A few from "the other side" came over just to troll, then quit when they were blocked rather than getting rewarded with engagement.

Thankfully Bluesky isn't a private social media company that just wants to juice its engagement, which only leads to a gradual enshitification of the product (and society's discourse in the process).

That is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. There have been many versions over time with many ways to do things. It has almost infinite flexibility which means quite a bit of complexity. There are quite a few ways to not just shoot your own foot, but blow it completely off.

You can start a new project from scratch and if you stick to a specific subset of C++, you can create safe code. That relies on someone knowing what subset they should be using, which could be difficult for newcomers to the language. If you're working in an existing code base, there could be a minefield already in the code.

A language like rust has the advantage of starting from scratch, so there isn't an old unsafe way to do things that they need to remain compatible with. They can make the defaults safe so that it is harder to get into unsafe territory. Of course they have the same issue as C++ in that they need to work with C code, which then throws some of that safety out the window.

At times this strategy does work for them. Teams has made major headway thanks to it suddenly appearing as part of Office and even auto-starting on many Windows machines. They were successful at cutting into Slack and Zoom's businesses by forcing Teams onto the whole corporate world. Why use something else when Teams is already there. They're hoping to do the same with AI.

However, this Copilot stuff seems extra forced and comes off as desperate. They've re-branded their entire office suite to be "Copilot", plastered Copilot icons into most of their apps, and even put Copilot buttons onto new computers. They cranked up the hype way too high, and now they're basically saying "we've spent so much money on this; please use it!".

From a branding perspective, this reminds me of when they were hyping .NET. They put the name on everything including things it had nothing to do with. The end result was that people were confused about what .NET was. If people are confused about what the product is and why they should use it, they'll probably just stay away from it.

Emacs has a doctor feature based on ELIZA, which dates back to the 1960s.

Maybe if we throw a few more billions of dollars at it, modern AI systems will be able to do everything that emacs can.

Or that tactic could massively backfire. An American company deciding they don't like the rules and invoking a bargaining tactic of threatening to leave could create an uproar against Apple. This is especially true in the current political climate. US tech giants aren't exactly at their peak of popularity right now. The desire to reign in these companies may see people side with the government on this one.

The bigger worry for the EU is reprisals from Trump, but since Trump is constantly threatening the EU with tariffs anyhow it could be that the threat is no longer effective. If he threatens them no matter what they do, they have no incentive to change their behaviour to avoid it. The constant threats have already set popular opinion against the US (leading to people already voluntarily boycott US produced goods), so they'll have the public's support in any confrontation.

Actually the above is not correct, as it sounds like they aren't keeping the warehouses either. They don't own them to begin with, but now they won't be a tenant in them.

So in essence they're keeping everything the same, except the unionised employees will now be non-unionised contractors who technically don't work for Amazon. They just drive Amazon's packages around between Amazon's warehouses and Amazon's customers.

Most places in Canada and the US would allow that sort of union busting to happen without batting an eye. Quebec might not.

Amazon will continue doing as much business in Quebec as before. They just contracted out a bunch of operations that used to be in house. It may be against Quebec's labour laws to outsource everything just to get rid of union workers, but we'll see if the province has any ability to stop them.

True, but if a small shop with a small staff can move 50 VMs in one day, what could a larger shop manage in one year?

Proxmox's import from esxi is slick.

Plus a pile of websites nowadays are just an endless scroll, so vertical space can have utility in the browser.

I suspect the idea is that this will make it easier to move existing codebases to Rust. They can start by refactoring the C bits which can't be automatically converted, and let the converter do the rest.

It seems they think this is a better approach than automatically converting the C codebase to unsafe Rust, then trying to refactor that into safe Rust.

In any case, I suspect that anyone looking to use this type of conversion is seeking to do new development in Rust. They won't write new applications or libraries in C and then convert them over. I could see this being used to create Rust versions of popular C libraries.

It is annoying to have crapware that nobody asked for installed without asking.

It is also annoying that Microsoft is writing so many of its applications as web apps, even the "native" ones. They spend massive resources building things like WinUI and MAUI and pushing developers to build native applications in them, yet when Microsoft wants to build an application for Windows their own developers use something entirely different.

"Also now let's argue whether we adopt permanent summer time and winter time."

This is often where this whole thing can be derailed. The majority of people want to stop changing clocks, but they can't agree on which time to stick to.

Personally I'd keep it on DST permanently. We're already running on that clock for the vast majority of the year. We only use "standard" time for a little over 4 months. Where I live, 2 of those months have such short days that it is dark both morning and evening, so shifting the hours makes no difference. That leaves 2 months of the year where you could make an argument that standard time is the better choice, and even there much of it comes down to personal preference (ie. are you a morning person or not).

When Alberta, Canada put DST to a vote, the options were to abolish it and stay on daylight time permanently, or keep changing clocks. The main reason permanent daylight savings was chosen is that is what our west coast neighbours have provisionally chosen to do (though they're all waiting for one another to do it before they switch). A lobby emerged advocating the merits of standard time and the dangers of staying on daylight time. They even had some bogus research showing how Alberta should really be 2 time-zones over from where they'd end up. It was nonsense funded by a special interest group, but it worked. Despite almost everyone agreeing that changing the clocks needs to stop, the referendum failed because some people didn't get their preferred time zone.

Right before every clock change, there is a flood of people complaining that we should abolish this stupidity already. But if you ask them if they voted to abolish it in the referendum, many regretfully say no. They wish they had.

Before Chrome, Google didn't have their own browser and just sent huge amounts of money to Firefox. Bringing the browser in house led to some innovation, but it also led to some abuse of power.

The only major browser focused company who has managed to stay alive and independent was/is almost entirely funded by Google. The other browsers with decent share (Edge, Safari) are all bundled with a platform just like Chrome is bundled with Android and ChromeOS. Any other browsers are just slight variations on Firefox or Chromium that couldn't survive without those projects.

It seems silly to allow Microsoft and Apple to bundle their own webkit based browsers with their platforms and then require Google to divest Chrome and not to have a browser at all. Plus how do you spin off Chrome (or any browser really) and not have it 100% dependant on a partnership with Google/Alphabet?

I'm not sure what the answer is. Google is definitely abusing their position to support their ad and search business, so something should be done about it. Apple rejects some of Google's additions because they're not an ad business and want to protect the privacy of their users, so that is great. They also purposefully hold back additions that would allow the browser to be a full-fledged application platform that would allow people to sidestep their app store (and therefore their cut). The browser space is a mess of competing corporate agendas.

Simply works and says nothing at all. It looks like someone took a generic website template and changed the company name and a few details.

It is sad that the bar for being a decent website is that it isn't intrusive and annoying.