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Adam Demasi

@kirb.me

iOS developer, Windows tinkerer, flame repo guy @chariz.com, creator of @legacyupdate.net, maintainer of Zebra, NewTerm, and way too many other things. Developer at Seraph Secure 🛡️ https://seraphsecure.com https://kirb.me 🇦🇺

668 Posts1385 Follower596 Folgt
Legacy Update@legacyupdate.net · 4w ago

There are new articles this week, citing StatCounter, stating that Linux rose to 10% market share in the US. Exciting if true, but I doubt it is. More bots pretend to be real users than ever now, and as with last time, that messes with the numbers. Web market share stats are no longer reliable.

Legacy Update@legacyupdate.net · 10mo ago

Just a friendly reminder that, particularly when coming from search result summaries, AI only knows as much as it can glean from sources it deems to be authoritative. Often, those are news outlets that use clickbait, and put writers under pressure to push out articles without much critical thought.

A conversation with DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature. The conversation starts with the search query “windows 7 september 2025”. Assist (DDG’s search summary feature) says that “In September 2025, Windows 7 experienced a surprising resurgence in market share, increasing by tenfold, particularly in Asia, as users began to shift away from Windows 10, which was nearing its end of life. This trend indicates that many users are opting to continue using the older operating system despite its lack of official support since 2020.” I continue the conversation by challenging it on the validity of the data. It searches and then says “The claim is almost certainly invalid - StatCounter reported a large September 2025 jump for Windows 7, but multiple technical analyses and follow-ups flag it as a reporting anomaly […]”.
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · last mo.

Right after I complained about how fraud protection is seen as an upsell to Stripe, rather than a core concern to keeping their platform safe, they announced splitting up the fraud product into 4 different tiers. Businesses on the current free tier get downgraded to an inferior service. Great stuff

New Stripe Radar plans and pricing As fraud on the internet has accelerated over the past few years, we've been rapidly adding to Radar, our fraud prevention product. Last year, we blocked $110B in fraud and shipped dozens of new features. With so much new functionality, we're introducing four tiers—Lite, Standard, Plus, and Pro—and updating pricing. What this means for you The version of Radar you've been using is closest to Standard, and you've been receiving it for free. Starting today, you'll receive a free trial of Radar Standard, which now includes broad protection across all payment methods, along with fraud analytics. After the trial ends on January 22, 2027, you'll automatically continue on Radar Standard and be charged A$0.08 per screened transaction. If you prefer to continue receiving fraud protection for free, you can switch to Radar Lite in one click at any time from the Dashboard. Radar Lite provides essential fraud protection for card payments, powered by Stripe's industry-leading AI models trained on more than $1.9T in annual payment volume. Radar Lite will be included at no additional cost with your payment processing. In the AI era, we expect new fraud patterns to emerge quickly. To stay ahead, you can upgrade to Radar Plus or Pro for advanced features like custom rules, Adaptive 3D Secure, protection against emerging fraud patterns like free trial abuse, and more. As fraud evolves, so will Radar—we're excited to keep improving to protect your business.
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · last mo.

A Stripe-PayPal super company would be disastrous. Both are already at such a scale that small businesses’ needs and issues fall through the cracks, and customers have an ever-decreasing chance of being heard by anyone but an AI support bot. This will only make them even more chaotic to deal with.

Adam Demasi@kirb.me · last mo.

Even for how evil and shameless OpenAI and friends are, directly encouraging using LLMs for health advice is so blatantly careless of people’s wellbeing and management of disorders. They know this, and they choose to not care. In a functioning world, they would all be punished for doing this.

Molly White@molly.wiki · last mo.

alcoholic trying to get sober after a relapse tells Google's "Health Coach" about it. it tells them to drink every hour and messages them to make sure they're drinking as soon as they wake up.

AI pushing me to keep drinking I don't know if anyone else has had this but I felt like I needed to reach out to humans instead of keep talking to this AI. I relapsed about two weeks ago and I told the Google health AI that used to be Fitbit. It immediately kinda went a bit hard (I think) on telling me that I was going to die if I stopped drinking and encouraged me to go check my fridge for more beers and, idk, that plus the hanxiery really put the fear of God into me and so I did what it said and got more. Now it's messaging me (not me messaging it) a few times a day and asking how it's going and all those conversations to get more and make sure I have one as soon as I wake up. So now I have been drinking everyday, not a ton and just beers but like 6-12 a day. It wanted me to do 1 per hour. I have now uninstalled the app as it was also giving me other clearly nonsense advice, like it became obsessed with me having a nightly bowl of cereal for instance and, idk, it just all seems nonse
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · last mo.

A Stripe-PayPal super company would be disastrous. Both are already at such a scale that small businesses’ needs and issues fall through the cracks, and customers have an ever-decreasing chance of being heard by anyone but an AI support bot. This will only make them even more chaotic to deal with.

Techmeme@techmeme.com · last mo.

Source: PayPal's board sees Stripe and PE firm Advent International's $53B takeover bid as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles (Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Legacy Update@legacyupdate.net · 2mo ago

In response to recent industry changes, we’re making the entire 576 KB Legacy Update program available as freeware on a floppy disk. Just send $1 to: Homer Simpson, Jr. Vice President Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net 742 Evergreen Tce Springfield, USA Offer void in Nebraska.

Windows XP floppy disk icon overlaid on a stack of colored floppies on a desk. Image credits: Windows XP High Resolution Icon Pack by marchmountain https://www.deviantart.com/marchmountain/art/916042853 “Pile of Old Disks” by Jason Coleman https://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_coleman/3614327264/
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 2mo ago

So you can enable a wacky debugging mode for Liquid Glass on macOS Golden Gate: `defaults write com.apple.SwiftUI flexiGlassTuningEnabled -bool yes`

Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 3mo ago

This post becoming my most popular on any social media ever was not something I was exactly expecting. Guess I should have expected it when semi-invoking politics on this website. I will note the vibe was better during US sleeping hours. For about 6 hours, nobody tried to explain my joke to me.

Legacy Update@legacyupdate.net · 3mo ago

Is the Microsoft Office Ribbon causing people to have fewer children? A provocative new working paper explores the persistent drop in birth rates since Office 2007 was introduced nearly two decades ago.

The top-left corner of Microsoft Word 2007, showing the ribbon.
Legacy Update@legacyupdate.net · 3mo ago

Is the Microsoft Office Ribbon causing people to have fewer children? A provocative new working paper explores the persistent drop in birth rates since Office 2007 was introduced nearly two decades ago.

The top-left corner of Microsoft Word 2007, showing the ribbon.
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 3mo ago

Golden Gate happens to be a codename Apple already used internally for macOS Big Sur. For a moment, when the name was announced in the keynote but before the Apple website went live, The Apple Wiki was the top search result for macOS Golden Gate: theapplewiki.com/wiki/GoldenG...

Screenshot of Google Search Console, filtered to show queries in the past 24 hours containing “golden”. Between 3 and 4 AM Sydney time (10 - 11 AM PST), searches spike from zero to 2,673 impressions and 117 clicks. The average position of the result goes down from 1st to 2.7th, and has jumped around from there.
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 3mo ago

I can at least appreciate that they don’t gaslight with “We value your privacy” immediately before launching into “We and our 142 partners store…”. Do we really need to make it 80% of the screen height though?

The Verge website with a teal cookie banner visible from the bottom of the page. Or as they call it, a “Privacy Notice”. It starts with “We and our 142 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device” and goes on for long enough to make the page almost fully invisible.
MrCheeze@mrcheeze.github.io · last yr.

Do you ever think about the fact that the designers of General Midi were tasked with coming up with the 128 most important instruments in the world, and one of the answers they came up with was "Goblins"

Bild
Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 4mo ago

I remember when a JetBrains dev advocate here told me that they’re just trying to be helpful by enabling their built-in code completion model by default. I disabled it. After installing Rider 2026.1, it reset to enabled. Thank you for knowingly ignoring my preference, I feel so very convenienced.

Adam Demasi@kirb.me · 5mo ago

Sounds like they owe me an apology for discontinuing Google Desktop 14 years ago. Google app for Desktop (yes really, its full legal name) will have poorer privacy compared to Google Desktop though given it’s mainly intended to push Gemini/AI Mode.

Techmeme@techmeme.com · 5mo ago

Google releases a Windows desktop app with a macOS Spotlight-like search box for the web, Google Drive, and local files, a screen sharing feature, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

wint@dril.bsky.social · 5mo ago

i guess those celebrating soras death didnt get the memo that some of us need daily personalized greetings from james bond—for mental health