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I suspect they were referring to some of the things git allows for non centralized version control. There are simplifications if you just wanted a centralized system like cvs had.

Bureaucracy in general exhibits that kind of hysteresis. It is like a running average of who has been in charged mixed with a big dose of the culture that people who choose that sort of career create. Ironically, that inertia is considered by political scientists to be a safeguard for democracy.

It hits different when the bureaucracy's job is to collect and exploit secrets, and act in the shadows.

It also “hits different” when you’re the group paying for the bureaucracy.

Actually they do. The law states that not only is it illegal to classify stuff to hide illegal activity, things classified that way are not actually classified. The whistleblower before Manning was very careful about what they leaked, and apparently went through the right chains. He was found guilty of misusing government property and given a slap on the wrist... And blackballed from working anywhere they had reach. But the law itself upheld that what he leaked was not classified.

Is there really likely to be any? The design is very different isn't it? Ghidra with llm plugins is likely at a place a determined person could find out.

Do you really think with that massive amount of open code, some would not be injected in windows kernel (or even .net with mono, or even windows userland with wine)? It is easier to hide it: it is closed source, and they are probably using the same hiding tricks than those used to hide coding AI generated code (usually some level of refactoring to adapt to windows data structures).

Seems like way more effort reading the linux code, copying and adapting it to windows, and actively "hiding" it, than just writing code that fits your situation from the get go.

In my experience, reading and understanding code takes a lot more time than writing from scratch, so I don't really see what windows developers (assuming they are somewhat competent coders, this assumption may not hold after around 2010 or so) would have to gain by coping from linux.


If you write from scratch, you reintroduce "solve" problems. Which it is why its https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Yep, that's why in many cases it is better to refactor already tested and debugged code.

Additionnally, the size of the code base increases the difficulty to spot 'obviously' refactored code from open source projects. There is a code complexity thresold. Coding AIs could help?

The only protection would be the honnesty of microsoft coders... wait, did I say "honnesty" and "microsoft coders" in the same sentence?


I read it as the EU was having a hard enough time with corruption before external pressure got involved.


Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.


The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.



HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...


What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.


GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.

Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.


Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.


Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).


Yeah the fundamental problem is there isn't a good way to write cross platform applications that interface directly with a usb device


pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI

I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.

https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.


Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.


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