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Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

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Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#201
One plus I will give to Microsoft is their moves in the direction to Right To Repair. Most recently they've made spare parts for an xbox joystick available to order [0], having done something similar for Surface laptops a while back. OTOH, Google pushes planned obsolescence hard the way they limit OS updates for Android devices and (to a lesser extent) Chromebooks.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/99615-you-can-now-repair-xbox-...

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#202

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

Meanwhile the development world has more or less shrugged its shoulders. The mass exodus of Github never happened, and aside from the dogmatic, VS Code seems to have a firm grasp on mindshare.

I moved from textmate to sublime to atom to vscode, and have had vim hovering in the background the whole time

If something better than vsc comes along, I'll move to it

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#203

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

This is exactly how I use YouTube. My biggest issue is the sponsored ads that get in the way of me paying not to have ads. I hope they find a solution for this.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#204
Any discussion of what happened to Google has to start with the two individuals who together still control most of the shareholders' votes and together still have (IANAL) effectively almost completely control over it, Page and Brin.

(Yes, they put someone else in as CEO: so what? Yes, they've largely disappeared from public view: so what? Page and Brin still exist and still control Google even if they have a lower profile than eg. Zuckerberg and even if they aren't jumping up and down in public like the current owner of Twitter: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence . If Sergey Brin is able to start poking around inside Google again because he's worried about competition from OpenAI https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-... then he's also perfectly well able to come back to scotch the Web Integrity API. The fact that he hasn't done the latter is simply a choice that he has made.)

Some people are too young to remember, and some seem to have forgotten, how much Google's rise to dominance was enabled by the perception that Page and Brin were two fine young men who could be relied on to act with restraint and a sense of public responsibility—a perception which Google itself of course encouraged. If they'd had the same public reputation as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison then the early history of would likely have been very different. (Now, more fool the rest of us for putting stock in that perception, of course, but that doesn't let Page and Brin off the hook either.)

So, what happened there? HR scandals and maybe health issues seem to have helped drive them out of public view. The end of Google's all-hands meetings also seems rather significant, though it doesn't seem clear whether it was more a cause or a consequence of other changes (Back in 2019 Steven Levy wrote "That’s why, when Google said Thank Goodness It’s Finished, it ended a lot more than a weekly meeting. Winter has come to Silicon Valley. And no beer for you." https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en... , which now seems prescient.) It also looks as if they simply got bored of running Google, and seem to believe that simply running Google is beneath them. Cut off from normal life, it also seems likely that they've been radicalised by an antisocial subculture of billionaires and cent-millionaires. But others must know much better than I do.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search has become nearly unusable This is a weird meme given how many billions of searches Google handles daily.

I legit have to go to bing (or duckduckgo if I wanna keep it private or so they claim at least) to get actual search results lol...

That's a fine anecdote but apparently unrelatable to the vast majority.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#208

I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…

I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen. I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same r…

> So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting.

If you just need those two things there's plenty of options - why are you forcing yourself into vscode ? VSCode is great because of the plugin ecosystem - if that's not your thing use something else - there's plenty of alternatives.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off a load of stuff. You don't have to install any plugins. VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects. Lots of separate VM dev environments with different editor configuration and tool requirements, and more or less only SSH config and keys to connect me to…

> VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects. To be that one guy, Emacs has had remote editing (without even needing to install anything on the remote server, unlike vscode) for forever with tramp mode. But other, more accessible/modern editors having it is definitely nic…

Everyone always brings up Emacs with regards to VS Code's remoting features, but I have yet to see anything that supports that it is anywhere close to VS Code.

With VS Code, I can develop across Windows, Docker, Linux, Linux running on WSL, and macOS with zero configuration aside from setting up SSH connection configs and installing the remote extensions with a button click. All the extensions work seemlessly when remoting. My settings also automatically sync by just signing into GitHub.

With Devcontainers, I don't need anything to develop except Docker and VS Code. I simply pull down a repository, open it in VS Code, and then VS Code sets up a container with all dependencies and configuration.

No, Emacs does not have this experience.

And I don't know the technical reasons why VS Code installs on the remote server, but I think it's important to note that you're not just editing remotely but developing remotely.

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