8 ms·
I am personally grateful to Microsoft for 1) saving github, because I love github 2) reducing the amount of private information that will go into Google databas
by devereaux 8y ago
I am personally grateful to Microsoft for 1) saving github, because I love github 2) reducing the amount of private information that will go into Google database, because I fear Google.
Years ago, Google was about do no evil and Microsoft was the evil empire. It's funny how we've gone full 180.
- opan 8y agoNot that either is great, but I definitely still think Microsoft is more evil. At least Google contributes to Coreboot and puts it on all their Chromebooks.
- pjmlp 8y agoIncluding "This web site works best on ...".
- devereaux 8y agoAnd google pestering me to install Chrome whenever I make the mistake of visiting google.com with Edge. Sorry, but Edge is faster and more power efficient on my Windows Tablet. So please stop asking. Actually, no. In fact, please keep asking google. It reminds me to fix my muscle memory and type duckduckgo.com when I'm not relying on the default search engine.
- saagarjha 8y agoddg.gg is shorter and redirects to the duckduckgo.com website.
- tonysdg 8y agoSwitch to DDG as your default, and you can search using Google semi-anonymously in even fewer keystrokes by just typing "g! <search query here>" (or just using DDG as-is).
- opan 8y agoBangs are so nice. They're my primary method for searching various sites. I've actually never really looked at a list of them, they just feel intuitive and often exist for sites I want to look at. There are the big ones like !w for wikipedia, but there's also !aw for archwiki, !mal for myanimelist, and even !naruto for narutopedia. I've even used them to get around site issues. I recently had an issue with my browser where I couldn't search on MAL, but searching via bangs worked, so I just kept doing that.
- saagarjha 8y ago!g, you mean.
- shmerl 8y agoAnd you think trusting MS is a better idea?
- dvtrn 8y agoIt may alleviate some cynicism to look at this as less a matter of implicit 'trust' and more a matter of 'best possible outcome'. At least IMO. As it is, Microsoft has been doing some pretty good, developer-centric work and I for one appreciate that. That isn't to say Google isn't, but again: best possible outcome? Like someone else brought up: I feel more comfortable with a product being owned by Microsoft and maintained for longer than 18 months before the devs get bored with and put it in front of a firing squad so they can go create yet another messaging platform (only to later kill that too)
- shmerl 8y agoI don't feel comfortable with MS owning it at all. I wouldn't feel comfortable with Google owning it either really, but MS is IMHO worse, especially if you consider issues relevant to FOSS (which should be important for users of Github obviously). Just see who was on what side in the dispute about copyrightability of APIs.
- on_and_off 8y agoof course ! Who can afford to remember more than the last 3 minutes ?
- devereaux 8y agoIt's funny, I find this attitude a lot with guys over 35. A quick example: I was at a conference last year in a group. Two people mentioned they worked for google. I mentioned an anecdote - how I had migrated parts of a research project from google maps to bing maps, because of a much better pricing for the simple things we needed (yet in a large volume, millions of API requests). They asked why, and I explained that besides the money saved, like a few friends, I tried to favor any credible alternative to google. They laughed it out with some arrogance :-) It's funny how the google of now reminds me of the Microsoft of the 1990s - a scary company I'd rather have nothing to do with.
- posixplz 8y agoAs opposed to all that private information going into Microsoft's databases? Microsoft has similarly aggressive data mining projects and is always looking for large sets with which to train AI.