Balder

Yeah definitely. I just heee to disable social media and anything that’s based on addictive behavior, algorithmic feed etc. and I automatically start doing more interesting things online, such as read Wikis of subjects I like, play with programming etc.

The problem is everything that’s driven by engagement and made to keep you scrolling artificially is toxic by consequence.

At the very least they’ll create a legal precedent.

“Italian organized crime groups receipts have been estimated to reach 7–9% of Italy’s GDP.”

But I guess pirating books is a more pressing problem.

Even North Korea can’t stop pirating completely.

This could be solved in other ways. For example, the software can simply track what % of the books are actually read without this extra step of borrowing and returning. Just like when you listen to music on streaming services.

Imagine if you had to select the specific album in a streaming service and choose to borrow it for x days, having to “return” it and borrow again if you wanted to keep listening, and being limited to 4 albums at a time.

Like… if the book is digital, why do you have to borrow and return? This makes no sense. They want to replicate a bad experience that doesn’t need to exist, what’s the point of that?

At the same time, they unfortunately can’t imagine things being better. That’s why societies differ a lot between cultures in different parts of the world.

Doing it silently without consent is definitely not okay. Or if they do such a thing, they should notify the user and give an option to rollback if they wanted. That’s what a company that respect users would do.

I just wish the price of having the publish feature was slightly lower. They’d get much more subscribers, including me.

If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.

I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.

So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.

I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.

It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).

I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.

Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.

They probably have patented some underlying technology they spent time researching to make the product viable.

Also what’s attractive to you might not be for me.

all this does is hurt acer

I don’t think it will necessarily hurt them if other brands follow suit. It will hurt the consumers, that is.

Yeah I also looked into it and there seems no concrete information on that, just speculation about the policy change, like this one:

“While Google doesn’t explicitly state that IP addresses and other fingerprint methods are now allowed, the Privacy Disclosure section of Google’s February 16th Platforms Program Policies now explicitly mentions ‘cookies, web beacons, IP addresses, or other identifiers.’”

When you dive into it, it does look more like companies that sell encryption and VPNs using some potential danger to get more subscribers.

But what you say depends on what’s causing such prices to rise, doesn’t it?

Let’s say that suddenly the production of product X halts and the prices rise. You’d expect that once you start producing it en masse again, prices of that product would at least fall. But what we see in most of the world is that products didn’t get cheaper once supply chains started working again, arguably because of the phenomenon of price stickiness.

Like, why not? The article says:

“And this is exactly why Google wants to use digital fingerprinting: It is way more powerful than cookie-based tracking, and it can’t be blocked for instance by switching to a privacy-first browser.”

If I use Firefox and Firefox doesn’t send any fingerprint to the website, then how is it identifying me?

I get that if you use Android (which is normally tied to Google), you’re still subject to see it on Google websites, but how will it work otherwise?

I think the true source is this one?

Some reactions to it.

Not all of the stdlib is written in C. Some parts cannot be Python because it’s critical code that needs to be as fast as possible.

Python is already slow for many use cases, if the standard lib was all built in Python it would be just too slow for much more use cases.

There’s no denial that money has a huge role on it, especially because open source software has contributions mostly from North America and Western Europe.

But about older guys being more available, I wouldn’t be so sure. That would be a nice case to study. Because the older you get, often the less inclined you are to spend your free time on something like that.

I believe what happens with these people is that the projects are truly their passion, and they come from a different landscape where software development wasn’t something mainstream. I remember some comment on HN where the user talked about how there was a “coolness” to it in the sense of being something new and unexplored, the internet was a place for like-minded people that loved information technology, they had the chance to create a lot of things that have become established today.

Now software development isn’t the same as it used to be in general perception, I guess. The influx of capital that made the startup scene boom and made everyone and their grandmother to learn to code sucked out part of the passion from the field. Nowadays you have a lot of professional programmers who don’t know anything beyond their immediate IDE and programming language. There isn’t a sense of discovery any more, cause it feels like any project is a copycat (another todo app), while the important projects have grown super complex and are managed by organizations instead of lone programmers.

There’s already Swift, which isn’t garbage collected, but the ref. counting does the same in practice.

The only problem with Rust and Swift, Kotlin etc. in my opinion is that they keep growing and getting more complex with no signs of stopping.