dabockster

It is cool and I use it regularly. But keep in mind that it’s yet another one person OSS project and can bite the dust *at any time*.

If you have the ability to financially support them or contribute code somehow, do it.

Most of the “don’t update windows” talk, in my experience, comes from monolithic kernels like Windows 98/ME and Linux, where a single update can change or break a ton of seemingly random stuff. Hasn’t been relevant for 99% of desktop computers for 25 years (not counting Mac stuff).

That, and WinGet really wasn’t a thing until the height of COVID when people really found out that it even existed. There’s still a ton of stuff that doesn’t install quite right in it.

Windows didn’t even have a remotely solid first party package management system (WinGet) until like 2018 or something. And that didn’t have a controller GUI (UniGetGUI) until COVID when someone stuck at home finally coded one up.

If I ever build a windows installer, I’m manually adding in that full screen blue background for nostalgia’s sake.

Can you force Edge to go through Windows Update? They have GPOs for download, but I didn’t see anything like that in there.

That’s awesome, but keep in mind that the AppData thing is likely a feature and not a bug.

Think about it another way: if they install in AppData, they can likely bypass IT depts and other business bureaucracies and get a foothold somewhere in an organization. It’s absolutely malicious, both in terms of tech and business practices, but it works.

They install in AppData to get around IT admin blocks. Unless a sysadmin has the tech available to operate on a whitelist only basis (which not everyone does - it’s super expensive), you can be certain that at least some users have things like Spotify installed illicitly.

And this is why having a solid working relationship between all levels of IT and your users are so important. It really is customer service first, tech second. If your users trust you as the IT admin, they’ll know to ask first before downloading AppData installers like this before they become a job ending issue for them.

> accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important"

Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub

That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way?

Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But honestly, our field would be so much healthier overall in the long term.

> It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation.

It's effective on things that would take months/years to learn, if someone could reasonably learn it on their own at all. I tried vibe coding a Java program as if I was pair programming with an AI, and I encountered some very "Java" issues that I would not have even had the opportunity to get experience in unless I was lucky enough to work on a Fortune 500 Java codebase.

AI doesn't work in a waterfall environment. You have to be able to rapidly iterate, sometimes in a matter of hours, without bias and/or emotional attachment.

You’d have to convince someone to say no to a multimillion dollar VC check, bootstrap themselves financially (and often on “bread and water” levels of available money for their project), and be willing to potentially run or be at least somewhat responsible for whatever they build for potentially decades.

An entity would have to really want to do all that for the “American Dream” to happen.

None of your business.

Yeah! Even as a dev who can navigate vim, I absolutely don't want to do that on a daily basis. Give me pretty GUIs and some automation!

I worked at a neighborhood IT shop during the height of COVID and we’d see XP laptops all the time that were used as offline/airgapped controllers for things like CNC mills.

I’m actually going long on Windows now after learning about how the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, whereas Windows is a “hybrid” microkernel design. It explains so much about some program behavior in Linux (eg crashing Gnome would often cause kernel panics) that you don’t see at all on Windows.

Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.

I wouldn’t call the GPL “evil”, but I do think it’s more unrealistic given current western economics and mooching practices. Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.

Hyper-V for a cheap solution.

But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).

Something else I just found (literally from two days ago):

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1kdc02o/firefox_co...

> I don't think that people understand what interest Google has in paying Mozilla so much for, let's be honest, so little.

> Louis Rossmann explained it the best to me - Google pays Mozilla so much only to keep them alive to prevent antitrust litigation if Blink becomes basically the only browser engine left for Windows.

Looks like the courts might be understanding that relationship and declaring that illegal as well.

I also want to add that I 1000% fault Mozilla on this for not diversifying their funding over the years. They knew that this much of their funding was that dependent on Google and they ignored it while, at the same time, advertising themselves as some kind of independent organization. They could have began seriously trying to decouple themselves from Google, but have seemingly repeatedly chose not to.

So how do we know that Google doesn't have their thumb on Firefox right now behind the scenes? Because looking back, Firefox always appeared to compete with Chrome - but I'm now seeing that it only competed "enough" as to possibly create an illusion of true competition. Could Google possibly have influenced this behavior?

Explain how you're different from RealPage.

Ain't no garages in low rise apartments either. I'm really believing now that the lack of hard science startups in the past decade+ is a byproduct of the US housing crisis. No single family home with a garage, no space to physically put a server.

> So, Chromium is unlikely to stop existing. And if it somehow does, it would immediately trigger a fork with a different name created by all the stakeholders that would require such a thing.

> And with multiple wealthy companies using chromium, funding that should be no issue.

You're assuming tech companies aren't being cheap lately when, in fact, they are being cheap. We should assume that the mooching (using Chromium without contributing code or money) would go to 11.

The issue is if that sponsor becomes too pushy, which a lot of them did become after a short amount of time.

> I've never lived in SF so maybe it was more of a thing there.

Yeah it's definitely more of an SF/SV thing for sure, if they're even still happening. Seattle had some hackathons and Dubhacks is still a thing (I think?), but they fizzled out by 2019 and Covid ended whatever was left. NYC had some as well, iirc, but they went away too along the same timeline.

I still do this occasionally, but I instead go to bed super early and wake up at 4:30-5 AM. You get the serenity of coding at the break of dawn but with none of the grogginess of the all nighter.

That has been the case since about 2017 for me. MLH took over a ton of college level hackathons and made them into a psuedo e-sports competition. And most of their prizes were for best uses of sponsored APIs and services - like "best use of AWS Lambda(TM)" or something. And then all the other events followed suit. That behavior ruined the original ideas and incentives behind hackathons: networking and building cool stuff. Because why build something actually cool and sustainable when you have all those sponsors shoving free API credits in your face all the time you're at the event?

I think the old versions would still be OSS (or "source available" at the very least) and could be used in some way in other products.

The Chrome brand (logos, trademarks, its "word on the street" recognition - its marketing) are the true meat and potatoes of that web browser. Forking Chromium would force them to build a new brand on that scale from scratch. That's not an easy thing to do.

Especially during the current (2025) iteration of the US government. All sides of the political spectrum will be accusing the program of having political bias against each other.