5 ms·

I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts o

I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support of Oracle against Google in the Java case). Pick a sports team if you must, but don't pick a brand and support them loyally. Be an interchangeable consumer, because this is how they model your behaviour anyway. Maximise that.

duxup 3y ago
> Uncritically Blindly pick one to trust sure that’s a poor choice. But we make choices based on our experience and what information we have. I won’t trust anyone forever blindly, but I will pick some for now over others who I find untrustworthy.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Right -- I mean if I was compelled by some weird fascist law to pick one brand to trust, I'd probably pick Apple. The fascists with the nicest things, for one thing, but they have also made commitments to privacy against which they can be measured. But I find it uncomfortable how much brain time we allow for making value judgements about brands -- it's a purely one-way emotional judgement, because as a general rule, not a single one of the people who run them would so much as piss on you if you were on fire in return. [ Edit: This is not particularly to be taken as an argument for open source; I don't think people in the open source space are inherently more trustworthy; they have just built mechanisms where I don't have to trust them individually or severally. We have to stop supporting "teams" in the tech world -- even at the level of employee loyalty. It's damaging, and not just to open source, but to human progress more generally. ]
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    IMO the fact that the open source folks built those mechanisms indicates they they are inherently more trustworthy. I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      > I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open. This may be true, but there are longstanding figures in open source who I would not trust as far as I could spit. It's a mistake to see the openness of open source or open access as a guide to trusting the people who produced it. Dual_EC_DRBG is a good example of why.
rhaway84773 3y ago
Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels. I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so. At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history. OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  "On the side of the angels" !== "angels". Just means tending to have the right motives. But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right? You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not. Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty. I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much. (Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)
- midoridensha 3y ago
  This just tells me that Google is by far the more trustworthy company. You don't have to worry much about them trying to destroy all the competition, and thus removing your choices. The key to Google is to simply not trust that their non-core products will actually last.
irusensei 3y ago
I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen. I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same reasons the average JavaScript Stan hates it: it’s keeping the web from implementing the latest usb-over-browser crap or wathever the-chrome-consortion (google) comes up with. Safari on iOS is the only thing that keeps “best viewed on Chrome” from happening in current year. Those are personal opinions though.
- rcme 3y ago
  You can disable plugin suggestions.
  - sah2ed 3y ago
    Please tell me how.
    - rcme 3y ago
      https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57664187/how-do-i-turn-off-the-extension-recommendations-notification https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57664187/how-do-i-turn-o...
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  You can turn off a load of stuff. You don't have to install any plugins. VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects. Lots of separate VM dev environments with different editor configuration and tool requirements, and more or less only SSH config and keys to connect me to them, from whichever machine I need to. It's the only Microsoft thing I use at the moment. I don't even have a github account.
  - 3y ago
Spooky23 3y ago
You nailed it 100%. Tech people are pretty gullible. Satya has a good PR operation and many people fall for the “wow it’s the new Microsoft”. I negotiate with them. They are way more difficult and hard nosed to deal with than in the Ballmer era. The salespeople work under a sword and while they aren’t Oracle, they are in that path. Trust doesn’t mean much with companies of this scale. You need to understand your contracts and the KPIs that drive decisions at the deal desk. If you are an individual, why are they giving you this bounty? With Google, their motivations are very clear, and they quickly course correct (ie kill the product) when their objectives aren’t met.
- anotherevan 3y ago
  > Tech people are pretty gullible. Yeah, I'd believe that.
- simondotau 3y ago
  > With Google, their motivations are very clear When people have said they don’t trust Google, that’s precisely the reason they give. Conversely I trust Microsoft and Apple more because their motivations are also clear, and less in conflict with my interests. I’ve no doubt that Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all equally horrible when it comes to negotiations behind-the-scenes. I’m sure they abuse KPIs as much as each other. As a customer none of that matters to me.
Justsignedup 3y ago
I just find it crazy. When I started my career and Balmer was ceo of ms, ms was the big bad. Don't trust anything ms releases because they'll use it to screw you over. Doc format? Evil. Xml format? Evil. Etc. Google, Google has your back. Today ms is the underdog in the digital world. Google is looking to take away every last bit of your privacy and use it against you. And they will kill anything they release in a year or two. In any case...
- tim333 3y ago
  The people running these things turn over. Individual people don't change much but stick a new CEO in and it's another roll of the dice.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Everyone has been that demon at one point or other (even Apple -- the "look and feel" lawsuits that are a bit before your time). I was thinking the other day about how sure I was that MySQL was toast as soon as Oracle acquired Berkeley DB and InnoDB, and then how sure I was it would be hobbled when they acquired Sun and got the whole shebang. What happened, actually, is that MySQL got better and better, with only a few annoying Oracley missteps along the way (permissions structure changes in a minor release for example). But what matters in that story is that Oracle vs (big bad) Google was substantially decided for Google, despite what Oracle (and Microsoft) wanted. Because it limits Oracle's power to use the MySQL APIs against competitors in the same way as it limits their ability to use them against Java competitors. This is what I mean: these are big competing interests. We are small interchangeable customers and consumers. It's worth avoiding investing belief in any of them.

duxup 3y ago

> Uncritically Blindly pick one to trust sure that’s a poor choice. But we make choices based on our experience and what information we have. I won’t trust anyone forever blindly, but I will pick some for now over others who I find untrustworthy.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Right -- I mean if I was compelled by some weird fascist law to pick one brand to trust, I'd probably pick Apple. The fascists with the nicest things, for one thing, but they have also made commitments to privacy against which they can be measured. But I find it uncomfortable how much brain time we allow for making value judgements about brands -- it's a purely one-way emotional judgement, because as a general rule, not a single one of the people who run them would so much as piss on you if you were on fire in return. [ Edit: This is not particularly to be taken as an argument for open source; I don't think people in the open source space are inherently more trustworthy; they have just built mechanisms where I don't have to trust them individually or severally. We have to stop supporting "teams" in the tech world -- even at the level of employee loyalty. It's damaging, and not just to open source, but to human progress more generally. ]
- bee_rider 3y ago
  IMO the fact that the open source folks built those mechanisms indicates they they are inherently more trustworthy. I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    > I mean, in many cases the honest party is also the one happy to do things in the open. This may be true, but there are longstanding figures in open source who I would not trust as far as I could spit. It's a mistake to see the openness of open source or open access as a guide to trusting the people who produced it. Dual_EC_DRBG is a good example of why.

rhaway84773 3y ago

Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels. I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so. At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history. OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
"On the side of the angels" !== "angels". Just means tending to have the right motives. But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right? You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not. Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty. I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much. (Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)
midoridensha 3y ago
This just tells me that Google is by far the more trustworthy company. You don't have to worry much about them trying to destroy all the competition, and thus removing your choices. The key to Google is to simply not trust that their non-core products will actually last.

irusensei 3y ago

I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen. I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same reasons the average JavaScript Stan hates it: it’s keeping the web from implementing the latest usb-over-browser crap or wathever the-chrome-consortion (google) comes up with. Safari on iOS is the only thing that keeps “best viewed on Chrome” from happening in current year. Those are personal opinions though.

rcme 3y ago
You can disable plugin suggestions.
- sah2ed 3y ago
  Please tell me how.
  - rcme 3y ago
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57664187/how-do-i-turn-off-the-extension-recommendations-notification https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57664187/how-do-i-turn-o...
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
You can turn off a load of stuff. You don't have to install any plugins. VS Code has one as far as I am aware uniquely-implemented feature -- remote editing -- which is absolutely invaluable to me as a freelancer with many long-term, infrequently-updated projects. Lots of separate VM dev environments with different editor configuration and tool requirements, and more or less only SSH config and keys to connect me to them, from whichever machine I need to. It's the only Microsoft thing I use at the moment. I don't even have a github account.
- 3y ago

Spooky23 3y ago

You nailed it 100%. Tech people are pretty gullible. Satya has a good PR operation and many people fall for the “wow it’s the new Microsoft”. I negotiate with them. They are way more difficult and hard nosed to deal with than in the Ballmer era. The salespeople work under a sword and while they aren’t Oracle, they are in that path. Trust doesn’t mean much with companies of this scale. You need to understand your contracts and the KPIs that drive decisions at the deal desk. If you are an individual, why are they giving you this bounty? With Google, their motivations are very clear, and they quickly course correct (ie kill the product) when their objectives aren’t met.

anotherevan 3y ago
> Tech people are pretty gullible. Yeah, I'd believe that.
simondotau 3y ago
> With Google, their motivations are very clear When people have said they don’t trust Google, that’s precisely the reason they give. Conversely I trust Microsoft and Apple more because their motivations are also clear, and less in conflict with my interests. I’ve no doubt that Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all equally horrible when it comes to negotiations behind-the-scenes. I’m sure they abuse KPIs as much as each other. As a customer none of that matters to me.

Justsignedup 3y ago

I just find it crazy. When I started my career and Balmer was ceo of ms, ms was the big bad. Don't trust anything ms releases because they'll use it to screw you over. Doc format? Evil. Xml format? Evil. Etc. Google, Google has your back. Today ms is the underdog in the digital world. Google is looking to take away every last bit of your privacy and use it against you. And they will kill anything they release in a year or two. In any case...

tim333 3y ago
The people running these things turn over. Individual people don't change much but stick a new CEO in and it's another roll of the dice.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Everyone has been that demon at one point or other (even Apple -- the "look and feel" lawsuits that are a bit before your time). I was thinking the other day about how sure I was that MySQL was toast as soon as Oracle acquired Berkeley DB and InnoDB, and then how sure I was it would be hobbled when they acquired Sun and got the whole shebang. What happened, actually, is that MySQL got better and better, with only a few annoying Oracley missteps along the way (permissions structure changes in a minor release for example). But what matters in that story is that Oracle vs (big bad) Google was substantially decided for Google, despite what Oracle (and Microsoft) wanted. Because it limits Oracle's power to use the MySQL APIs against competitors in the same way as it limits their ability to use them against Java competitors. This is what I mean: these are big competing interests. We are small interchangeable customers and consumers. It's worth avoiding investing belief in any of them.