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

it’s just a lot of complexity, especially if you’re targeting only Android. it’s single threaded and not native to the platform. you’ll be behind on platform versions and have to find shims for everything. you’ll run into weird issues for which the fixes are not supported by the native platform. the more layers you put in between you and the native runtime, the more things can go wrong

Android Studio and Jetpack Compose is going to be the path of least resistance, but i’d need to hear more requirements to make a real recommendation (besides try to avoid React Native unless you have a really good reason)

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.

there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma

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

that seems abnormal, but if you’re worried about people creeping into your infra, you could add a VPN for an extra layer of security. i use Tailscale, and it works like a charm

ngl, sometimes it is. it depends on the game. usually the problem is anti-cheat, but Valve has been working on improving that with many games working out of the box today. i’d say if you’re playing single player games, once you get Proton installed it’s virtually the same experience.

check out https://www.protondb.com/

if your games are gold or above on there, i’d go ahead and pull the trigger.

yeah i have friends who are medical technicians, and i’ve heard some things

right so we should continue making smart investments in cutting edge tech, which is probably the point they were trying to make, even if the wording of it is informed by a pop culture zeitgeist more than an understanding of the tech and ethics that are currently being scrutinized as part of the development of what is called “AI”

i’m definitely not advocating for that. it’s just a bit strange to talk about it like that on a policy level. should the US, as a policy, defund AI research?

why focus on the AI boogeyman? investing in AI is important in this context because it has the potential to increase overall productivity. which, like, don’t we see that as a good thing? also, AI might suck right now, but it’s stupid to think that we should just abandon that research. AI is clearly an innovation, and if you don’t think so it’s time to touch grass.

easily said

i doubt the recent uptick in traffic is from “stealing data” for training but rather from agents scraping them for context, eg Edge Copilot, Google’s AI search, SearchGPT, etc.

poisoning the data will likely not help in this situation since there’s a human on the other side that will just do the same search again given unsatisfactory results. like how retries and timeouts can cause huge outages for web scale companies, poisoning search results will likely cause this type of traffic to increase and further increase the chances of DoS and higher bandwidth usage.

bruh i know people in their 40s making 6 figures that couldn’t read an error message if it would save ten generations of their family.