• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.

    The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.






  • The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
    I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.

    Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.






  • I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
    At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it either and then they’ll found Google.

    I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

    And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

    I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
    If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?




  • Yeah, that is a valid opinion to hold. I am saying that trust is garbage.

    You could consider compiling the KeePass app yourself, if you’re worried about that one in particular.
    A guy I used to study with, decided that he just wouldn’t have a password manager on his phone.
    I’ve certainly considered switching to a Linux phone for that, among many other reasons…