johnasmith

Canonical Serviços De Software Ltda.;

I'm curious, what does having control over the update process give you? Isn't it replacing one unauditable black box system for another? Are you concerned about a regression and don't want to be in the vanguard cohort?

Google has two billion lines of proprietary code, conformant to their style guides and proprietary requirements. I can't imagine they'd poison their model with non-conformant third party source.

The English translation of the (Dutch) "strandbeest" is "beach animal".

Not all John Smiths are bad, promise.

The article suggest that it was neither. That rather it was an engineering decision: the product did not have staffing to be properly maintained, and rather than staff it up, it was easier to turn it down.

Google is no such place. I've worked in several product areas, and while there is no formal one-size-fits-all process, generally engineers build products specified by PM written PRDs, often informed by UXR, designed by UX. At least for the last 12 years, it's not been a wild west of rogue engineers.

For Firefox to succeed, it has to differentiate. There are two meaningful ways it does, or will do, in the near future:

1. Mobile extensions: that's a unique value prop

2. Fight for the user: manifest v3, web environment integrity, and whatever comes next are degradations in user experience, and following a different path puts FF apart

There are build systems where this guidance isn't terribly valuable.

With Bazel for example, you typically have build files in each directory, and a test target for each test class in that build. But bazel allows you to select and run targets in a collection of directories, select targets recursively, or by a variety of other criteria. Your CI systems runs targets selected implicitly, while each build expresses the test targets explicitly.

One of the newer things I've appreciated from guava is ListenableFuture to Kotlin suspend functions interop.

That's a fine argument to make, but the article didn't.

The article conflated ad selection and search query results.

Mozilla's office in SF, pictured in the article's first photo, is literally neighbor to Google's SF office, making that a particularly apt photo and headline pair.

We can assess the analogy on its merits, but random opinions are circulated in docs at Google all the time. From this article, 186,000 employees, therefore lots of opinions. This is a random employee who's made an analogy, not a leadership owned doc.

I mean, I've worked in search, android, and c&c, and the above is pretty close to my experience in all three.

The way it's meant to work is tether acts as a market maker, always willing to buy and sell tokens at parity. Nobody would buy below that if they know tether is around. Tether, having issued the coins, should have sufficient capital to play that role. But if they spend too much of their capital, they lose the ability to fulfill their role.

I wrote myself a Chrome extension that does this, using http://l/foo style links, and using Chrome's sync to share across devices. Works well enough but limited to desktops.

Some large orgs maintain internal shorteners, like http://go links at Google.

Looks like this was an actual bug, not deliberately removing a feature:

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1560010093294489602

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread//152736727

I've been using Stadia since day one. It's a really terrific execution of cloud gaming. It would be a real shame if it did get shut down. I hope the rumors are false.

Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke was a core Rails developer. He's tightly connected to the Ruby & Rails communities.

I'm Québécois from birth (Trois Rivières). I voted in the incredibly close '95 seperation referendum. In my view, separation or sovereignty would be bad for us.

Separation is mainly predicated on the idea that Québécois are culturally distinct from the rest of Canada, and that our values would be better represented independently. We mostly speak French, and the rest of Canada is predominantly anglo (my New Brunswick Acadian mother in law would have me point out New Brunswick is officially bilingual and has many Francophones). Separatists would argue that there are substantively deeper differences, but having lived abroad in several countries over a decade and returned, any differences seem to me razor thin. We have vastly more in common than separates us. Breaking from Canada to underline these minor differences would come at a tremendous cost.

But creating a movement around identity is easy. So every now and again separatist ideas gather steam. We'll pay through the nose for a Québécois Nation and be no better off for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Quebec_referendum

I found the Schmidt suggestion surprising, but here it is, apparently made seriously, to change your name upon arriving at adulthood: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575423...

The Arstechnica article Doctorow is linking to: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/shameful-insteon-loo...

No difference except you did it from source and spent the build time yourself.

You can buy a pixel device and flash it to AOSP here: https://flash.android.com/

Install a launcher of your choice and be on your way: https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/round-up/best-android-launchers

They compared across breeds ("51 dogs of various breeds", 9 of which were pugs or 'small' [1]), but some breeds are... dumb as hell. I'm skeptical the statement holds across all breeds. My friend's pug will run full speed into a wall for no apparent reason, hardly the most perceptive of creatures.

1. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...

I'll give you $5 for it.

In google source code: https://cs.android.com/search?q=%22wtf%22%20f:java$&ss=andro...

It seems presumptuous to speculatively be outraged and it seems unfair to assume that because a person was once employed by Facebook, their efforts at Mozilla will be corruptive. Lets wait and see.

I think this is unlikely, but should it become the case, you can easily install an alternative launcher, something presumably impossible on the sheild.

Also, the default launcher happens to be something heavily customized by each OEM (likely extending the AOSP launcher which will never have ads or more typically extending a shared base launcher[0]), and I think routing ads through OEMs would be both a technical and logistical impossibility.

The phone space is such a competitive market, and the cost of switching (launchers/to a different Android phone/to iOS) is so low, and the risk to future sales so high, I really doubt you'll see ads on the launcher.

[0] https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste...