My best recommendation is a good git GUI. I really like Gitkraken (proprietary & freemium unfortunately, but a pretty generous free plan). I’m now more advanced than many of my coworkers because it helped me form an intuitive understanding of git.

DuckDuckGo has an app which can block trackers system-wide on Android

Game mechanics can’t be patented, only game assets (character models, etc) I’m wrong!

Lol chill, I use Firefox. I can still call out good things in other browsers even if I don’t like the browser as a whole for other reasons. None of what I said there was in support of chromium.

Brave can make micro payments to content creators based on the number of views to the site, directly supporting content creators without ads or the need to join the patreon for each creator. It’s a fully optional system, off by default but prompted upon opening the browser for the first time. It’s a cool idea but they kind of spoiled it by making it be a crypto wallet with ads to earn the crypto.

Also, Brave doesn’t have a subscription…?

Honestly, despite the crypto, good on Brave browser for trying to subvert the advertising model by providing an actual monetization alternative

Satisfies both the unstoppable, never ending march of time AND dad rock: Time by Pink Floyd

I did one similar! Used autohotkey to hide the task bar at random intervals and pop up a warning that said “system out of memory”. Only way to get it back was autohotkey or a reboot. It would restart daily and on login so it would keep happening. And I hid it as “Nvidia game scanner service.exe” in the Nvidia bloatware folder so it looked innocent. Had a good laugh about that one

Yeah, never thought about this before, but how do blind users deal with captchas?

Rust is a lot more niche and intimidating of a language compared to Swift. Swift is familiar to C++ devs, while modernizing the language and toolchain, and providing safety guarantees.

Also, Safari on Windows had low usage, and was probably a pain to maintain. Swift cross platform is more about abstracting out Apple specific things (like the standard library and UI toolkit). Apple has already been investing multi-year efforts into Swift on the server for longer than Safari on Windows existed. The last couple versions of Swift (~3-4years of development) have been almost entirely focused on safe concurrency, which is intended for server-side development.

Actually, this isn’t true. Apple has a vested interest in cross platform Swift. They’ve been pushing hard for Swift on Linux because they want Swift to run on servers, and they’re right to. Look at how hard JavaScript dominates on the server-side because of one language everywhere.

I’ve worked with Swift a bunch for Apple platforms, am mildly familiar with how it works on other platforms. It should be able to compile on a wide host of platforms with minimal/no issues. The runtime dependencies are localized to Apple platforms, and I think the dominant UI toolkit on other platforms is a Swift port of qt. So it should be just fine?

What do you have against the number 4?

That’s what decentraleyes does as well

This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!

What’s wrong with Business Insider? Genuine question

You declare it in the package.json as a category when publishing. It’s completely self-selected with no oversight, review, or enforced permissions.

I believe they’re referring to lower down in the article, where the researchers analyzed existing extensions on the marketplace:

After the successful experiment, the researchers decided to dive into the threat landscape of the VSCode Marketplace, using a custom tool they developed named ‘ExtensionTotal’ to find high-risk extensions, unpack them, and scrutinize suspicious code snippets.

Through this process, they have found the following:

• 1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
• 8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
• 1,452 running unknown executables.
• 2,304 that are using another publisher’s Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.

FYI, Jenkins has an endpoint to validate the pipeline without running it, and there’s a VSCode extension to do this without leaving the editor: https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2018/11/07/Validate-Jenkinsfile/