I've been doing consultancy for OSS development and one in-between company asked me to sign a contract that had a random clause in it somewhere that banned the use of OSS for work.
When I pointed this out, they said "just ignore that part".
It took a while to point out all the other stupidity in the contract (this wasn't the only part, just the most blatantly silly) and I ended up taking another one.
The objective is for American big tech to be the sole gatekeeper for your ability to log in to things. They would love for it to be required for everyone on Earth to own an Apple, Google, or Microsoft device to use the Internet.
This is a pretty unconvincing argument. It's just one guy saying "trust me, no one will abuse this." It's especially unconvincing when you've got this other Passkey dev directly contradicting it:
> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties. ... I've already heard rumblings that KeepassXC is likely to be featured in a few industry presentations that highlight security challenges with passkey providers, the need for functional and security certification, and the lack of identifying passkey provider attestation (which would allow RPs to block you, and something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations).
Then remove it from the spec and everyone is happy. I don't trust big tech companies to not use this feature if it is available. They have too much incentive to be the sole gatekeeper for your ability to log in to services.
Based on that, I believe Giles is mistaken in the Eurogamer interview cited by Wikipedia. The demo was on Gameboy, not NES. The also-linked NintendoLife article also mentions the demo was on the Gameboy. But I guess maybe that's actually more impressive!
There was a NES and later SNES prototype (By Pete Warnes and Carl Graham) that was IIRC the focus of the 3D chip discussions. X was cool, and a good selling point (and predated the NES work), but there was (again IIRC) no interest on going further with 3D on GB.
Seeing custom hardware on carts (Pilot wings, Mario Kart?) and having dealt with the custom hardware on the Konix, gave Jez a good avenue to explore with Nintendo.
> hope some typescript-like "typed shell" becomes mainstream someday
The trouble with trying to invent a new, more robust shell language is you basically just end up re-inventing any number of scripting languages (eg Perl, Python, awk, ...), so you might as well use one of those.
Most regular programming languages aren’t well suited for shells because they have a verbose syntax due to their readability goals. But with a shell, the vast majority of times you’re typing in stuff that you have no intention of reading back ever again.
I’ve done a fair amount of research here and I actually think we do need a new programming language for the shell (and then I created one).
Excellent article, thanks for the link. I do agree with the premise. But every time I write some Bash code and think there should be a better way to do this, I ask myself why I don't just learn Perl. I dunno. Feels like inventing another solution would just hit the old "there are now 14 standards" problem where it would solve some problems but introduce others (see: PowerShell).
If you’re vastly more productive using these alternatives then it would be silly not to use them.
If your colleagues want to reuse the same scripts then they can install the runtime too. It doesn’t mean they need to write all their future scripts using that runtime.
Did someone say... Xonsh?! It's tough to give up the niceties of zsh and it's various plug-in ecosystems, but I would love to be able to use Xonsh [1] as a daily driver for exactly the reasons stated. It is already the language I lean on over bash for most utility scripts with its kitchen sink built-ins.
> What's the hardest thing for a C programmer to unlearn when moving to Rust?
One thing that stood out to me going this direction is it's really hard to write hackish or intentionally-broken code in order to try to explore implementation options or debug an issue or test an algorithm. Rust requires you to handle error cases, and all possible values in cases, and is strict about memory access and stuff. But sometimes I just want to shove these bytes into this thing and see what happens, or hack in an early return or something, or half-implement this API to see if it "feels right" before committing to a full implementation, and Rust's enforced best practices stop me doing that.
(To be clear, I like Rust. This is just one thing that trips me up coming from C.)
Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.
Has Microsoft done much toadying? I don't recall seeing their name appear in many of the articles about tech CEOs and companies debasing themselves at Trump's feet. I've seen plenty about brown-nosing from Apple and Facebook and Amazon and obviously Musk, but I don't remember seeing much about Microsoft. I wonder if that lack of ingratiation is part of why MS is being targeted here but the other large tech companies aren't? Or maybe I just missed it.
> they will remove "AI controls" from normal Firefox
which is the question the original poster asked?
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