An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.
As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.
Fellow sysadmin here. I'm glad to see somebody else thinking about the practical side of this.
Google should know better. Chrome has local administrator permissions anyway (w/ its updater) so they should have installed a single copy for the entire machine.
It's not cool to give a damn about the people who keep mundane stuff like desktop infrastructure, file servers, etc, working, I guess. The wanton disregard to even talk to a single in-the-trenches corporate sysadmin seems like malice.
Google has not ever cared about the real world implications of their browser decisions in the past. I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't start caring for this occasion.
I tend to deal with unwanted installations by creating a zero length file with the name (weights.bin) and remove all permissions from all users, taking the ownership as well. While the download and friends commence they fail to overwrite it.
The tactic used to work even as prevention to common RPC exploits (viruses/worms) on windows as well (in the early 2000s).
Conspiracy theory: making the browser bigger makes it harder to run large quantities of headless versions, for all the useful (but anti-Google) things that enables. I suspect this is directly tied to the ongoing ascent of verification laws and other pieces of the drive towards authoritarian dystopia. They're basically DDoS'ing providers of browser-VM services with this.
Indeed. We look after a huge, very diverse set of users (university science faculty - many thousands in our faculty, but tens of thousands across all faculties and professional services teams). According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome has over 65% market share for desktops - not supporting Chrome would be overly restrictive.
Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us.
Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.
Except IT does that all the time in most companies. You don't get to choose your own OS. You have to use Outlook and Teams in most windows shops. Good luck getting approval for an Office alternative.
I wrote a fairly opinionated screed here but opted to delete it after I thought about it. I think I can summarize pretty succinctly: The business guides IT. Often cost reduction is the order of the day and, to that end, monocultures usually win out.
Because due to Google having a near-monopoly on the entire goddamn Internet, a shocking number of websites and services will refuse to work with non-chrome browsers.
And even when they work with non-chrome browsers if you run into an issue, you won't be able to get it escalated without trying with chrome (or lying and saying you did, I suppose).
I actually found it really reassuring and a little enlightening that he had so little to say about those technologies. I find it very easy to get sucked into a technology vortex (especially on Hacker News), where the imposter syndrome creeps in and you feel like a failure for not knowing some trendy technology that “everyone knows, duh!”. The next time I feel like that, I’m going to remind myself that Brian Kernighan doesn’t know Nix, only used Rust once (and didn’t like it) and doesn’t even know what Linux distro he uses. And no one would ever accuse him of being an imposter or a failure!
Related, I found that even after designating an application (iTerm2) as a "Developer Tool" in System Settings -> Privacy & Security, there were circumstances where notarisation checks were still carried out. Particularly, launching tmux then detaching and reattaching would cause the processes to no longer be exempt. This applies to any executable (+x), including shell scripts. I put together a test script that proves it at https://gist.github.com/davebarkerxyz/4111276ae1fb4a7566b271... (the second run is much quicker than the first one after a tmux reattach, but within applications marked as Developer Tools the times should be nearly identical).
Fortunately as of Sequoia (15.4.1), I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue.
Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.
Anyone who has maintained code that written by engineers new to the industry, who didn’t understand the context of a system or the underlying principles of what they’re writing, may disagree.
This is what it currently says for me on the homepage when I view it:
Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now
A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can still log in to download your data.
> We regret that a U.S. law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19 and force us to make our services temporarily unavailable.
> We're working to restore our service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned.
Exactly an hour later, it changed to:
> A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
> We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
Yeah, having the whole of the UK being one colour is pretty useless, given the huge disparity in wages and cost of living between central London and the rest of the UK.
They didn't even manage to get the UK right. Apparently whoever made this map doesn't know that the UK is the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and that Éire is only the bottom bit.
I wonder how that skews the figures. Are folk in NI paid more in line with GB or with Éire? I'm sure currency comes into play too, what with Éire using the euro.
I use a .xyz for my personal domain (I could get my real name as the domain, and it was cheap). I use FastMail for email. Deliverability has been fine, with one exception - Radisson Red hotels. I’ve had two occasions in the last year when I’ve needed to email different Radisson Red properties, and both silently dropped emails from .xyz domains.
The blog post mentions an open source license but I can’t immediately see it in the post or the repo (perhaps I’m just missing it). Any idea what license this is released under?
That appears to be the VirtualBox OSE license, copied from the original Oracle package, not the license for this specific release. It’s unclear how this new derivative or work is licensed.
The intention is to have this under the same license as the VBox open source release. If there is a way to clarify this more on the Github page, please advise. :)
Thanks for the clarification, that’s really helpful. I think a paragraph under a “License” header in the README just reiterating what you said in that reply would be pretty clear.
I’m sure some people would make the assumption that it’s under the same license as the upstream package but in some environments absolutely clarity around licenses is really appreciated.
I was looking for something just like this the other day. I’ll often import a CSV into SQLite to do some ad hoc data analysis and transformation, but realised how useful it would be to have a JS/WASM based tool I could host on a static site for my colleagues (academics who don’t necessarily feel comfortable working in the terminal). Being able to say “import your CSV here and run some of these example queries” would be so useful. No complex web app or reporting suite to host, and nothing to install.
As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.
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