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dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

Google could have had solid competition if Garmin and TomTom made their offline map subscriptions available on phones instead of pushing their dedicated devices so hard. TomTom just started publishing their own apps during Covid, and Garmin is still nowhere to be found. There's also other apps like Magic Earth that use other data, but they're also super recent.

I feel like the whole tech industry, especially the American part, really dropped the ball on this.

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

Or someone else. They could definitely go the acqui-hire route.

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

> Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet"

That stereotype is now "grandparent thinks Chrome is the internet". It still exists in a big way. It also exists in the sense that "no one ever got fired for downloading Google Chrome".

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

Opera is PRC owned and operated. Vivaldi is the actual successor to OG Opera.

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.

They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.

Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.

[1] https://notaniche.com/firefox-3-new-logo-weave/660/

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

* As far as we all know. *

This relationship means that Google can be throwing whatever they wanted into Chrome, and not necessarily have it make its way into Chromium.

VS Code is the same way, and a lot of forks are finding out about that relationship right now when Microsoft blocked their C++ extensions from running on anything other than the proprietary build.

dabocksteron OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience

It could be argued that having Google retain ownership of Chrome would give them too much of a business incentive to repeat the monopoly in the near future.

dabocksteron Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

9/11 also happened during that time. Punishing the people that declared war upon the United States and destroyed the Twin Towers was the larger priority than breaking up one company.

dabocksteron FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

Honestly this is crazy enough to work. Bonus points if both you and the scraping company reside in the same state.

dabocksteron FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

Even though I agree with what you're doing in principle, I feel it's necessary to remind and warn everyone here that sabotaging bots could be viewed as a violation of laws such as the US's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1]. I mean, unless the Second Amendment is suddenly interpreted to include cyberweapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

dabocksteron FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

I doubt they'd post it since it would mean those AI firms could use it to adapt to their countermeasures.

dabocksteron Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one

Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that:

- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)

- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)

- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls

- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)

- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website

The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.

dabocksteron Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

I can't cite sources since it would involve trying to piecemeal together tons of almost 20 year old Twitter posts (the ones that are still even online in some capacity). But I'd strongly encourage anyone interested to research both the 2008 campaigns of Barack Obama and the late John McCain. Obama went hard into social media like FB and Twitter with almost daily updates, and also used those platforms to directly connect with voters. McCain's campaign, if I remember right, largely stayed off of them until right before the election. And even then, McCain/Palin only used it like an RSS feed and really didn't engage with anyone.

It's the same strategy that propelled Bernie Sanders to the national stage in 2015/2016. It's the same strategy that got Donald Trump elected, legitimately or otherwise, both in 2016 and 2024. No one wanted to touch it until it made both Trump become POTUS and made a Clinton lose an election.

dabocksteron Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one

Another potential big issue is the community itself. A huge reason why LinkedIn is so hated is the community that's on there, and how the various engineering/design choices made by LinkedIn over the years amplifies and encourages those behaviors. Things like humble bragging, writing styles, DMing patters, etc etc etc.

And I don't know if building another platform with a feed will solve that problem. Because the existence of a social feed itself might be the issue here. But then what do you have if you don't have a feed? Is that a "platform" anymore if all that's on there are peoples' resumes?

I feel that building the next LinkedIn is really building the next LinkedIn community. That can't necessarily be done through computer code. I mean, look at the kind of community building that it took to build out HN.

dabocksteron Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

> I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

They operate internationally. FB is still big in some of the South Pacific/Asia nations like the Philippines and India (iirc).

dabocksteron Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

It wasn't so much "idealism" than it was the fact that social media was directly responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the US's first Black president. It also gave him a significant advantage in 2012. Nobody wanted to touch social media out of fear of putting future Democrat POTUS candidates at a disadvantage.

Notice how, in 2017, it's only after everyone starts post mortem evaluating the 2016 election that the "idealism" of social media begins to sour.

dabocksteron Ask HN: Are you a 40-year old software engineer without a job for > 1 year?

The amount of job postings I've been seeing in Seattle from jobs of all kinds, not just tech, that aren't even offering health insurance for full time work is absolutely ridiculous.

dabocksteron Ask HN: Why are there so few Flutter jobs? Should I switch to React?

Make the time. You're ability to provide for your family is at stake.

dabocksteron Ask HN: Should the Mozilla Foundation be forked?

Another reframe: "Do we need millions of dollars to hire a ton of devs, or can it be done in a lean and mean style team?"

dabocksteron Ask HN: Should the Mozilla Foundation be forked?

> Google will just buy everyone and slowly suffocate the rest.

> A browser cannot cost a billion per year, that’s bullshit people want you to believe.

Those two comments contradict each other. And the second one shows why Google won't just buy everyone out. Competing as a business/org is totally doable if all Big Tech does is throw money at problems.

dabocksteron Ask HN: Should the Mozilla Foundation be forked?

There is, though. You'd be going at it alone. That's what this post is about - taking the pulse of the community at large to see how we all feel about possibly making a new org.

You can't make a viable browser product by yourself.

dabocksteron You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

Legacy code is amazing RAG material to throw at an AI ;)

dabocksteron New junior developers can’t code

> in the real world, senior programmers (people who are hired in that role and make money for >=decade, not whatever your feeling what it should be is) are not very different either. Very many don't know what they are doing either, just they deliver by trial and error and got their years and stripes in, still barely understanding what they are doing.

Yup. I had to deal with that last year when some senior Microsoft devs tried to shove serverless Azure stuff into something that was supposed to be for a Seattle community group full of non-technical people. The group lead was totally oblivious to how serverless on-demand pricing worked and wanted a fixed monthly cost. That whole project ended up getting scrapped and replaced with an Excel spreadsheet.

dabocksteron New junior developers can’t code

dusts off HN account

AI coding is even more impactful considering that most coding-oriented AIs will explain what the generated code does. My offline combo of Ollama, Qwen Coder 14b, and the Continue.dev VS Code extension will always explain what it did at the end of each chat message in understandable English. And if I'm still confused, I can literally type in "I don't understand these changes could you walk me through it" and it will walk me through the code changes with the whole codebase as context/RAG material. All running on-device with no token limits or subscription fees (runs really slow, but still $0), only limited by the computer hardware itself.

In fact, I credit my AI stack with removing a huge coding "writer's block" I've had since recovering from a mental health crisis right before the start of the COVID lockdown, and has made me fall in love with building software all over again.

And it's only going to get even better the more open/shared source on-device stuff gets released. Forget multimodal models, these specialized tools are where the real magic is happening!

dabocksteron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)

Onsite in the city that made WSDOT raise the max HOV lane toll to $15 because of all the car traffic in the morning? Are you mad?

dabocksteron U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

> Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

This is the correct take, though. They ARE the same web browser, just with different skins.

dabocksteron Google confirms they will disable uBlock Origin in Chrome in 2024

You can't restrict what any for-profit entity does with your source code. You have to give it away for free to be in compliance with the license.

dabocksteron Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

Yeah this feels like a possible white collar crime. And with the US government out for blood right now about tech abuses, even a minor tax audit wouldn't be good for them.

dabocksteron OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

> Of course no one knows for sure except the people directly involved here.

The IRS will know soon enough if they were indeed non-profit.

dabocksteron OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

The same thing got said about Elon Musk and Twitter, and yet X is still somehow alive.