Birchtree

You say that Windows is a Kraken, but it's been on a downward slide in my mind. I don't think Nadella gets enough flak for what is happening to Windows and Microsoft's attitude towards respecting users / privacy in general.

Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months

* Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-browser-url-leak-bing-privacy

* More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_start_ads/

* Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news

Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar.

I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here.

They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're…

I see people reporting that the extension has already been forcefully removed (or disabled in some cases) from their Chrome. This hasn't happened to me (v133 on MacOS).

I have primarily been using Chrome up until this point as I was under the impression that performance (and therefore battery life) is bad with FF on MacOS. Recent results seem to indicate that Chrome is in fact the worst offender [1].

Yesterday I uninstalled Arc as they have all but abandoned their browser to work on some AI crap browser (after saying they planned to support manifest v2 for the forseeable future).

Today I installed Orion Browser [2]. It's using webkit under the hood and seems to be far lighter on battery life than Chrome, Arc (Blink) and Firefox. They fully support FF and Chrome extensions and therefore UBO seems to be working (on the whole) very well.

[1] https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-mac-battery-life-but-does-it-i-tested-for-36-hours-to-find-out/

[2] https://kagi.com/orion/

Maybe the audience of FOSS is "self" and therefore I will obviously write something that matches my need.

Can you provide one example ?

because gnome is FOSS and I have heard complaint it's 'too simple'

and https://birchtree.me/blog/screwing-up-the-simplicity-of-it-all/ :
"Most people get maybe 2% of the potential of their Macs and Windows PCs today. Have you watched most people use a computer laterly? Most people I see have all apps in full screen all the time, no matter how big their screen is. Most people I see use keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, opening new tabs, but basically nothing else. I've seen numer ous Mac users download apps, open the DMG, and run the app from the DMG forever because they don't know you should move it to the Applications folder. Many people have a desktop full of files because the desktop is the file system."

(and SAP and any Oracle Enterprise products...)

MLC (http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/definition/multi-level-cell-MLC, http://birchtree.me/blog/nand-flash-party/), which is used quite a bit in consumer flash, is base n>2.

Those links claim devices use n=4, 8, 16,... but apart from practicalities, I don't see a reason why n=3, 4, 5,... wouldn't work.

Also, these devices may get produced in power of two sizes units, but they all use error-correcting codes that turn their effective size in something non-power of two.