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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Last year I was reading a bit about Mozilla, all that google money, their spendings, their CEO and got really really angry looking on how shit the Firefox is I use daily.

    The reason Firefox still exists is that Google can prove it’s not a Chrome monopoly. Now this is just me forming conspiracy theories, but I do believe that Google would stop these payments the day Firefox would really out-innovate Chrome and get more market share.

    I do believe all that Google money is not keeping Firefox alive, it’s keeping it dead.

    At that moment I rage-donated money to Servo. Monthly. Didn’t regret it, yet. Found their transparency records what they use it for. Up to now they use their money very responsibly.


  • I’m not a Playstation fan, I just want to play on the sofa, so I bought it just for that. It was a PS1, PS3, PS4, PS5… ooh wait, in fact I did have nearly all of them

    PS6? No way. For me the PS always was a good offer for couch gaming.

    Unless Sony changes course, a future PS6 looks mighty unattractive, price and usage-wise.

    My next “console” will be something with Steamos or Bazzite or any wine/proton install. Maybe something that I can also use for running LLMs when I work.

    If memory wasn’t so expensive, I’d already have ordered a 128G Strix Halo box (good enough for most games, good enough for a lot of local models)


  • Amazing. I did the same on my 2012 macbook air, and a friend’s Asus notebook. My 2019 Lenovo is still going strong, I expect to get 10y of lifetime out of it. Oh, and Lenovo spare parts are dime a dozen. I have rebuilt old Lenovos multiple times in my life, typically by buying a broken donor machine.

    So exactly what is the business case for buying a Framework Notebook?

    (Yes, they are really beautiful, cool and I’d WANT one. But there always was a better option to buy, for one reason - price: used Lenovo, portability: MacBook Air)










  • Much too frequently, if you need to manage systems for a company.

    THAT is my point.

    I have spent too many nights unrolling and blocking Windows updates just to keep the fucking MS Exchange server happy. Or the damned 8 year old CRM software which writes to places that Windows now blocks access to.

    Yeah it was paid time, but I’m much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.

    So ultimately I just jailed all the Windows stuff in VMs which I can snapshot and reliably backup, which I can roll back (mostly, as long as it does not involve Active Directory) etc. Windows is inherently unstable, that’s my point.

    The ultimate solution was to get out of that job. Yeah, I stilm do use Windows as a daily driver, but single use only, no centralized management and thats kind of OK.


  • Haha, are you aware of how many layers of Windows are just backward compatibility hacks? Architecturally Windows has changed a lot since Win98.

    The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).

    Btw, the same for games. Windows detects specific games and re-enables former direct x bugs.

    There are numerous layers of abstraction between your Win32 application and the Kernel, there’s no reason they won’t work on another kernel.

    Oh. And of course it’s badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.

    I stopped maintaining Windows systems and focused on developing software - it’s so effing annoying that things always break out of the blue with a new windows patch versions because MS has bad quality control on their overcomplicated house of cards that is named Windows.


  • Are you wishing back for Ballmer? IMO things were even worse, then. When they built a new version of Windows that was so bad they threw it away after a few years and botched together Vista as a quick save.

    Or for Gates? Who just missed and overlooked this newfangled internet thing in the 90s until they slammed the brakes and used loads of money to turn things around?

    Or the Microsoft that successfully hollowed out monopoly regulations paving the way for the tech bro style off business we now have?




  • There’s no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google’s. They’re also likely to be less reliable.

    Thank god. I do really believe all the Google money is actively stifling innovation at Mozilla. The only thing they can’t do is building a better browser than chrome is, for fear of becoming a viable alternative again.

    So they use the money for some CEO pay. and weird projects while Firefox further falls from popularity.

    I hope for the day Firefox’s market share has dropped to a level tha Google just won’t pay any money anymore for the default search engine deal.

    That day - and not one day before - innovation will resume.