Miguel de Icaza ᯅ Profile picture
Fun Stack Vibing. Started Xamarin, Mono, Gnome; was MSFT/.NET/Xamarin/Mono/VSMac/AI https://t.co/QkbDDWMXRf @migueldeicaza.bsky.social
Reinier Nápoles Martínez Profile picture 1 subscribed
Aug 2, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Been thinking about this call to action from Google’s CEO and the challenges he faces.

The problem Sundar has is that he was appointed CEO during a rosy period. Things were selling themselves, growth was booming, and all he had to do is keep turning the crank. 1/ And sometimes what you need is someone that can turn the crank, so this is a match made in heaven.

What Sundar is asking for from his employees are a list of band aids and some red tape removal here and there and hoping this solves the problem.

This is lipstick on a pig 2/
May 9, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Two LGPL musings this morning:

1. given that WebKit is based on the LGPL KHTML, how is it that I can’t replace the system WebKit with my own engine?

2. I don’t think Chromium could be published to the AppStore given the LGPL and AppStore conflicts. Clarification: this is on iOS.
Feb 11, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
Just dialed in, and this is super juicy: “Facebook conduct must be sanctioned, and in this case this should extend to their lawyers as well” Judge telling Facebook that they will foot the legal bill for their stalling, and their behavior to stonewall “preposterous”.
Feb 2, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
If your company has a PAC, they are asking employees for donations. Go to Fec.gov and see which colleagues are funding the PAC, and if you have a relationship, reach out to them and ask them to withdraw their donations - you must starve the beast Example. Go to here and type a company name, in this case I randomly picked my employer (but applies to all companies with PACs): Shows how to lookup in the section “candidate or committee
Oct 28, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
This I believe is a perfect example of a bad business decision. Customer acquisition is quite expensive, so much that sometimes the cost of acquiring a customer is only justified if you can retain them for years 1/ When you force customers into exploring other options you don’t only lose the customer, but also the resources you spent acquiring them, and their free advertisement/advocacy 2/
Jul 2, 2021 6 tweets 1 min read
Without looking, what license are stackoverflow snippets under? Good answer, and Luis replied:
Jul 2, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Earlier today, I retweeted this, and a friend asked me if this resonated with me, or which part of it did. And I wanted to share what part did resonate with me (1/)

I have for years admired the work that others have done, and have spent a large chunk of my life cloning proprietary ideas and making open source versions of it. I have joked "I spent my career competing with Microsoft" 2/
Jun 28, 2021 21 tweets 4 min read
My recent Bitcoin criticism has once again raised the question among friends: aren’t Bitcoin and the dollar the same, since we just choose to believe they have value?

A thread on where the US dollar derives it’s value from 1/ No matter what economic activity you engage on: getting paid in dollars, bartering, exchanging favors, selling stocks, trading stocks or crypto, come April 15 you gotta turn that sweet sweet benefit you got into US dollars.
Jun 27, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
Engineers can get very passionate about a particular technology, and be blind to what impact the technology can have. The first time I confronted this was sometime around 1995-1996 - I was working on porting Linux to the SPARC 1/ SPARC workstations were more capable than PCs, and that Linux road to success went through embracing high end systems. They used the superior SCSI, ran faster, were RISC-based and PCs were toys 2/
Jun 25, 2021 11 tweets 2 min read
The time has come for me to come clean.

After a long internal struggle, I have come to accept some ideas of cryptocurrencies are good, but I needed a system that was ecologically sustainable, today I want to introduce my own cryptocurrency: MigCoin2

1/
The “2” is used to distinguish it from my previous foray into the space, which proved impractical tirania.org/blog/archive/2… 2/
Jun 23, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
These takes don’t take into account how public companies operate: executives have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholders’ value.

It would have exposed Apple to shareholder lawsuits, and activist investors replacing the leadership team and others. Unlike Google and Facebook that have issued stocks with different voting rights (elite stock and the masses stock), Apple 11 years ago operated under more traditional stock rules and was more diverse - and thus in a weaker position against external pressure.
May 16, 2021 20 tweets 7 min read
Threads on books on understanding what is happening to Palestinians. I start with the shorter/simpler reads that are timeless (2 days to read), and later add the longer, more detailed ones (1-2 weeks to read) or focus on a narrow event.

1/
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine gets the basics of the conflict in place. Starts with the war of independence - everything you hear about the conflict stems from this - a great foundation to tell facts from propaganda 2/
May 4, 2021 7 tweets 5 min read
Fascinating data from the Apple/Epic lawsuit.

If you want to start your own competing store, spend 11 million on buying the rights to various games, and that brings you 18 million players. So you spend less than a dollar to acquire a user, 10 dollars to acquire a customer: Two observations: rights to older games are being sold at bargain prices. And AAA games with their more sophisticated business development teams can command higher licensing fees, but are worth it.

It is basically a money printing tree:
May 3, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
Opening slide decks in today's court case between Apple and Epic:

app.box.com/s/6b9wmjvr582c…

app.box.com/s/6b9wmjvr582c… Good business lesson from Eddy Cue here: do not discount your product, instead, offer a voucher for additional value to your product:

app.box.com/s/6b9wmjvr582c…
Apr 6, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
This reminded me of another story.

We used to know this incredibly talented software programmer that was an artist, a genius, a visionary, and very strongly opinionated. He was ahead of his time. 1/ He truly created beautiful universes out of thin air in the computer, and this was back in 1997 or so when computers were slower, had fewer resources, and were very constrained.

He made magic happen on those old clunkers 2/
Apr 6, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
The way AI transformers work reminds me of the 1990's.

Back in the 90s in Gnome-land, PNG was not in wide use yet, and we needed some sort of transparency for images. So we used a library that faked it by using an uncommon color to mean "transparent" 1/ The uncommon color was some sort of magenta, and the idea was "nobody in their right mind would ever use magenta on an icon".

So magenta became the color to indicate "this pixel should be transparent".

This worked with all existing paint programs 2/
Sep 8, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read
Apple today filed their juicy bits, recap of where we are at:

* Epic Lawsuit 8/13
* Epic Motion for Temp Restraining Order (MTRO) 8/17
* Apple response to MTRO 8/21
* Apple Response to the 8/13 Lawsuit 9/8

1/
Apple's response is here:

courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

You might want to reference the original document when you get to their responses. It starts in page 4 of this document:

courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Apr 19, 2020 8 tweets 3 min read
The Andreessen Horowitz article making the rounds is rich.

This coming from the guy that funded all Republican Turds in Congress, and funds those nasty PACs you have seen me tweet about and then like Trump points the finger at others: Here is a bold idea for the concerned VCs: Perhaps don’t get those turds that hate government and want to wipe out government funded. And let people that believe in science, regulation and social fairness run the show.
Jan 21, 2020 14 tweets 3 min read
When the Snowden spying scandal broke, I came up with a joke app idea: Patriot Chat would be a secure chat app that would encrypt all communications using peer to peer protocols, with a twist 1/ The twist was that it would also encrypt the messages with a set of trusted keys, from the NSA so the government could easily spy on you. 2/