I feel like there’s a very fine balance for the effort required to publish a package.

Too easy and you get npm.

Too hard and you get an empty repo.

I feel like Java is actually doing a relatively good job here. Most packages are at least documented a bit, though obviously many are outdated.

Because that way they avoid any competition.

Thing is, businesses like Google’s ads are not linear. If you can track 90% of people 90% of the time, your ads are much much more valuable to advertisers than a company that only tracks 70% of the people 90% of the time. So it makes sense to create a moat by literally shitting money on everyone around you.

Think about the opposite: if Apple would switch to DDG by default, most people would leave it at that. And that would mean, a significant chunk of the US search traffic is gone. Europe and the rest of the world are not that apple-heavy, but Apple users are rich power users (on average), these are extremely valuable.

No.

Google pays to keep its monopoly on search.

Chrome, Android, etc. all are just tools to funnel views on their ads.

If Mozilla would fold, Google would have a monopoly on browsers, which could cause problems for them. So they finance fake competition.

No other company could pay even close to that amount of money.

And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

The best argument against Rand is just listening to her for 5min.

Very rarely do you see such a mixture of arrogance, self-righteousness and utter lack of logic in a single person.

Well, actually you’re kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.

So I’m not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) “we will deploy that in our k8s cluster” but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that’s incredibly stupid.

Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.

I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.

Most “professional” writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.

I’m involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it’s 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.

Why exactly does MS gaming employ over 20.000 people?

And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

Most people are used to devices being at least somewhat safe. They don’t expect devices they buy from a large online retailer to be that bad. A flaw here and there, sure, but basically a 100% chance of death? Yeah, that’s not exactly to expect.

It’s usually not a question of legality, but efficiency.

It’s easy and efficient to bust someone for seeding, but busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.

There’s no hope anymore. Simple as that.

For a pretty long time, probably starting even before WW2 in some countries, there was this hope “tomorrow will be better, my children can have a better life”. And that hope was at least somewhat true.

But it’s gone now, and the children understand that. What is the positive narrative for a 16 year old child now? They know exactly that they’ll have a worse life than their parents in many regards.

And you didn’t even mention climate change.

I’m in my early 30s, so I experienced cooler summers, but also the crises in 2007 and the following years (where basically every Eurozone country south of the Alps almost collapsed).

I also experienced the refugee “crisis” in Germany and obviously covid.

What I learned is, that the only thing our governments can do is throwing money at rich people. Literally nothing else. Every single crisis, conflict, bad situation was met with utter incompetence, corruption, and often enough some new way to blame poor people.

I can’t speak for other countries, but ask yourself, what actually changed for the better in the last 20 years thanks to any government action? Rents? Still high. Education? Educate yourself. Healthcare? Here’s aspirin, good luck.

The young people of today see that our entire society is moving in an extremely dangerous direction of collapse, and they feel like they can do nothing against it. They feel powerless against a system that ostensibly is super open and democratic. That’s why so many (not only young people) are voting for extremists. They want to see everything burn.

And reusable!

If some bot reacts to this comment, you’ll make the developer very unhappy.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

I’m still not sure, what exactly the journals are actually doing.

Like, in all seriousness, what service do they provide? Just hosting the platform for anonymized reviews and basically a blog for the actual articles? That should cost maybe a few millions each year, yet this sector makes billions in revenue.

Python caches bytecode, so the translation happens only once.

Java loads everything immediately and keeps it in memory. All beans, all connections, etc. That takes up a ton of memory.

Of course, but I’m not productive in it.

If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.