How about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.
How does the extension model work with MS? I did a similar move to chromium and eventually had to move to firefox when they pulled the plug on ad blockers.
I am more interested in how MCP can change human interaction with software.
Practical example: there exists an MCP server for Jira.
Connect that MCP server to e.g. Claude and then you can write prompts like this:
"Produce a release notes document for project XYZ based on the Epics associated to version 1.2.3"
or
"Export to CSV all tickets with worklog related to project XYZ and version 1.2.3. Make sure the CSV includes these columns ....."
Especially the second example totally removes the need for the CSV export functionality in Jira. Now imagine a scenario in which your favourite AI is connected via MCP to different services. You can mix and match information from all of them.
Alibaba for example is making MCP servers for all of its user-facing services (alibaba mail, cloud drive, etc etc)
A chat UI powered by the appropriate MCP servers can provide a lot of value to regular end users and make it possible for people to use their own data easily in ways that earlier would require dedicated software solutions (exports, reports). People could use software for use cases that the original authors didn't even imagine.
It would, but the point of MCP is that it's discoverable by an AI. You can just go change it and it'll know how to use it immediately
If you go and change the parameters of a REST API, you need to modify every client that connects to it or they'll just plain not work. (Or you'll have a mess of legacy endpoints in your API)
Not a fan, I like the "give an LLM a virtual environment and let it code stuff" approach, but MCP is here to stay as far as I can see.
How does it remove the need for CSV export? The LLM can make mistakes right? Wouldn’t you want the LLM calling the deterministic csv export tool rather than trying to create a csv on its own?
I think the design is bad: my girlfriend would never wear it. Maybe they know already and that's why the webpage contains only picture of male hands.
Given the many smartwatches on the market which can do so much more, are lightweight and some of them with acceptable battery life (Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit), a smartring is of very little interest to me. But I often struggle to understand why certain products fascinate people, so I may be totally wrong and I wish the makers best of luck.
Yeah, I have to wonder what lead them to these color choices. Not sure why they wouldn't include a white option or any other good neutral colors that actually go with silver and gold. And I think the number of people willing to wear a matte black ring is quite low, especially among women.
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
Ant did not include IF THEN ELSE, unless you added the contrib package.
If you understood the paradigm, you could write branches in Ant files simply using properties and guards on properties ("unless"). Using IF in Ant was basically admission of not having understood Ant.
This said, I used Ant for a very limited amount of time.
As of Ant 1.9.1, you can use 'if' and 'unless' attributes on any task or element in a target. I stopped using Ant a long time ago, but this was a pleasant discovery when I had to pick up an old Ant based project recently.
I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.
I passed the PDF to Claude and asked it to check if there is any part of the document that states that google deprioritizes good search results in favor of advertisement. Here is the output from Claude:
Yes, the document contains highly significant factual findings by the Court regarding how Google deprioritized organic search results in favor of advertising. The most significant findings: The Court documents that the positioning of Google's AI features (AI Overviews, WebAnswers) on the search results page reduced users' interactions with organic web results - deliberately.
Relevant text:
"Some evidence suggests that placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results (i.e., the traditional "10 blue links")."
And:
"Placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results where Google's WebAnswers appears on the SERP"
Important note: these are not "admissions" in the sense of Google voluntarily confessing, but rather factual findings by the Court based on evidence presented during the trial - which is legally even more binding.
While I understand the reasons behind this campaign, I have mixed feelings about it.
As an iPhone user, I find it frustrating that deploying my own app on my own device requires either reinstalling it every 7 days or paying $100 annually. Android doesn't have this limitation, which makes it simpler and more convenient for personal use.
However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store, I take a different view. In my opinion, stricter oversight is beneficial. To draw an analogy: NPM registry has experienced several supply chain attacks because anyone can easily publish a library. The Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace for their library. This additional requirement, along with a few extra security checks, has been largely effective in preventing—or at least significantly reducing—the supply chain attacks seen in the NPM ecosystem.
Given the growing threat of such attacks, we need to find ways to mitigate them. I hope that Google's new approach is motivated by security concerns rather than purely economic reasons.
Android already has this strict oversight, in theory, in the form of the Play Store. And yet.
Personally I feel much more safe and secure downloading a random app from F-Droid, than I do from Google, whose supposed watchful eyes have allowed genuine malware to be distributed unimpeded.
> In my opinion, stricter oversight is beneficial.
I agree; stricter oversight is beneficial for the official app store. It should not be necessary (and neither should Google's (or Apple's, or Microsoft's, or the government's, etc) verification be necessary) for stuff you install by yourself.
> The Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace for their library.
This means that you will need to have a domain name, and can verify it for this purpose. (It also has a problem if the domain name is later reassigned to someone else; including a timestamp would be one way to avoid that problem (there are other possibilities as well) but I think Java namespaces do not have timestamps.)
> I hope that Google's new approach is motivated by security concerns rather than purely economic reasons.
Maybe partially, but they would need to do it a better way.
If the manufacturer wants to offer verification of developers, this should be an optional feature allowing the user to continue the installation of applications distributed by unverified developers in a convenient way.
Making this verification mandatory is an absolute non-starter, ridiculous overreach, and a spit in the face of regulators who are trying to break Google and Apple's monopoly on mobile app distribution.
I don't understand how you can have mixed feelings about this.
> However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store,
This isn't about publishing apps to the Play Store. If that's all this was about, we wouldn't give a shit. The problem is that this applies to all stores, including third party stores like F-Droid, and any app that is installed independently of a store (as an apk file).
> Given the growing threat of such attacks, we need to find ways to mitigate them.
How about the growing threat of right-wing authoritarian control? How do we mitigate that when the only "free" platform is deciding the only way anybody can install any app on their phone is if that app's developer is officially and explicitly allowed by Google?
Hell, how long until those anti-porn groups turn their gaze from video games and Steam onto apps, then pressure MasterCard/Visa and in turn Google to revoke privileges from developers who make any app/game that's too "obscene" (according to completely arbitrary standards)?
There's such a massive tail of consequences that will follow and people are just "well, it's fine if it's about security". No. It's not. This is about arbitrary groups with whatever arbitrary bullshit ideology they might have being able to determine what apps are allowed to be made and installed on your phone. It's not fucking okay.
My elderly father unknowingly installed an application on Android after seeing a deceptive ad. An advertising message disguised as an operating system pop-up convinced him that his Android phone's storage was almost full. When he tapped the pop-up, and followed instructions he installed a fake cleaner app from the Play Store. While the app caused no actual harm, it displayed notifications every other day urging him to clean his phone using the same app. When he opened it, the app — which did nothing except display a fake graph simulating almost full storage — pressured him to purchase the PRO version to perform a deeper cleanup.
In reality, the phone had 24 GB of free space out of 64 GB total. I simply uninstalled the fake cleaner and the annoying notifications disappeared.
How such an app could reach the Play Store is beyond me. I can only imagine how many people that app must have deceived and how much money its creators likely made. I'm fairly certain the advertisement targets older people specifically—those most likely to be tricked.
For better or worse, I'm pretty sure that such an app would never land into the Apple App Store.
So you're saying Google is doing fuck all to protect customers on their already locked down store, right? This doesn't sound like it will be addressed by Google extending developer registration outside of their store at all if they can't even address obvious scam apps that they're already promoting. And to your point, yes, Apple probably does do a better job of maintaining their app store, that way they can prevent some of the push back on iOS being so locked down. An iPhone sounds like the right device for your father.
Litmus test: Can you get NewPipe or other Youtube clients onto an Android phone? This is non-malicious software that users want to run but could reduce YouTube's profits.
It's a nice effect, but I don't think it's usable in practice, because it's not accessible for visually impaired users: not enough contrast between foreground text and background
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