> When you install fresh Windows, it'll get activated automatically.
Same happens with some crapware provided by vendor. You can wipe drive all you want, but ASUS motherboard will ask Windows to automatically install "essential drivers", and to be specific - "Armoury Crate".
You can (partially) blame Microsoft for that. I still don't understand why it's seemingly OK for device manufacturers to distribute such crapware through Windows update. New keyboard? Oops, spyware. Printer on your LAN? Here, let me install these 16 utilities for you. Just give me a driver without any GUI tools. Or at the very least prompt me before installation.
If by worked you mean "worked so well they replaced all the big actors" then sure, nothing has worked.
But plenty has worked on a smaller scale. Raph Levien's Advogato worked fine.
There's also a reason most new social networks start up as invite only - it works great for cutting down on spam accounts. But once they pivot to prioritizing growth at all costs, it goes out the window.
PGP is niche. This would be far more mainstream. If you applied it to HN I could probably verify > 50 people already. For PGP I wouldn't know anybody...
Slower to implement new features, but still implementing them, just makes it the new Firefox. IE's larger problem was how popular it had been before it stopped implementing new features. It was like if Google got bored with Chrome and decided to stop all funding on it. People would be stuck on Chrome for years after that investment stopped because of all the Chrome-specific things built around it (Electron, Puppeteer, Selenium, etc and so forth).
Right now the world needs a lot more Safari and Firefox users complaining about Chrome-only sites and tools than it does people complaining about Safari "holding the web back". Safari's problems are temporary. Chrome is the new Emperor and IE wasn't bad because it stopped, it was bad because it stopped after being the Emperor for some time. People remember how bad the time was after the Empire crumbled, but it's how IE took so many other things down with it that it is easier to remember the interregnum after IE crumbled than to remember the heyday when "IE-only websites are good enough for business" sounded like a good idea and not a cautionary tale.
The biggest problem with IE from a developer standpoint wasn't the slow feature release cadence, it was that the features it did have worked differently from standards-based browsers. That's very much the position of Safari/WebKit today - code that works across all other engines throws errors in WebKit and often requires substantial changes to resolve.
Safari is also pretty popular on iPhones, in fact it has a full 100% market share. With browser updates tied to the OS, that means millions of devices have those "temporary" problems baked in forever.
> Right now the world needs a lot more Safari and Firefox users complaining about Chrome-only sites and tools than it does people complaining about Safari "holding the web back".
There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing).
> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing).
It's a matter of perspective. The safer perspective is: Safari isn't holding the web back, Chrome is moving too fast. Developers making Chrome-only sites and tools are moving too fast for the safety of web standards/web platform. Where one of the safety factors is "widely available in multiple implementations, not just a single browser".
> > Safari's problems are temporary.
> What are you talking about?
The point is that Safari may be moving slow, but it is still moving. It doesn't have enough users to hold the web back. It isn't "always a decade behind", it 's "a couple years to a couple months behind", depending on which caniuse or MDN Baseline approach you want to take.
There are some things Safari doesn't want to implement, but has registered safety or privacy or coupling reasons behind such things. Firefox is doing the same.
Safari isn't trapping website developers in "old standards forever", it is encouraging developers to use safe, private, stable choices. Chrome is "move fast and sometimes break things". Safari doesn't want to be that. That's useful for the web as a platform to have one or two browsers considering their implementations. It's a good reason to point out "Chrome-only" developers as being "too bleeding edge" (sometimes emphasis on the bleeding) and out of touch with standards and standards processes.
The only well supported and consistent argument I see in those links is that Safari is bad at PWAs. I agree with that. But (timely rant incoming) I also think everyone is currently bad at PWAs. The current ServiceWorker-based approach is brittle and hard to use because it is too low level and too tightly coupled to what seem to be Chrome-specific concerns. The previous manifest.json approach should have never been disabled in Chrome, it should have at least lived side-by-side and let developers vote by their feet, at least until a reasonably equivalent high-level manifest replacement was built.
I was just thinking about this this week because I have a webpage I built with offline capabilities and an excuse coming up where many of the webpage's users will be offline for a week but might have use for the webpage, but I can't easily turn it into a PWA because it was built as an MPA and there's no great high level tools for writing an MPA's ServiceWorker because most of the high level libraries are so (overly) focused on SPAs. I wish I could just put a manifest.json or some sort of zip archive users could download and have it share Local Storage.
I do pin a lot of this on Google engineers. The side effect is Safari is having a hard time implementing these "standards", but the real cause is the "standards" are over-complicated trash that are also hard to develop for. Everyone including the links you sent can see how Apple's App Store moat gives them an incentive to drag their feet on implementing these "standards" and yet no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards that are hard for anyone to use and harder for anyone else to implement is just another way to drag your feet and keep the whole web platform behind, without looking like you are dragging your feet.
It would feel different, too, if the fully declarative manifest.json approach hadn't briefly worked (well) in Edge (Spartan) and Firefox before Google derailed that standards train with "Chrome-first" ServiceWorker complications. Always seemed like one of the reasons that Microsoft just gave up on the web platform because they couldn't keep up with Google's machinations (and conflicts of interest) in Chrome.
It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.
The safari feet dragging/obstruction goes far beyond PWAs. The chart on this page is one of many examples showing how consistently far behind Safari is - they've been enormously behind chrome and firefox in coverage of tests for 7+ years. https://wpt.fyi/. And here's an extremely comprehensive article on the topic https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
As for standards, here's another detailed series to learn from https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/. Once again, you have it all backwards. Saying "no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards" is not only laughable, but just dumb - Google doesn't and, in fact, can't "make standards". Standards are something that comes about through the painful diplomatic process described in those links.
Moreover, it is quite clearly an institutional decision to hold back the web, or else they would allow for other browser engines to run on iOS rather than focing them all to be skins on webkit. Again, this is all documented in extreme detail in the articles on that site. If you find it to be still somehow lacking, the author is very open to discussion on bluesky or mastodon (I'd prepare far better though, because what you've said thus far would get eviscerated).
Also bizarre that you are saying that Google Play is somehow at the root of this supposed scheme to make web standards impossible for others to implement. Android is similarly against the web flourishing, but evidently not nearly as powerful in the greater Google enterprise as iphone/app store is in Apple.
As for MPA PWAs, there's nothing at all stopping you from serving pages from a service worker. There's plenty of valid and accessible ways to precache all the pages that a user might need while offline. Workbox (from Google!) makes it easy, but its also easy to hand-roll.
And, Microsoft most definitely has not given up on the web platform - they literally adopted and make contributions to chromium. The author of that site literally works at Microsoft now, coaching both internal and external teams on improving their use of the web, as well as contributing to standards.
I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.
If you are actually attempting to communicate in good faith, i can't recommend strongly enough that you read that entire site. And, likewise, read and support the work of Open Web Advocacy. https://open-web-advocacy.org/
> It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.
I'm saying this is exactly the problem. If the perception is that only one browser is "moving forward" and the rest are just chasing that moving target, that's not healthy and it is not a standards process. WHATWG has always been at risk of "regulatory capture" by Google or at least Chromium interests. More so than ever there are standards that seems like WHATWG rubber stamped whatever Chrome decided to do without larger consensus work with Safari and Firefox. That's really dangerous for the web platform. (And W3C lost to WHATWG and seems increasingly irrelevant as a standards body for HTML.)
I think we are all very lucky that ECMA hasn't so far shown the same risk and TC-39 (JS) continues to look overall diverse and healthy.
> Google doesn't and, in fact, can't "make standards". Standards are something that comes about through the painful diplomatic process described in those links.
This is why I put standards in quotes in most of that comment. I do think WHATWG has already signed off on Chrome-first things as "standards" that aren't in the sense of multiple robust implementations and a diverse enough number of stakeholders that aren't just using Chromium-derived codebases. I worry WHATWG is at risk of getting worse in this.
> As for MPA PWAs, there's nothing at all stopping you from serving pages from a service worker. There's plenty of valid and accessible ways to precache all the pages that a user might need while offline. Workbox (from Google!) makes it easy, but its also easy to hand-roll.
As very personal experience from building PWAs (and failing to build many more of them): Workbox is bloated and awful to work with and is bad enough at SPAs that trying to feed it an MPA makes me want to scream just thinking about it. Hand-rolling a Service Worker remains a nightmare because the API is awful to work with by hand, which is the whole reason Workbox exists. There's something very wrong with the APIs that right now the only answer seems to be "just use Workbox". That's not healthy for the web platform to be so dependent on a single vendor's tool to get over the hump of using a web API. (Even if that tool is open source. CVEs affect open source like everything else.)
The last time I was serious about PWA development I broke down in tears and switched to Ionic's Capacitor and Electron because browser wrappers are still too much easier than writing a PWA.
I know that isn't just me also anecdotally by the number of Electron apps running on my machine even right now (a bunch) and the number of PWA apps running on my machine (none).
Statistically Service Workers and Workbox are massive failures, and it isn't Apple's fault and it is weird to me claiming that it is entirely Apple's fault. If you don't want to blame Google or at least Chromium engineers, that's fine, we don't have to agree on that. But show me the app with a working PWA ServiceWorker that has a good reliable caching strategy, good offline-first support, and people use that offline-first capability regularly and I'll show you a unicorn. The APIs are terrible, the standards should be better. If we don't want to point fingers at why the current APIs and standards are so awful, can we at least find someone to point a finger at who is actively working to make them better? It doesn't seem to be "Just Use Workbox" Chromium. Who is actually trying to move the offline-first web forward towards pragmatic reality and not just "we support it in theory, with this one JS library, but very few are using it in practice and almost none successfully"?
> And, Microsoft most definitely has not given up on the web platform - they literally adopted and make contributions to chromium. The author of that site literally works at Microsoft now, coaching both internal and external teams on improving their use of the web, as well as contributing to standards.
When Microsoft switched to Chromium they soft laid off a lot of their web platform staff. Chromium Edge's outward development focus seems to be AI and First-Party Coupon Cutting Extensions.
Spartan Edge had ideals and seemed to really believe in the PWA as a first class application platform. For a time, I had a bunch of PWAs as daily use applications in Windows 8 and early 10 (not all of which I built myself, either). That era is certainly gone now. WebView2 is making some inroads in reduce the reliance on Electron by certain types of apps, but WebView2 isn't a PWA platform, it is another end run around it/away from it.
> I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.
> If you are actually attempting to communicate in good faith
You've strayed close enough to the realm of ad hominem attacks that I'm going to stop here. It doesn't sound like we are going to ever agree, but certainly not because I'm not debating in "good faith" or living in some "bizarro world". It seems rude to me to imply such accusations. Just because I have a different perspective doesn't make me a bad actor nor prove I have some sort of mental health issues. I may have experienced a different world than you have in my career, but there was nothing "bizarro" or worse about it. Different perspectives should be a joy to engage with, not an affront to ridicule. I'm sorry I couldn't find help you find common ground.
Does immutability implies using only open weight models? Both Anthropic and OpenAI keep deprecating/removing ability to run older versions of their models. And that means all previously recorded prompts would now produce slightly different output.
For me it is 1. Terrible quality of all rubbery/soft elements. 2. If it is original model (instead of ripping of existing set), it often contains huge, shell like elements, that can't be easily be in custom designs. 3. I guess the previous point doesn't really matter, when bricks are designed to be assembled once and are impossible to pull apart without hurting your fingers.
> Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.
That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.
Agreed. When I was working on TEEs/confidential computing, just about everyone agreed that FHE was conceptually attractive (trust the math instead of trusting a hardware vendor) but the overhead of FHE was so insanely high. Think 1000x slowdowns turning your hour-long batch job into something that takes over a month to run instead.
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