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Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

kodfabrik.com

471–480 of 530 posts

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#471

Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad. Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules . And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this. With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" ( https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin... ), and then wrought gl…

To me it sounds like both sides had their own (though different) tone-deafness.

"Oh I didn't know there was a company with that name" well, now you know. How would you like to go into NPM and find someone has created a package with your or your company's name?

At the same time Kik's answer of "we're nice people but we're sending the lawyers" does not come across as friendly.

And yes, NPMs response is not surprising. They're going to side with the trademark owner, unless there was a very good reason not to (like the MikeRowSoft case)

Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces. Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

No, you'll get a COVID shot.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#473
Why are google unable to offer ongoing services? Anything that requires management is always a disaster for them (DCMA notices on YouTube, hell any part of YouTube for creators, Nest, now this). I’ve worked at small trading companies where if you’re not directly involved in the act of trading, you’re just a cost centre to be minimised. Is it that?

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you including the change cost here, which will be many times higher for most of the population vs. HN? Even if I thought that Firefox was a better choice, I'd recommend to my friends and family to keep using whatever they are using unless they have to switch for some reason.

What, precisely, is the cost?

Effort, time, unlearning workflows and re-learning them in Firefox, etc. Switching costs would probably have been a better term to use.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces. Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1994 Microsoft didn't arbitrarily ban applications on their OS.

They had different knobs available to them, and it's not clear given the opportunity that they wouldn't try it. E.g. it was less common for PCs to be connected to the internet and receive OS updates, so they wouldn't have an effective way of using a policy like that. They certainly did their best to prevent any other OS from being on your hardware.

They still are not doing it right? You just get the "downloaded from internet" warning.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.

To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.

And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

I'm serious.

Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#479
post #269
post #157

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejec…

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

s/these days/always/

Here, fixed it for you.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bookmarking service sounded to me like something Google wanted to operate themselves, and I was thinking maybe that was related to why it got taken down. At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?

Google already has a bookmarking service at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ I have stuff saved in there dating from 2007 to 2015. Used to use a Firefox extension to load them in the sidebar.

I was surprised to see that is not the same bookmarks synced in my Chrome Browser. That's the case with https://passwords.google.com/ . Is their a webview of synced Chrome bookmarks (I couldn't find one) and what use case is google.com/bookmarks?
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