The sale of Pebble was supposed to include the developers jobs. They found out very late in the game that this wasn’t true. He screwed his devs on the way out. Basically said “fuck your job, good luck.”. Real shitty way to handle it, imo.

Coupled with the fact that it meant all real support for Pebble was gone as well, it really was about Micigovsky making out with a bunch of money and saying “good luck, I dont actually care what happens” to his devs and the people who bought a Pebble.

The way it shook out just doesn’t make me trust him. I think he would do the same thing again, sell to a more scummy third party who will strip Beeper for profit when he isn’t making enough money.

I honestly distrust their business model as a successful long term one, based on his past.

Guy behind Beeper fucked Pebble smartwatch users and developers on his way out.

So when Beeper isn’t making enough money and he sells it… Will you trust who he sells it to to keep it secure instead of aiming to use data for ads or some shit?

I won’t.

I’ll admit, the reason I ended up reading the whole article were the words “Ben Schwartz.”

Scott Aukerman is an absolute wreck over this news.

No problem. I remember being mildly irked about it at the time, because while I disagree with his choice to make that donation to that group, and understand the feelings of LGBT people working at Mozilla and how knowing his politics impacted them… He handled the public response to it professionally. He didn’t double down like conservative politicians these days and start shouting about “gays are groomers” or something. He owned it and stepped away, which should at least speak to him not being completely homophobic and able to take ownership of how his personal politics affected others. You see so little of that these days, that when someone acts professionally after perceived wrongdoing, it seems sad when people don’t recognize it.

Also, I never saw any news of him being proven to have made any discriminatory moves while in Mozilla at all. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember employee complaints of being treated differently before the news of his donation broke. Like I said, I can understand how that news can change how you feel about your boss, but if your boss never made an outward show of it in a work environment and a news report on his political donations is what it took for you to know his politics… it means he was probably being pretty fucking professional at work and trying to not let his personal politics infect how he treated his coworkers and employees. *shrugs

Oh for sure, it didn’t undermine your point excessively, just a little, I was mostly just being cheeky, just how it read to me. As I said, I agree with all the things you’re saying. Cheers!

That’s fair, but in that case you might just say “they likely profited handsomely off this venture” or something similar, because if you reach for dollar amounts like that, it can kind of undermine your point.

Also, and I hate to defend a homophobe here, but if we’re going back to the details…

It all sprang up because he gave $1000 to the Prop 8 campaign for banning same sex marriage in California.

Scummy, to be sure, but it’s not like he orchestrated the whole campaign or fully financed them. $1000 is barely enough to pay for one TV ad to play exactly one time on a local California TV station. I understand, yes, that when you add that to the rest of the donations, it was a juggernaut, but it still felt a little like punishing someone for having different politics. I also understand that it would be hard to work under someone like that knowing what his politics are, and questioning if that was going to impact fellow LGBT employees. Super valid reasons to be upset that he was put in the top leadership position.

His politics are shitty, to be sure, but a single $1000 donation definitely always seemed a little overblown to me. Especially since he chose to resign after just 11 days, while Mozilla had tried to convince him to stay on in a different role. No one in leadership roles stepped down over him, he made the choice to save the organization instead of himself. That at least showed some sense of humility. So I don’t know, not the greatest guy, and his current trajectory with Brave hasn’t been so great either, but he at least showed decorum in that situation.

However, that situation also put Mozilla on the defensive, having to put out a FAQ about how they weren’t turning into an activist organization, or how you didn’t have to ascribe to and agree on every political issue to work at Mozilla.

It was just bad business all around.

making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users

I agree with this post completely but for some reason you finishing with this makes me chuckle.

Oh no! Thousands! They might be able to pay rent for a month or two!

I’m just being cheeky, and while its true what they did was scummy, it also feels like a really… smallish amount of money?

If we’re literally just talking thousands, and not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

But yeah, fuck Brave.

Firefox gang and Hardened Firefox gang here to stay.

Mozilla’s got its own problems but that’s a story for another day.

Cheers, mate! I don’t use Apple stuff very often, but I do strongly respect their engineering and the fact that they’re certified UNIX for macOS.

There just needs to be far less gatekeeping and acting like one solution fits all in the PC community in general.

Wish we could cancel Executive Orders 12333, 13355, and 13470, all of which are used against US citizens.

Thanks Reagan and Bush, motherfuckers.

I get that, but Windows/Powershell isn’t case-sensitive, so you can type it all lowercase if you want (I do).

Linux on the other hand is case sensitive despite most GNU tools defaulting to all lower case. There’s definitely a bunch of case-sensitive switches in Linux CLI applications.

There has been optional case-insensitive file system support in Linux for a few years now, though.

Nah, not dickish at all. None of us can know everything. I’d rather be informed that I’m wrong than continue walking around being wrong.

True, but if your repetitive, boring task can be replaced by a well-put-together Excel spreadsheet or a few simple scripts, you’re looking at replacing yourself at your own job.

I’ve definitely seen people replaced by the work-saving scripts they wrote. Corporate doesn’t care about pesky things like “maintenance” or “security updates” or even “that command we used in the script is now deprecated.” It works well enough now, and now they consider you “redundant.”

Some folks keep doing it the repetitive boring way to keep their bosses from shitcanning them for creating something their bosses are absolutely too dimwitted to do themselves. It’s never nice to do something that saves you effort and the response is your boss shitcanning you and then saying “I made this.”

Anyone who is anyone has fancy driving gloves, cap, and goggles!

Oop can’t forget the scarf!

EDIT: I gave you an upvote here because you don’t deserve downvotes for your well stated opinion.

I have done computer work for a bunch of little old ladies, and when they couldn’t afford to upgrade to new hardware, I would put a lightweight version of Linux on their computers for them.

Only one of them really struggled with the difference, and she wasn’t against learning, she just struggled. The rest handled the transition fine and didn’t do a lot of complaining that it wasn’t what they were used to. (Probably partially because I made clear what apps were what and put shortcuts to each on their desktop, each shortcut well labeled.)

I don’t think it’s unusual for people to “get used to” how certain things work and expect that. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty normal.

But I think there’s far less fear of change from regular people than you seem to think. I see far less addiction to the “brand” of Windows than you might think.

To use the car analogy, it’s like somebody who will only drive Fords, and is terrified of the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a car made by any other manufacturer.

I mean, lots of people are scared as hell of driving a stick shift and refuse to learn… soooo yeah. I’d say that’s a closer approximation. Because a Ford and a Chevy both have steering wheels and pedals all in the same place. You add that extra pedal and some folks lose their minds. Which at least makes sense because it is different.

Those are all true, but they also don’t apply to the vast majority of computer users.

1. Most people don’t need the speed of using only command line, especially when the programs they’re working with aren’t deeply tied to the command line. How is the command line gonna help a regular office drone writing up a new resume? It would be far easier and quicker for them to do it in Microsoft Office instead of spending hours learning how to do it with CLI.

2. Absolutely you can get more fine-grained information from the CLI, but for the vast majority of users, they won’t need to.

3. Literally almost no regular person has even heard of SSH or will ever need a reason to use it. It’s great that it’s helpful to us, but I can think of zero reasons most people would need this knowledge for.

4. You can also install a lightweight version of an OS for this, without needing to just dump to the CLI. Agreed that Windows doesn’t really have a light version, but this is also not a necessity. If you’re using a system that’s old enough to get bogged down by watching a YouTube video, that’s kind of a side effect of using such old hardware. In most cases people will have modern enough hardware for this to not be an issue or something the average computer user needs to know. Because most people aren’t doing massively demanding tasks on their computers (unless they left a lot of apps open).

5. It’s a great flexibility to have as a developer or as a sysadmin, it’s honestly practically a requirement for both.

All of these are super valuable to people who work with computers daily. My hairdresser doesn’t give a shit and just wants a computer that functions without confusing them because they went to school for hairdressing not PC maintenance.

I get what you’re saying, but you’re acting like these things are a lot more valuable to the average user than they really are. They’re way more important for people working in the industry, not so much people who just have a computer for writing emails, drafting resumes, and browsing the web.

My partner got into programming because of learning how to mod games on her Windows PC. The idea that Windows can’t be a path to wanting to program is just a little silly.

I’m not sure, but even with jailbreaking, iOS isn’t certified UNIX. It doesn’t have a command line shell built-in that you can access easily like macOS.

So I really meant “locked down” in the sense that you’re not getting easy access to command line interface that can access system files without jailbreaking/rooting first.

I do think jailbreaking and rooting is easier than it used to be, but I don’t mess with iOS devices much.

Thanks, I think I’m on a distro where it’s not set up properly (or I broke something, heh), since that has not worked for me. I did some search and saw some working examples though, so I get it. Although I’d still say the naming conventions for the programs in Powershell makes them far easier to sort through than they are with the man -k command.

Linux is great, but obtuse, not straightforward for a beginner. The fact that something like this can be broken out of the box is sort of proof of that. Linux expects a lot more of its sysadmins.