Blogpost Directory:
Why Google selling Chrome may not be as impactful as you think
Written on 2/5/2025 • Sharing LinkIf you’ve been paying attention to the news recently, you would know that Google may have to sell the Chrome browser to a different company. This however, may not be as big of a deal for Google or the browser as you might expect.
Chromium and Chrome:
The biggest reason for why Google selling chrome might not be as important for them as you might expect is because Google Chrome isn’t really Google’s most important browser. It is more of a side project for them if anything.
What is Google Chrome? It is simply just Google’s free and open source Chromium browser with a few little added features that make it easier for the average user, than given a proprietary licence. Google’s most important browser is actually Chromium, not Chrome. That is not just because it powers Chrome but because it powers so many things other than Chrome, some that you might not even think about.
Let’s get started on the topic of web browsers. Chromium is the base for many other popular web browsers than just Chrome, such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, the default Android browser and many more. Apart from web browsers, Chromium is also used to power a great many apps on Android. In fact, a large percentage of Android apps are not really much more than a embedded web browser with locally stored HTML/CSS/JS which culminates in a working app. That isn’t just true for Android apps. A great many desktop apps on Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS use Electron or CEF. Some popular apps include Visual Studio Code, Obsidian, Discord, and Steam. If you use a web app that has a desktop version (or vice versa) chances are very high it is using CEF or Electron, which is basically just a stripped-down Chromium browser.
Seeing how important Chromium is to Google, the question must be asked. What will the courts actually do? Will they force Google to sell Chrome, Chromium, or both? It’s not unheard of for the courts to give a seemingly good sounding but ultimately ineffective punishment, so we should take a look at the possibilities that could be generated by each scenario.
If Google is forced to sell Chrome, but not Chromium:
At the end of the day, Google Chrome isn’t a very large project. It would be pretty easy for a dozen developers to maintain it, as long as they don’t have to maintain Chromium itself. Most of the code would still be coming from Google, you would just have to maintain the cherry on top of the cake.
The big problem with this would be that as previously mentioned, Chrome isn’t really Google’s most important browser. If Chrome was bought by another company, Google would still end up contributing the vast majority of the code that will end up in future releases of Yahoo/OpenAI Chrome.
This doesn’t really sound like it would do much to hurt Google or break up the monopoly. In this case, Google would still have de facto control over browsers based on Chromium like Yahoo/OpenAI Chrome. Google could even start a new fork of Chromium that continues the legacy of Google Chrome.
If Google is forced to sell Chromium, but not Chrome:
I think this is flat out the least likely scenario to happen. Still, it is worth exploring. Even though Chromium is generally a more important project for Google, that does not mean that this would be an appropriate punishment either.
First of all, Chromium is free and open source software so even if another company acquired it, there is not much that could be done to stop Google’s employees from working on it unless Google themselves stops their employees from working on it during company hours.
In this case, since Google has already invested a large amount of their time and effort into the Chromium browser and since (in this scenario) they would still own Chrome, Google would still have a massive incentive to keep working on the Chromium browser and likely still be the primary contributor to Chromium.
If Google is forced to sell both Chromium and Chrome:
This would be the worst scenario for Google, but many of the problems discussed previously would still remain. Google would still likely fork Chromium for a new browser to continue Chrome’s legacy that they will push onto their users until the next antitrust lawsuit, and Google would still likely be the primary maintainer of Chromium at least for a while.
In this case, there is still not much the new owners of Chrome and Chromium could do to stop Google from working on Chromium as previously discussed. Whether Google forks Chromium for a new browser or not will largely determine how much incentive Google has continue working on Chromium.
Realistically, what I think would need to happen for this to work is both someone else (hopefully one that doesn’t specialise in proprietary software – but that’s unlikely) to buy Chromium, and heavily encourage non-Google employees to work on the browser and make it easier for those outside their own company to work on the Chromium browser. A large part on why the vast majority of commits to Chromium are made by Google is because Google has pretty strict requirements for anyone who isn’t a Google employee, effectively gatekeeping non-Google contributions to the browser.
Even the worst case scenario for Google won’t be as huge of a deal as most seem to make it out to be unless there are more people from outside Google and outside of the new owners of Chromium contributing to the browser, however in the short term after the purchase that does not seem particularly likely.
What will this mean for the open web anyways?
If you are expecting this to be a win for users or web developers, unfortunately it seems that the potential buyers of Chrome (and/or Chromium) have less than stellar track records themselves. The companies that have stepped up are largely other large corporations that make mostly or exclusively proprietary software, such as Yahoo and OpenAI.
While it would be nice to see an entity who makes free and open source software to step up to buy the browser and make it FOSS, however free and open source software organisations are unlikely to have the capital needed to buy the browser. This basically dooms Chrome and/or Chromium to see the same type of corporate enshtification that we see with Google right now, just with a different company behind it. It is likely that (with Chrome’s current market share) we will see another company try their shot at becoming a monopoly.
Conclusion:
In short, it’s unlikely that the sale of Chrome and/or Chromium will be as devastating to Google as many will make it out to be, nor will it bring a positive change to regular users or web developers. If just Chrome is sold, Google will still be contributing the vast majority of the code Chrome uses. If just Chromium is sold, Google will still likely be contributing vast amounts to Chromium because it’s their old open source project and Chrome still depends on it. If both are sold, Google will likely fork Chromium for their new browser without much stopping them from continuing to contribute to Chromium.
The tragedy of corporate-owned proprietary AI
Written on 1/5/2025 • Sharing LinkThere’s a lot of skepticism if not downright hostility in the free and open source software community about emerging AI technologies, such as large language models and stable diffusion. Rightfully so, as these technologies have largely been a net negative for society, the software they infest, and many of the people who use them. But I don’t think it had to be that way.
Personally, I don’t think that much of the issues that AI has was inevitable. Sure, there still would have been some problems with AI that would have happened no matter what. The effect that AI has had on society, from people using it to generate wildly inaccurate foraging guides, to using it to write your essay in high school or college would have still happened no matter what. Still yet, AI could have been (and could still shape out to be in the future if we take the right steps now) much better and could have been a general net positive even if it did come with some downsides.
So what is the problem? Proprietary AI owned by for-profit corporations. That is why we are in the mess that we are in.
For-profit corporations and software in general don’t mix well together, as the corporation grows larger it’s focus becomes more laser-focused on making a profit on it’s products rather than delivering you a high quality software. This is how enshitifcation happens and make no mistake, AI is basically just being used by corporations as a marketing ploy for gullible investors and other people that don’t know any better.
Do they have an incentive to make competent and responsible AI? Absolutely not. In the current state that LLMs are right now, they are not to be trusted any more than your conspiracy theorist uncle on Facebook. Yet, these large companies have pushed their LLMs in such a way that makes them seem more credible than they actually are. While it is impressive how far LLMs have come even just within the past 5 years, they are nowhere near good enough yet to be relying on what they say without fact checking every single thing they say. Do you also rememember how Apple Intelligence months back was giving people dangerously misleading news headlines? In case you need a refresher, here's a little screenshot:
[Image Credit: BBC]
Companies have been pushing AI as a miracle solution, and the average person will often come away with thinking that AI can do more things than it actually can be trusted to do. There is few warnings about the limitations of these technologies, such as how wildly inaccurate LLMs can often be and to fact check everything they say. Implementing a clearly visible warning like this would tarnish the perfect mircale drug reputation that companies are trying to cultivate for their AI chatbots.
There’s also the issue of data usage. Large companies have been known to scrape the internet for data to train their AI with, oftentimes training off material that the original authors have no idea and have given no consent for AI to use. It has also been observed that when AI is integrated into an operating system, that files stored on your device could be used to train AI.
Earlier, GitHub announced that they would be training Microsoft Copilot based on the git repos hosted there. Many of the projects on GitHub use the GPLv2 or GPLv3 licence. If someone was to ask Copilot for code, and the code Copilot generated was sampled from GPL code, and the person asking for such code is developing an application not using a licence compatible with the GPLv2 or GPLv3, than (don’t quote me on this, I’m not a legal expert) the author could have just committed a GPL violation without even knowing. There is often times little way to know where the data that AI is trained on comes from since the data sets are usually not open to the public, until you are able to prove with little doubt that whatever was being generated by AI infact was sampled by you.
However, many of these issues wouldn’t exist if most AI models and chatbots are FOSS and not owned by for-profit corporations. There would be an incentive to provide a high quality piece of software where it’s limitations are clearly outlined. It is always controversial when free and open source software grabs data when it’s not supposed to, so there would be more respect for what data gets to be used to train the AI. It would also be very easy to verify if FOSS AI trained on your data since by the definition of the OSI an open source AI must also have an open source model where you can view all the data that is being used to train it.
This is why properly funded FOSS projects will almost always give you higher quality software than their proprietary equivalents, and AI perhaps needs this treatment the most if AI ever wants to become a high quality product that people actually want to use. AI is perhaps a perfect example on why proprietary software always lends itself to enshitification, because for-profit companies have ruined what are genuinely interesting and quite innovative technologies by using them to chase profit.
Fedora Silverblue is better than ChromeOS and Windows S.
Written on 10/3/2025 • Sharing LinkWhen it comes to operating systems like ChromeOS and Windows S, the primary audience are those who are new to PCs. Perhaps people who have used a smartphone before, but aren’t quite used to what a complete PC operating system can offer.
For that kind of user, ChromeOS and Windows S aren’t very good options. Fedora Silverblue effectively has all the advantages (minus one important one that I’ll touch on later) while not compromising on being a fully featured operating system for those who need it.
First, let’s start with ChromeOS. For a long time, what you could do with ChromeOS has been quite limited. Somewhat recently, ChromeOS has added support for Android apps and running a GNU/Linux container (Debian being the default) to get better app support. Still, the container is not enabled by default and requires an additional step to enable.
To enable the GNU/Linux container, you’ll have to go through what might be one of the worst designed GUIs I’ve ever seen on a desktop operating system. Beyond skin deep, ChromeOS is not designed very intuitively. This is quite bad when you consider the fact that this is an operating system meant for people who are new to computers.
I think the elephant in the room though for ChromeOS is the 5 year artificial cap that you have on operating system updates for your device. This just either creates e-waste after a perfectly fine computer no longer receives security updates or means that people are running outdated and potentially insecure software on their device. People are keeping their devices for longer and longer and computers are becoming obsolete at a slower pace than ever, so such a cap is just a move to force planned obsolescence on people.
Moving on to Windows S, I think a problem with it is the fact that while the operating system itself isn’t as fully featured as Windows (or even Fedora Silverblue) it does contain the full Windows interface. Windows GUI design is better in many aspects than the horrendous slop of ChromeOS, but is still nowhere near as intuitive and easy to use as GNOME. New users will likely be overwhelmed with the amount of icons and buttons present at first startup. Windows also has the problem of containing many legacy apps that haven’t seen an update
Another problem with Windows S is the Microsoft Store, which is simply put in an absolutely horrendous state. Few apps that you’d actually want to use are located there, and most of the store seems to be taken up by some of the lowest quality applications imaginable.
While Windows hasn’t done the same artificial time limit on updates as ChromeOS has, Microsoft has been willing to discontinue official hardware support for certain hardware after some time has passed. Microsoft has also been pretty clear that even if you can find a bypass for installing Windows on unsupported hardware, that they might compile Windows in such a way that might prevent you from using it on your hardware in the future. Somewhat recently, Microsoft has shown this by requiring the CPU to support the SSE4.2 instruction set preventing older but still fairly capable computers from running the newest versions of Microsoft’s operating system.
I think the biggest problem that Windows S has though is the fact that if you want to install an application outside of the Microsoft store, you have to switch out of S mode and forfeit all the advantages it provides, and you can’t switch back.
Meanwhile, Fedora Silverblue has much of the same advantages as ChromeOS and Windows S with much fewer drawbacks. Fedora Silverblue, like those operating systems is atomic. Using a read-only file system for the system makes it effectively idiot proof and more secure than a traditional operating system. It is the entire reason why ChromeOS is much harder to break than a traditional GNU/Linux or Windows based operating system, and is also why you can trust just about anyone to use Fedora Silverblue without breaking it. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue makes snapshots after updates so in the rare case that something does break, you can easily roll back.
Fedora Silverblue also comes with the GNOME desktop environment which is simply the easiest and most intuitive graphical user interface on the desktop, especially for those who have never used a PC before. From my experience teaching people how to use a computer they tend to struggle much more with Windows or macOS than they do with Fedora/GNOME. GNOME is very simple to use by default which is perfect for a new computer user, but can be powerful when needed with extensions.
What Fedora Silverblue doesn’t have is any real artifical restrictions on what hardware you can run it on. You could run it on an old system with an Athlon 64 X2 CPU, or a modern system with a Ryzen CPU. You can expect upgrades to the operating system to support your PC beyond it’s obsolescence.
Fedora Silverblue also has the flathub repository built in and GNOME Software (a software store and update manager) preinstalled. Fedora Silverblue has automatic updates configured out of the gate, so you won’t even have to manually do anything until a new version of Fedora is released. Flathub contains applications you’d probably want to actually use. It even contains Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, if you prefer using those (slop) browsers. You’ve even got container support enabled right out of the box if you want to install an app not on flathub but available in the system repositories. Even if you want to install a system app and not use containers, you can do so using rpm-ostree than rebooting and you’ll keep all the advantages that come with an atomic operating system without having to switch to a more traditional operating system.
So, you’ve got all the advantages of an atomic system with Fedora Silverblue but you might be wondering about it’s disadvantages. First a more minor disadvantage is when you install system updates and system apps, you will have to reboot as the operating system being read-only and image based means any changes you make to the system will only become active after a reboot. This however, is inherent to all atomic operating systems and is the same way with ChromeOS too.
Earlier I said there was a major disadvantage to Fedora Silverblue when compared to ChromeOS and Windows S, and here it is: Fedora Silverblue doesn’t come preinstalled on very many devices. It’s an utter shame it doesn’t, because so many people that would benefit from a fully featured yet easier operating system won’t even know of it’s existence let alone have the ability to use it. I think this is where (to some degree) you can be the change you want to see. I am someone that people (in real life) typically come to for tech advice, so I am in the position that I can install Fedora Silverblue on their computer for them. I’ve also sold some of my used/refurbished devices with Fedora preinstalled on them.
So in short, Fedora Silverblue does pretty much everything that ChromeOS and Windows S does better and it can do more than those operating systems but it sadly doesn’t come preinstalled on very many computers. Fedora Silverblue, for the target audience of people who are new to computers, whether they be 8 or 80 years old could benefit greatly from using it over ChromeOS or Windows S.
The upcoming pseudoscience of lie detecting
Written on 8/3/2025 • Sharing LinkJust a little disclaimer, this is completely 100% an opinion. Take everything I say here with a grain of salt and if you are a student please don’t cite me as a source. With that’s being said, let’s get on with the post.
In the last 200 years, we have seen an explosion in the area of science, but with that we have seen entire fields of science come and go. Over 100 years ago, fields such as Phrenology and Eugenics were still seen a legitimate fields of scientific study, and now they largely aren’t. Sometimes I wonder what fields of study we consider legitimate today in 2025 that will be seen as complete pseudoscience in 2125.
Psychology is home to it’s own subfields, and in that we find the still popular notion that it is possible to accurately detect a lie without having hard evidence. I think that in the next 100 years, we will see the scientific credibility of this idea crumble into oblivion.
We are already starting to see the cracks in this idea form. Polygraph machines (also known as lie detecting machines) have been found to be quite inaccurate at detecting lies to the point where in many countries they are no longer permissible as evidence to a crime. Still, popular media still for some reason gives them much more credibility than they actually deserve.
If you take a look at the rest of the methods used to detect lies in the absence of hard evidence, they have at best a moderate correlation with someone lying and at worse point to something else entirely. One of the better methods is seeing if someone tells two different stories at two different times, but even that is shaky as anxiety or general forgetfulness while being put on the spot can lead to people prioritising different details leading to a somewhat different story if you ask them again, even if they are being truthful.
The worst methods involve the use of body language, the specific way they answer a question, or the tone of their voice to indicate if someone is lying. This doesn’t measure lying, it measures anxiety. While it is true that people who are lying are typically more anxious, being put on the spot especially if being accused of something will also cause anxiety that will manifest in a similar way whether someone is telling the truth or not.
Most lie detecting methods are already sketchy enough when used against neurotypical people, but against neurodivergent people they are even less accurate. People with conditions such as ADHD, Autism, some personality disorders (such as Antisocial personality disorder) and more will often respond in a much different way both verbally and non-verbally to lie detecting methods than a neurotypical person does which will result in false positives and false negatives more often than when the same methods are used against a neurotypical person. Effectively, many lie detecting methods shaky enough as they are become absolutely useless at telling if someone is lying if used with a neurodivergent person.
We’ve even found out that your own family who have known you for your entire life can’t accurately tell if you are lying or not without concrete evidence against your claim, and that your own family is hardly better than a stranger at detecting a lie without proper evidence.
The only way to be able to know with reasonable accuracy if someone is lying or not is to have hard evidence against their claim. If little Robert stole a cookie from the cookie jar and you don’t have a camera pointed at the cookie jar or you did not witness it yourself, you have no reasonable way of knowing if he lied about stealing a cookie. There are other explanations that are just as valid as “he lied” such as you misremembering the amount of cookies in the jar.
Why I recommend Fedora Workstation to new GNU/Linux users
Written on 7/3/2025 • Sharing LinkCurrently, I am working on a guide on how to switch to GNU/Linux for Windows and macOS users. This is a precursor to that guide that will answer a somewhat common question I get. What is the best distro to start with?
Usually when I am teaching people how to use GNU/Linux, my go-to distro is Fedora Workstation. Many others will suggest Linux Mint, and while I don’t think that is a bad option I think that there are some pretty good reasons for starting out with Fedora Workstation instead.
Fedora Workstation comes with the GNOME desktop environment, which is at this point (whether you’d like to admit it or not) simply the most polished and complete desktop environment there is on GNU/Linux. It has the best ecosystem of graphical applications, the best support for accessibility tools, and among the most complete Wayland sessions of any desktop environment. At the end of the day, most applications on the GNU/Linux desktop are designed with GNOME first in mind or at least as a consideration. GNOME also receives the most monetary investment compared to any other desktop environment. I’m not saying that GNOME is the best desktop environment for everyone, but GNOME is effectively the flagship desktop environment of GNU/Linux and the desktop that is overall the best suited to the general public.
Fedora itself is a very good base in general. It’s both very stable and up to date. Fedora has one of the largest distro userbases which also means that almost all software available for GNU/Linux is available for Fedora. It also provides GNOME the way the developers intended it. Some distros (such as Ubuntu) add things on top of GNOME which are often unneeded and just make the experience more cumbersome. Fedora at this point provides the best GNOME experience out of the box overall, with it being up to date and easy to use.
In short, GNOME is the most widely supported desktop environment on GNU/Linux and Fedora Workstation provides the best GNOME experience compared to other distros. That is why Fedora Workstation with the GNOME desktop environment is my go-to when converting people from Windows or macOS to GNU/Linux.