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Me neither, but telling others that they will have a bad time trying to do the same is either confusing or disingenuous depending on how charitable you want to be. His second comment seems to indicate having regrets in going that way presumably because this strategy turned out to not be very profitable, and that was the reconciliation I was looking for, sort of. I still disagree with the original bullet points.

> There's nothing wrong with open source as long as you are honest to yourself regarding the intentions.

My takeaway from your bullet points is more specific – that you shouldn't bother with open source unless you want to advance the state of the art while being perpetually unpaid and unrecognized, which I can not agree with in any way.

> Many open source developers start with intentions like "advancing the state of the art" and over time become disappointed because others build businesses and profit off of their creations.

I just don't buy this distinction of starving artists vs commercial enterprises. Especially as the project grows in scope, complexity, and popularity you might need to spend more time on it to keep it in good shape, and time does not come for free.

While you might have been willing to spend 10 hours a week on it for free, the now-grown project would really benefit from you working on it full time, but that's not feasible to you, so you turn to monetizing it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to both advance the state of the art and to be paid for it.

It's not about being disappointed with others making money off of your project, it's about ensuring sustainable development of your project.

If OSS projects weren't funded by a chance of money or fame, we'd have much less such projects available to us, especially significant ones, because not everyone who currently contributes to OSS can afford to or even wants to work full time for no pay. I don't know why that would be a desirable outcome to anyone.

If you want to tell everyone else that they should be in OSS just for advancing the state of the art, you might want to reconcile that with SheetJS earning money from non-OSS extensions and consulting services, because that discrepancy certainly doesn't look very honest of you.

There's https://easylist.to – might want to start a new list in this format or look for existing ones on github.

About the same as I felt about popup ads when it was a thing. Eventually these will be reliably filtered by ad blockers I guess.

In more philosophical terms, how am I supposed to feel about profit-optimizing websites that I don't want to pay for choosing to be shitty to me? Meh.

I can stand behind ideological refusal to travel to the US because of this, but in practical terms for an individual traveller a 0.007% chance is does not qualify as "somewhat frequently".

That only works when almost everyone agrees on things you want to ostracize people over.

However, unfortunately there are so many idiots that this pretty much only works to divide a society into ideological camps with few negative consequences to individuals but a lot of damage for the society at large.

I'm not sure how that would work in Scala.js without redesigning the library to have an async API, at which point it's not really the same library anyway. The author said that sync API was a major feature of this lib.

This has a blocking API which is a no go in single threaded Javascript, so my guess is no

His basic argument hinges on incorrect division of devs into Java/OOP crowd and Haskell/FP crowd. There are plenty of Scala users who don't fit these stereotypes though. I personally very much appreciate the unique mix of OOP and FP that Scala allows for.

For me Scala is a very general and a remarkably unopinionated language. It efficiently encodes and integrates multiple programming paradigms in one language, letting you pick and choose what makes sense to you.

Scala is useful to a wider range of programmer preferences and skill sets than any Haskell-on-the-JVM could ever be. It's a feature, not a bug, both for individuals and enterprises. Pure FP is just some people's preference that requires a significant buy-in, not the one true way of doing things.

In general, this talk just seems like a case for one man's preferences rather than a fair summary of Scala's current market situation.

Amazon are complicit because they sell third party inventory while marketing it as "sold by and shipped from Amazon.com". That's deliberate deception.

Publishers are not merely "information transfer". They are largely content creators. Whether that content is music or news or something else, it costs money to produce.

Using that content without paying for it (with ad impressions or direct sales) when those payments make the creation you consume possible in the first place – there is no moral high ground in that.

By ad blocking you're just taking things for yourself while relying on others to pay for your share of the cost to produce the content you're consuming. Zero marginal cost is not such a big intellectual barrier to understanding that this is unfair and unsustainable.

People are quite content with ad blocking only because someone else has to pay for creation of the content they consume. Of course people are content getting a better deal than other people.

But you can't translate this individual selfishness into a general society-level desire because ad blocking only works when not everyone is doing it. On a society level, if you don't pay for something, you don't get it, because there is no one else to pay for it. Whereas what people want is to get something without paying for it.

And if you claim the society is in agreement that ad based business models are unacceptable, I'm yet to see any indication of that. People really like not paying for things with money, and ads let them do that.

But what people like to do even more is taking without giving in the name of some unconvincing ideology.

I don't see what the technical capabilities have to do with the morality of the issue. You might just as well modify a downloadable binary to neutralize license checking code to avoid paying for the software. Does the fact that you can do this make it not stealing?

If you want to exploit your technical capabilities to deny publishers their revenue, don't fret when publishers do the same with DRM, walled gardens and other such measures.

Current adtech practices need to be made both illegal and technically impossible, but that obscenity does not make ad blockers more moral. Two wrongs don't make a right.

> the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or a processor not established in the Union should be subject to this Regulation where the processing activities are related to offering goods or services to such data subjects

> In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union

> factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-23/

So you need to "offer" services, not "supply" them, and "to data subjects in the EU", not "within the EU".

So you can't just run your business from Canada with no special emphasis on EU and call it a day.

Or if you're advocating blocking European IPs, well that's exactly the "hysteria" the article argues against.

OTOH

- Scope outside of Europe – e.g. if a completely foreign entity that offers a Spanish or French translation of its service could potentially be covered by GDPR, even if they're not marketing to EU markets specifically. Too bad for Quebec I guess. Or what if you fly to speak at a conference in Europe – is that "marketing" to residents of EU? Depends on your slides? Or not? Who knows.

- Consent – does X fall under "legitimate interest"? Is it essential to providing the service? These are not easy to definitively answer for any non-trivial application. And it's not like you can just err on the side of caution – you are not allowed to ask for more consent than you need IIRC. And if the regulator (one of them) disagrees with you after you've spent a few years building a business relying on a certain interpretation, tough luck I guess, try again?

- How to deal with backups that contain personal information

The "special" part is that it prescribes very specific things in very ambiguous terms.

You have to change what you're doing to be compliant, but you don't know how. And for some aspects, no one knows how.

And GDPR actually has teeth. It's ripe for selective enforcement and other bureaucracy failures.

The problem of multiple ambiguities in GDPR hasn't really been addressed here.

Also, must be nice to live in a country where the regulator is as benevolent and reasonable as is described in this article.

I think it's ok for foreigners to be skeptical of this promise, as the article implies that this reasonableness is not encoded in law.

You can get very far by just containing unsafety. In this example, you shouldn't need to sprinkle `new CardID` calls throughout your whole application. You will only use them when deserializing values from a typeless source (e.g. AJAX response), and that part should be contained to some AjaxService.

Because you can still have a "backend" hosted on the user's computer, it just doesn't have to be node.js, could be something more efficient or powerful or whatever is needed.

Maybe not-really-ISPs should be made ineligible for certain privileges / rights given to real ISPs. Like not-really-doctors can't do everything that real doctors can (grasping for a better analogy).

What hasn't worked: thinking in terms of monads / applicatives / functors / other FP / category theory concepts.

I know what those are, but this is just not how I see the world, and forcing myself to think about code in those terms just isn't productive.

What worked: using FP composition / organization / abstraction patterns that often involve those same FP concepts but without cargo culting.

Non-hardcore FP has been very rewarding to me. With Scala, mixing FP and OOP patterns is a great way to get the best of both worlds.

So? Big aircraft cost a lot of money and bring in a lot of money. Projects incur significant cost overruns in literally every industry.

That argument doesn't really hold water when applied to aircraft manufacturing.

Commercial jets are not indistinguishable commodities, there is a ton of variation in design and mission ideologies (control systems, materials, hub-and-spoke vs point-to-point, etc.)

The type of goods and barriers to entry are more similar to e.g. car manufacturing than to utilities like ISPs.

If Boeing and Airbus weren't artificially inflating administrative barriers to entry we'd definitely have more competition, and consumers would benefit, not suffer.

I'm just waiting for an electron based web browser.

Scala.js is a great, stable, mature tool. Scala is a sharp sword, but it fits your criteria quite well. I'm certainly enjoying Scala.js very much.

Yes, look at how it deals with type param variance for example. It doesn't.

Power-to-weight ratio. It's a major weakness of electric power with current technology, and a single engine with a big prop is more efficient than any other configuration.

Sometimes you see electric aircraft have multiple smaller engines and props, but that is mostly driven by structural or design concerns of their esoteric missions like needing to distribute the weight along a huge wing (Sunseeker) or needing to land in tight spots (various VTOL designs). Conventional planform electric aircraft don't have such extreme limitations so there is no point in sacrificing performance.

You can certainly apply and enforce such regulations on mainstream media, both TV and online. The world will benefit even without US getting onboard with it, and without the need to police every last website.

I would say the general public's level of intelligence in general, and the effect of dumb content on it specifically is definitely significant enough to need a solution. Many solutions, probably.

Of course no one will seriously suggest a gif prohibition (I hope), but regarding fake news specifically, regulation such as the FCC Fairness doctrine could possibly work.

The point is not to eliminate undesired behavior entirely, but to make it less available and less desirable compared to alternatives. For example, smoking cigarettes is being largely successfully solved by education, promotion of general health, gross packaging, putting cigarette cases out-of-sight in supermarkets, and taxes, not outright prohibition.

I don't think that just because the content is digital you can't do anything about it without introducing worse problems for freedom of speech and such. Tons of industries are successfully regulated, this one is not special enough to be unsolvable.

I definitely think that dumb content makes the consumer dumber with repeated exposure just like smart/educational content makes them smarter (well, in simple terms). I don't think there is a baseline intelligence level for each person below which they can't possibly fall regardless of what they do.

So yes, platforms making dumb content more available do make people dumber long term. I don't know what to do about it, but at least we have to recognize that this is a legit problem.