserGuid) did the rest, including the SQL query and the style I used etc.

To me, that's where it shines!

Once you figure out where it works best and its limits, it's brilliant imo.