DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.
Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.
Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.
Back when iOS and iPad were eating Microsoft's lunch in mobile, Microsoft freaked out and released Windows 8 with that new tiles UI framework ("desktop and tablet are going to converge so we need to dumb down the interface") and the Windows Store that was supposed to be their response to the App Store. Microsoft wanted all future Windows software to be released through the App Store. Of course, this was an existential threat to Valve/Steam, so Valve vociferously pushed back.
The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not forgotten.
He made some critical comments to the media about the Windows app store and Microsoft's position of trying to turn Windows in to an iOS type situation with everything locked down. Remember that Microsoft had just released Windows RT and later Windows 10 S which could only run apps from the Windows app store.
This could have pushed Steam out of the market if it had succeeded. Valve then spent the next decade building up Linux gaming almost from scratch to reduce their dependance on Microsoft.
What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away.
Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.
MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.
Yes well that wasn't the point. I was fed up with the direction and quality (or lack thereof) of Apple laptops at the time. I wasn't going to chance it on an Air , which at the time wasn't relevant to my use either due to its specs.
I don’t need google either, I could read docs or source code and figure things out myself. I do need it if I want to skip parts of coding that are not my focus at the moment - AI is arguably similar.
“That’s a great point about your finances. But did you know this company offers credit to someone in your position for only this low interest? I can apply on your behalf if you just sign this statement”
The main "Fingerprint ID" on this site seems to be a direct combination of all values, so if even a single one changes it'll act like the only conclusion is this is an entirely different fingerprint. Actual fingerprinting is a bit smarter, but it's not really possible to demonstrate that in a single clientside scripted static web page.
The more important bit to see from this tool is probably "this is an example of how much information which can aid in identification your browser exposes".
We know that being a billionaire surrounded by yes-men all day causes brain damage, and we know that being on social media living in a delusion bubble all day causes brain damage, so really they were already cooked even before signing what was left of their brains over to the LLMs.
It's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly after I arrived, Netscape dropped.
He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
I don't recall that fame at the time (from Mcom/Netscape, JWZ was more visible, in my circles), but I knew his name.
When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty young, and doing workstation development, which took more of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of contemporary software development does. And we were also presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture, which was very different than the tech industry culture of today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine; but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my mind about trying to first become a professor and then do research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-over.)
I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto pumping.
Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and power to make it happen?
There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but then went a different way. Were they actually always like that? Did they learn something that changed how they think about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles, sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just along for the ride?
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