sp3ctr4l

No problem!

Wonderful username btw, haha.

In case people missed or are unaware of the context:

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/doj-google-must-divest-chrome-possibly-android-google-fires-back

https://www.howtogeek.com/united-states-doj-google-android-chrome-split/

The DoJ recently (before Trump got elected) won an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and the lawsuit is currently in the stage of haggling over the extent of the penalty actions taken against Google as a result.

One of the things the DoJ is pushing for is breaking off not only Chrome but also Android from Google to just leave Google with its search stuff.

This is like splitting up Bell from decades ago.

What Google is doing right now is strategic positioning to be able to argue that Android can’t be split off from Google without causing them too much pain, and by making Android more and more dependent on, and nonfunctional without being under the same corporate ownership.

This is a powerplay to try to not be broken up so hard by the anti-trust lawsuit they already lost.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)

The actual penalty ruling is expected to come down by August 2025… unless the Trump admin fucks with it, somehow they… haven’t seemed to yet notice or care that this lawsuit is going on, despite Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having a literal front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

Hey now, when you test in production…

… you gotta aim for the stars.

translation party!

Throw Japanese into English into Japanese into English ad nauseum, untill an ‘equilibrium’ statement is reached.

… Which was quite often nowhere near the original statement, in either language… but at least the translation algorithm agreed with itself.

ScriptKiddies.

I worked at a large import export firm based out of Seattle a decade ago. All of their internal and external accounting ultimately relied on COBOL as well.

A single guy maintained it all… he also wrote it all, originally. Got back from the Vietnam war, learned COBOL with his GI Bill, went to work for this company, stayed for his whole life.

He kept telling the board that they needed to find a replacement, or three, for him, when he retired.

They did not, at least not before he retired, and I left several months later due to every system I relied on to do my work breaking down after he left.

You’re thinking like someone who exists beyond this quarter’s profit margins.

I mean, you do, but as your boss, I’m required to tell you that you need to maximize short term results, and take all the responsibility for medium and long term calamities caused by me telling you to do that.

Didn’t even see the watermarks.

Thanks!

I unironically need glasses.

Yeah, I learned to code almost 20 years ago in order to mod video games, and learned that many bugs and massive problems in mods and games are caused by coders being either extremely lazy or making extremely dumb decisions.

In general, a ginormous problem with basically all software is technical debt and spaghetti code making things roughly increase in inefficiency and unneccesarry, poorly documented complexity at the same rate as hardware advances in compute power.

Basically nobody ever refactors anything, its just bandaids upon bandaids upon bandaids, because a refactor only makes sense in a 1 or 2 year + timeframe, but basically all corporations only exist in a next quarter timeframe.

This Jack Forge guy is just, just starting to downslope from the peak of the dunning kruger graph of competence vs confidence.

Its only a matter of time.

Mutahar (SomeOridinaryGamer) is… possibly? probably? … the most popular youtuber who regularly uses linux, games on linux, explains to people how to do so, has come up with many of his own methods and tutorials.

He does a whole bunch of other kinds of content, but he functionally serves as a linux evangelist for pc gamers, with general appeal.

He’s been gaming and daily driving linux for … probably half a decade now, starting to do so back before Proton really started to take off.

Mutahar’s initial exploration into, and then just casual usage of linux for gaming, has probably/possibly done more to normalize amd destigmatize the idea of gaming on linux than any other youtuber I can think of.

While the justification for this is primarily based on TikTok being a privacy and data security risk due to it being owned by a Chinese State Organ/Corporation… which is hilarious bullshit because the US does exactly the same thing with all the net data that goes through US corporate social media…

Brainrot is a real thing.

Shortform video platforms are addictive the same way cigarretes or heroin is, extended use ruins your cognitive ability, ruins your attention span, increases depression and anxiety, and fhe format promotes an absurdly fake, narcissistic culture, scams, and mis or disinformation.

Algorithmic profiling is definitely not unique to TikTok, but it is used by the app, and this often pigeonholes the user into content/advertisements that often becomes more and more extreme, manipulative and exploitative of the user.

Though this is being done mostly for stupid reasons, and it isn’t stoping US Corpo brainrot inducing social media platforms, I’ll take what I can get.

Yep, Signal has been the obvious best combination of actual security and ease of use for quite a while now…

But most people that I interact with are still on the level of ‘everyone knows Apple is more secure than Android, so anything on an iPhone is fine’ or ‘wtf undont have a SnapChat? Everyone has a snapchat’.

The sun is fairly low in the sky, just a bit to the right of the guy on the dirt path, whose shadow is almost but not quite straight vertical.

The guy casts a darker and more crisp, or less diffuse shadow because he is less translucent, or more opaque, than tree leaves, and because the total distance from the heighest tree leaves to the ground is greater than the total distance from his head to the ground.

The lines of the tree trunk and lamppost shadows all converge toward where the sun is, if extended toward it.

The illuminated square in the one tree’s shadow is likely a reflection from a window or some kind of metal fixture from a building or object behind the pov of the camera.

Probably the tree is shadowing the same area that a window in or near the building the picture is being taken from is illuminating.

A lot of universities with large campus grounds take the approach of observing the natural foot traffic wear patterns on grassy areas, and then build walkways where the most worn down parts are.

Its… pretty obvious.

If everyone is taking an alternate, non designed path… your design sucks, modify it to facilitate what people find more effective.

Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.