• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Why are open source software monocultures bad? The vast majority of non-Windows OSes are Linux based. Teams who don’t like certain decisions of the mainline Linux team maintain their forks with the needed changes.

    Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.

    And we could get a functional one today by forking Chromium and never accepting a single upstream patch thereafter. I find it really hard to believe that starting a browser engine from scratch would require less labor. This is why I’m looking for an alternative motive. Someone mentioned licensing.

    Perhaps some folks just want to do more work to write a new browser engine. After all Linus did just that, instead of forking the BSD kernel.















  • The problem with smart light switches is that they sit on the AC path. This means they’re capable of starting fires. As a result you might want units that don’t have questionable designs or the cheapest relays inside. A proxy for that is being certified by a western certification organization. Something like UL, CSA, ETL, MET, TUF, etc. Both the certification and the grade of components used increase the price of such units. There are some cheaper certified switches too, but personally I wouldn’t install something that doesn’t carry the name of a North American (I’m in Canada) manufacturer on it. Leviton, Eaton, etc. And those are $50+. 😔