An egg cooker is a special appliance for people who feel like their pot doesn’t take enough electricity, and doesn’t cuss them out with a special beep when finished.

It’s pretty great when it’s done well though. But it’s so rarely done well.

I’ve heard appliances make beeps or sing songs that clearly meant “job completed successfully”, or “low battery”, or “I need rescued before I can work again” without any need to consult a manual.

Agreed, about keeping more goofy songs out of the kitchen.

But I’ll make an exception for my egg cooker.

My egg cooker beeps the equivalent beep to “I will fucking kill you all. Also these eggs are done. Seriously though, if I weren’t just an egg cooker, I would stab you right in the eye.”

I would trade that beep for pretty much any other sound, even a goofy song.

“extra fingers, too many fingers, not toasted, bad anatomy,” got me. It’s perfect.

Also, your username is perfect for this moment.

I hope I’m rocking that hard at 84.

My next non-alcohol bubbly drink will be in your honor, Larry.

Great summary bot, as ever. But missed this absolute gem from the comments:

“Thanks for helping me wardrive and steal the WiFi from that dentist, Larry.”

and how we could have achieved it all with no written records.

Our religion prevented using doc strings or code comments of any kind. What little software we had that actually worked correctly probably was aliens, come to think of it…

Good point.

I’m willing to accept a reality where the science magazines are constantly excited about every development in helicopter technology.

In the pull down area where flashlight and Bluetooth toggles go, GrapheneOS has options for disabling the camera and microphone.

Sounds great, but I can’t find “bouncer” on either the F-Droid or Google Play stores. Anyone got a link?

And virtual reality gets a free revival every other technology, while we’re at it.

I’m predicting VR coming back into the limelight, try again, shortly after everyone loses interest in AI.

Also, I’m still pissed that flying cars aren’t in the limelight more. I was promised daily updates, and I’m not seeing them. That’s the biggest proof that the media is completely disconnected.

I’ve seen this sentiment before, but I’m waiting to switch until I learn how to add the microphone and camera quick toggles included in GrapheneOS to LineageOS. Is there a project for that?

“No border, no nation, no gods, no masters, never gonna…” got me good. As bad as other things are, this is a delightful moment in the Fediverse, and you’re all a delight to share it with.

Heh. Jellyfin sees “Inside Out” very differently than I did…

“I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

It might be time to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I’m fond of Synology, at the moment.

You’re delusional.

We have established that. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Show me evidence that “the Windows kernel” is going away.

That’s what my other examples are evidence for. I’m extrapolating a trend I’ve seen many times before. I could easily be wrong.

I’m not stressing over it though, because I’m happy being a delusional old person.

My dude have you not seen marketshare for Chrome and Safari?

Yes. And it supports my point. Here’s the source code to Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/chromium

Here’s the license: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/main/LICENSE

And here’s the source code to Safari: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

There’s an advertising campaign by the current big players that everyone may as well accept their bullshit, because everyone else does.

I’m telling you, from experience, that putting up with that (current) bullshit is temporary.

They’ll innovative new bullshit, of course. That’s how the pattern goes.

When open standards win, it’s usually because the platform was built on them, like email or podcasts.

That’s the perception I’m trying to counter with the web technology examples I gave above.

I was there building the web, on proprietary products, and I believed that, myself.

I’m delighted to report that I was wrong.

It took decades, but the far less visible corner of the web running on open technologies is now the only portion we currently still have.

With a big delightful exception for Shockwave Flash, and the folks valiantly keeping it alive to preserve it’s part in gaming history.

Did XMPP win?

That remains to be seen. I’ll gladly accept XMPP as a point in the “against” column, as it has a long way to go, if it succeeds.

Google succeeded handily at their last round of embrace, extend, extinguish, against XMPP, by dropping support from Google Chat.

It’s worth noting that the question isn’t really whether XMPP replaces WhatsApp, it’s whether it can unseat SMS.

SMS is seriously entrenched. I don’t know it’s state of openess. My understanding is it’s mostly run/owned by a few large proprietary players.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

Again, I’m happy to concede that XMPP looks doomed today, like RSS did a couple decades ago.

Did RSS win?

RSS certainly hasn’t won, yet. But RSS is doing fine, behind the scenes. Most of the RSS the average person interacts with doesn’t look, to them, like RSS. There’s a lot of RSS still in wide use, today. Competing solutions are currently enshitifying (Google Search, Reddit, Facebook, Xitter), while RSS is still free and still just works.

That’s not an automatic win for RSS, until you consider that RSS has already outlived WebCrawler, Digg, MySpace and GeoCities, among others.

I’m calling it early in favor of RSS.

We’ve agreed that I am prone to do so, though.

Did Linux win?

Yes. Linux won. The vast majority of computation today runs on Linux.

Windows used to hold a serious percentage of web hosting. My best guess is it was around half. The current percentage is unknown, but generous estimates put it at 3%, at most. For some context, the Azure cloud (Microsoft’s web hosting that Office 365 runs on) is known to mostly run on Linux.

But to address the other part of your question:

Is Windows desktop going away?

Something mostly proprietary that costs money and is called Windows with be with us for a long time.

But the Windows kernel is counting it’s final days now, while most people haven’t noticed.

The Windows kernel is cool, but it’s a pure cost center and no longer offers anything that Linux doesn’t.

Game developers noticed, this year. I personally, held onto Windows desktop for decades, solely for gaming. I suspect the shift this year will turn out to be a key moment in the spin down of the Windows kernel.

A desktop OS has a ton of moving pieces. We’re currently seeing the natural trend for those pieces to take advantage of existing open solutions.

I predict that we will see more and more of that, until the switching cost reaches the current low cost of switching web browsers.

The farther niche it goes, the less open it has to be, on principle of utility.

That’s a great point! I kind of skipped over, that. Good add, thanks.

who? are you talking to?

Sorry. Movie quote. The Big Labowski. Check it out. It’s fun. For context, the guy that says that line is a blowhard, not to be taken too seriously. (Like me!)

I don’t know what any of these things are but I’m pretty sure they’re not popular social media platforms. If you don’t understand why that matters then you have a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation as it stands.

I understand network effects. All of my examples had large network effects supporting them, in their time.

Seriously. Open standards win. It takes flipping forever sometimes. But they do. Check into the screwdriver thing. It’s a cool read. Or for something more recent, the histories of open and closed web browsers. I think you’ll find it encouraging.