burningChrome

This is the old, "Easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission"

A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.

I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.

>> Front end frameworks are usually pushed by developers, not management.

The last ten years I spent as a front-end "full stack" dev and every time there was some new shiny JS framework, all the devs would get out their tiki torches and pitchforks, go to management and tell them they should really really move to this new framework because blah blah blah.

In less than five years our department did this:

backbone -> angular -> react -> ember -> next -> vue -> svelte -> and finally back to angular/react which is what a majority of what we build with now.

Doing this insanity also created a way for mangers to make sure their year-end reviews looked good and polished. Every time an app that was built on a framework a few years old, suddenly a manager would declare it "dead" and needed to be re-built in record time (because the new framework allows devs to build Rome in a few days time). We would bust ass, usually hitting the deadline with something put together with duct tape and code no dev would willingly sign off on. Manager gets their raise and bonus at the expense of a host of devs running for the door.

Rinse, repeat. But 100% of the framework changes were always pushed the hardest by the devs.

Worked at a Fortune 200 company. Any govt project you worked on, you had have to have a basic civi security clearance. Any govt contract we got specifically stated you couldn't have off shore folks working on any of the code. Not sure how MS got around those requirements.

>> I've long suspected Amazon's search is so crappy because it makes their ads necessary to actually surface a product.

I thought it was just because they were forcing third tier Chinese knockoffs for everything I searched for. After a few months, I gave up completely. I now look for product reviews on YT, THEN go back to Amazon and search for exactly what I'm looking for. Even then? The search results are still jammed with cheap knockoffs.

>> If I had to compile all the resources I had consulted for something like C programming, they wouldn't amount to a single shelf.

Serious question - with something like a programming language where there is a sort of finite information available about the language and how to use it. I've found once you start moving into areas where this isn't the case like metaphysics where there is a lot more ambiguity, does the sourcing and information then become more valuable? Or are we going to finally be ok with ambiguity as humans?

I can see what you're saying and agree, but are there areas where sourcing does in fact become more important?

Gaming laptops they've never competed at all. Windows laptops offer far more form factors with easily upgradeable hardware. One of the only places Apple has an advantage is their chipsets. However, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips have significantly closed the gap on Apple's ARM based M-chips.

I just got a 16" MacBook Pro with an M5 pro chipset and its total pig compared to my 15.6" HP ZBook Power G8.

The only area I can see where Apple is still holding their own is their UI/UX has always been buttery smooth compared to Windows or Linux. Not a fan the new liquid glass, but its still a very smooth running UI regardless.

As a personal vendetta against Jani Patokallio (a Finnish cybersecurity blogger) who was trying to unmask the person who ran the site - which goes back to 2023.

>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.

Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.

Seems Anthem is gone, but not completely?

From the same post-mortem video:

former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."

"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...

I watched Adrian Crendshaw's DefCon talk about how people got busted using Tor and have also stayed away since then. I have used it in conjunction with TAILS a few times, but other than that, I don't mess with it any more.

DEF CON 22 - Adrian Crenshaw- Dropping Docs on Darknets: How People Got Caught

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ2OZKitRwc

I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.

The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.

And now with their popularity, they're almost everywhere now. Mcdonald's, Krispy Kreme, Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's have all had Biscoff partnered products.

Kind of cool to the explosion of popularity and them taking advantage and partnering with other brands to expand their markets.

Trying to fight it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. I carry two phones now - since I have my "privacy" enabled phone that basically has nothing on it. Email, messages, weather app and a few privacy enabled browsers. My other phone has all my "faux" google stuff on it. Maps, gmail, banking apps, my authenticator apps, music apps, etc.

Even then, these can all be tied together fairly easy, but just trying to make it harder to keep my data private is such a battle; and friends always ask me why I spend so much time trying to keep myself anonymous when in 2026 its virtually impossible to do so.

I always tell them: “Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” (To live well is to live concealed.)

>> Many people doubt. And we know that they do all sorts of funny book keeping shenanigans like SPVs and delayed deprecation.

Every time I see Anthropic and other AI companies getting ready to go public, I cannot stop thinking about the entire Enron debacle and all of their "unique" book keeping shenanigans that has far reaching impact, even to this day.

People keep telling me, "Nah this is totally different man, you can't compare the two!" But is it really??

Interesting that everybody is going after Deloitte, but why are we giving Abramovich, a known Russian oligarch and close personal friend of Putin a pass? Shouldn't we be more upset about Abramovich evading taxes? Isn't he and his lawyers more to blame because I would assume they're the ones telling Deloitte to do it?

Seems to me there's a lot of misplaced outrage here.

Back in the day when I was doing contract work and hopping around a lot, I often had to switch between windows and mac. One of the issues I always ran into was the not necessarily the keys, but where they were positioned.

Doing something basic on a mac like Copying (Ctrl + C) and Pasting (Ctrl + V) had to be done with ⌘ Command. So instead of using my pinky in natural resting by simply shifting my palm down which I was used to. Using the ⌘ Command, I had to use my thumb instead and it was always a weird shift. Having used Windows most of my life, I always had to look down to make sure I was on the right keys on a Mac.

I've tried a few times to go back, but its always been such an unnatural feeling that I just avoid it now like you do.

At the dawning of the technological age that would change the word in some many ways. Like the quote infers, everything they did was something nobody had before.

You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.

There were internal warnings about making the move from highly customized MySQL bare-metal clusters to cloud infrastructure because of network latency, moving from physical machines to multi-tenant environments and having to rewrite a lot of their existing customization.

The other issue of trying to quietly move terabytes of information while the site is live hasn't helped either. Add in the challenge of keeping highly customized bare-metal databases in sync with a cloud environment isn't easy.

Its this very very very complex migration that's resulted in a lot of the ongoing issues.

https://hostingjournalist.com/news/microsoft-accelerates-git...

The migration underscores Microsoft’s strategy to unify its AI and developer ecosystems under Azure, bolstering performance and reliability for Copilot and related AI workloads. However, not all GitHub employees are confident in the transition. Internal concerns have surfaced about potential service disruptions, particularly given the complexity of moving GitHub’s massive MySQL clusters, which currently run on custom bare-metal infrastructure.

Outages have become more frequent in recent months, a symptom of GitHub’s growing operational strain. Insiders suggest the platform’s infrastructure - originally designed to handle conventional development workloads - is now being pushed to its limits by large-scale AI integrations and surging user activity.

>> I think Anthropic did the right thing here

This is the paradoxical times we live in right now.

Don't do something? She walks into the office and start shooting the place up. Several officers and innocent people are killed. Cue the media claiming, "You should've known she was talking about this an AI bot! Why didn't the bot tell anybody she was planning a mass shooting?!"

Do something? She gets rolled up by the cops and questioned about what she was talking about and brought to the cop station and interviewed. Cue the media claiming, "This is an unethical way to use AI, this is an infringement on free speech! This is authoritarian!"

I believe in free speech as much as the next person. But in this day and age, its almost better to be safe than to have to explain to someone's loved ones you had to chance to prevent this and did nothing.

Most of the dev conferences around the Midwest have both the QR ticket code and then you can print a physical ticket as well - just in case. Speaking with people who work at the events, physical tickets are a life saver in conference halls where wifi/cell coverage is awful.

Nobody volunteering wants to be the bad guy and tell someone they can't enter the event because they don't have a digital ticket.

Of course a dev conference can be lenient. A Red Hot Chili Peppers concert? Probably not so much.

>> then a fingerprint with a second factor pin as the secondary unlock

Unless you have a 4 or 4XL which are pretty popular with graphene os users. The weird thing is the 4 and 4XL are the only models without fingerprint because Google was pushing its #D Face Unlock System at the time.

The funny part is Graphene by default now disables face unlock on newer Pixel models.

I remember driving several scary roads out in Colorado. The 210 out to Snowbird in a blizzard and a few others legit made my palms sweaty and I wasn't even driving. As a great plains Midwestern kid, seeing my buddy (who was well familiar with the roads) drive as well as he did in those conditions at least helped a little.

It just reinforced I didn't have the constitution live out in CO and drive those roads in those conditions.

There were rumors that that the "Chapitos" in Sinaloa purportedly banned the production and sale of fentanyl in their territories.

There were signs warning of this and if I remember correctly, they murdered two major fentanyl cooks, put their bodies on the side of a road, along with a warning sign and two huge piles of the drug around the bodies.

Depends on the site. If its a small/medium business, every LLM is now looking for "reputation signals" and "authority signals". This means everything from your basic SEO on the site with incoming links, how updated your google business profile is, how many reviews you have, how recent they are. They're also looking at any kind of references from other blogs, substacks, youtube videos, social media shares as well as a number of other things they look for.

I would imagine in smaller industries, flooding the internet with fake information, then linking it all together would be somewhat easier - but it still takes quite a bit of work to get even just the major LLM's to give the consistent responses you want to see.

Updates on this have been slowly trickling out and the best I can discern is you will be able to still install apps from stores like F-Droid, but you have to go through a manual "advanced flow" which will most likely make you wait 24 hours before installing it and make you go through other hoops.

In short, google has referred to this as "increased user friction" to try and deter people from doing this. Essentially not making it impossible; just really frustrating for users so they get sick of the process and just install verified apps through them.

The only way I know around this is to install a custom rom like GrapheneOS or Lineage OS since this change targets Because the policy targets the Google Mobile Services (GMS) framework rather than the foundational Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

>> Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way,

This is how I realized we truly are in an AI arms race. Literally every app or website or tool I use now forcibly pushes their "AI features" or "AI assistant" on you instead of just letting you use their products the way it makes sense for you. Stripe just confirmed what OP was saying. Poorly built, poorly thought out software is now the norm not the exception any more.

When the social media ban went into effect in Australia last year, kids were submitting photos of their parents and dogs to get around the verification. Not sure how better or worse they've gotten, but the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.

For reference: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/dog-photos-vpns-fake-ids-how...

Nest door neighbor did this when he just decided on a whim to put in a new driveway and started digging with a bobcat. 10 mins in and BLAM severed the main Comcast coax serving the entire neighborhood that was running under his driveway.

Luckily we were on Century Link so weren't affected by his stupidity. lol

I had better success with earlier versions. For me Siri has regressed so much and had become so unreliable, that having to constantly repeat or rephrase or delete whatever nonsense it was doing was so frustrating, I stopped using it years ago.

Its quite the paradox when Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence so hard, yet their assistant that's been around for 15 years can't do even basic things now.

>> Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.

The new liquid glass ui also fails a lot of basic accessibility checkpoints like contrast, readability, and increases cognitive load.

The rounded corners you speak of also hamper tap and touch targets for users with motor disabilities. The rounded corners make icons and other elements less distinct, increasing the possibility of touch or tap errors.