This is a great example of it happening in the .NET world:
7,072 karma · joined January 15, 2016
First of all every division at Microsoft needs to be cash positive. At DevDiv (developer devision) the main bread maker is Visual Studio. .NET is free and makes no money. VS Code is free and makes no money. OmniSharp is/was free and made no money. ASP.NET is free and makes no money. It's mostly SQL and Visual Studio licenses which pay the salaries of the .NET team. For that reason Microsoft can never let it happen that a free and open .NET extension can make VS Code a good enough experience for the vast majority of .NET developers. It's not by accident that despite Microsoft owning C#, .NET, VS Code and OmniSharp the C# experience on VS Code was the worst of its kind in comparison to any other programming language. It's by choice in order to push developers to use Visual Studio.
Another big reason is that Microsoft needs to keep a tight grip around their .NET developers, because .NET is the main driver to Azure adoption. Azure is an extremely unattractive product to any other development community. Azure is slow, it breaks, it over promises and under delivers and it is almost twice as expensive to AWS or GCP once you actually establish feature parity. It's mainly .NET devs who get cleverly pushed to Azure and siloed away from anything non-Microsoft by Microsoft. The world runs in the cloud nowadays and the cloud is a unix based environment. Microsoft has felt the bleed of its traditional Windows centric developer base migrating away to macOS and Linux and becoming more wise about their technology choices. In order to stop the bleed Microsoft tries hard to convince its remaining Windows developers to remain in the Windows/Azure silo by giving them just enough sugar coating so they never step outside. WSL, the new unix-like terminal in Windows, Windows containers, etc. are all attempts to keep Windows folks on Windows and therefore closer to Azure.
The irony with all of this is of course that if you are a software developer, you'll have a MUCH MUCH better experience with Microsoft owned products (GitHub, VS Code, etc.) if you choose any programming language which is NOT .NET, because (at least for now) they will not try to come after you to lock you into their Windows/Azure based silo.
Trust me, both took me out for a week, but the flu was 10x worse than COVID. The flu gave me bad headaches, fever and a super runny nose and sore throat. COVID only gave me fever for 1 day, a cough and a mild sore throat for 1 day. The only thing that made COVID inconvenient was the loss of smell and taste for 5 days but otherwise I felt fine and went in with daily life after day 2.
Go is very neat, true to its core identity and very very stable. I have been developing .NET (C# and F#) for almost 20 years and I don't enjoy it at all anymore.
EDIT:
Just last week the .NET team tweeted that they are looking to introduce green threads to .NET after all. I love the green thread implementation in Go and I think it is superior to .NET's async/await model which get scheduled by OS threads, but .NET has gone down that route many years ago and it's embedded everywhere now and introducing such a new fundamental change now is just plain fucking stupid. Microsoft is so dumb for even thinking this is a good thing to do. If they don't like how C# works then invent a new language with modern fundamentals which you like but stop changing C# so much that it's become completely unrecognisable. .NET developers don't want to rewrite their code bases every 12 months. We have real work to do.
It’s not GitHub anymore though. It’s Microsoft and Microsoft must advance the Visual Studio brand.
I on the other hand was one of the few idiots who didn't go on furlough and then used my furlough money to holiday in Spain and instead was working throughout the entire pandemic like an idiot and now I have to pay more taxes for all the expensive COVID-19 measures which I believe until today we should have never done and let nature filter an overpopulated planet like it's meant to be.
I am sick of woke fascism and Twitter was up until now the prime breeding ground for new age radical left fascists. If the deal goes through the world will be a better place for it.
On the other hand in first world countries and extremely well connected and overpopulated cities like London Uber is more of a disaster. They clog up the streets and create so much more unnecessary traffic. Uber drivers are extremely picky and don't accept rides which are not going from one prime location to another prime location. They are more expensive than black cabs and offer a worse service. In London black cabs are soooo much better, they can drive in bus lanes which Ubers can't do and therefore beat traffic whereas with an Uber you pay more and then it takes you still twice as long to get anywhere. Also black cabs have more space, they have card readers in the back and you can easily hail them down. It's so frustrating with Uber, especially at night when you want to get home from a party or something which is 10-15 mins away from a busy area and then you try to get an Uber and stare for about 20 minutes on your phone where the app makes you believe that you get a driver confirmed in 2 minutes but it keeps changing and nobody accepts. Literally happened to me so often, looking at my phone and it keeps lying to me that a driver is 3 mins away, then 2 mins, then 4 mins, nobody confirming but it also doesn't allow me to cancel after like 10-15 mins which means I'm then stuck waiting. Uber is so shit it pisses me off. If I don't get an Uber in like 2-3 min then I don't want it and just walk down the road and hail down the next cabbie. So much easier in London sometimes. Anyhow... it's very different in different places.
The Valneva vaccine was approved in the UK and might be very important because it trains our body against all proteins of the virus as opposed to just the spike protein which is what the AZ and Moderna/Pfizer vaccines were doing so far, so probably giving us better protection against future variants.
Cool... that sounds great and very logical. Body learns about the entirety of the virus and therefore will be better to fend off new variations of it in the future.
But that doesn't sound like some profound new scientific discovery we have made. This sounds like science 101 to me, so WHY did the same two scientists vehemently refuse to acknowledge in any shape or form that people who have had COVID-19 and therefore had been exposed to a huge viral load of the ENTIRE virus with all its proteins might have also acquired a better immune response than a vaccine which only trains your body against a single spike protein? It's the same principle, but because it was not WOKE to say the truth.
It's plain simple, we are all being brain washed with selective reporting and fake news and its enforced by social media so that critically thinking minds cannot undermine our increasingly more authoritarian governments which try to control our thinking in order to control our lives and get what they want - more powers in their favour.
For example:
> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...
> massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.
This is not true.
Any message, irrespective if EVERYONE KNEW it was true, for example that COVID-19 is statistically less of a risk to children than the flu, was censored and labelled as fake news or even taken down. Free speech is dead in its current form where social media companies are peddling the fake news by our Western governments to control our thinking. They will make you believe that Iraq has mass destruction weapons if they want a war and they will make you believe that a minor cough virus will kill your child if they want to control your life.
Own your data, own your blogs, own your words, own what you create/write/do on the web. Don't rely on third party services uphold a common sense contract or what most people would expect is the ethical/correct/good thing to do.
I disagree with this. Dependencies become your code and any magic will always come and bite you, no matter if it's written by you or a downstream dependency.
The guiding principle should be: Reject magic at all cost
If I buy an iPhone then it is so that people can call me on it. The Mac makes it easy that I can also receive a call on my Mac if I am working on it. It's an additional convenience feature. It's not like the Mac is forcing me to do this. The call would still happen on my phone, I'd just have a much harder time to respond to it if I didn't get the smooth integration on my Mac whilst working on it. If I didn't have an iPhone then I also wouldn't get random calls on my Mac. Besides, if I don't want this feature to work then it is very easy to disable it form a very self explaining settings app and that setting will persist during updates.
It literally couldn't be more different to how Windows operates.
Also, perhaps Apple makes things enjoyable in how they work, which is maybe why less users have a desire to disable these handy features. It certainly feels more straight forward, down to the point, no dark patterns and very obvious as a macOS user. I can't say the same about Windows.
In theory you don't have to do anything mate. Just lie down in a coffin at home, shut the door and I bet you you won't catch COVID or any other mild respiratory illness. If to you the meaning of life is to get born, not catch COVID under any ridiculous circumstances and then die then this is a dead sure way of achieving your dreams!
I rather live life, take risks, feel my heart beat, go out and spend intimate time with other people, feel the thrill of being close to other human beings, feeling the joy of a person's touch, seeing their beautiful face when they laugh, share food and drinks without being paranoid and indulge myself in everything the world has to offer. Getting a mild cough or feeling a week a bit ill because of a flu every few years is a small price to pay for all the amazing memories I'll collect along the way.
I never went to any protest, not just this but in general, but I was very pleased that there were huge protests in the UK and elsewhere at that time, because I had enough of restricting my own life for the sake of others.
The USA has invaded several sovereign nations, tortured innocent people, murdered innocent children, on false accusations such as "mass destruction weapons" and many other falsehoods. They were never banned from SWIFT, never boycotted from sport events, never contracts cancelled.
The .NET Foundation for example has two banners on their website (1), one in support of Black Lives Matters and one in support of the Ukraine. Two great initiatives, but where are the banners for Muslim lives? Where is the banner in support of Syria, Afghanistan and a handful other countries which have been devastated by Americans?
The truth is, once a company decides to become political on one matter then the silence on anther matter also becomes a statement. This is why we had the wisdom of not being political at work for so long for a good reason. Now it is pretty clear that the .NET Foundation or Google simply don't care about Syrian refugees or Muslim children being murdered and in fact it almost seems like they were in support of those actions, otherwise they would have shown equal support recently.
All of this makes me realise how much we get brainwashed in the West. There is no objective way to explain these hypocrisies.