Doesn't sound like they needed a microblogging platform, just a web page that could be easily updated. Their use of Twitter in the first place would appear to be the crux of the problem.
I don't really know how Mastodon works, but one thing I've wondered is, how does is a small instance affected by federating with a large instance? If, for example, some instance were to grow to a significant percentage of Twitter in terms of usage, does that spill over into servers that are federated with it? Or do instances only pull data by request so that it's own userbase size is the main determiner of load?
You should check out his browser hacking videos. It's pretty shocking how much they have already and how fast it's improving. I have no doubt they will eventually be able render the vast majority of websites correctly. The real question is whether they will ever be able to make it performant enough that people who don't care about browser hacking will choose to use it. That's where a lot of the engineering hours in browsers goes.
I think Andreas' point is that although there are more specs and they contain more details, they are far less ambiguous so that a careful reading allows one to achieve correct functionality without guesswork. Since he's worked on browsers for many years, I'm inclined to believe him.
Also, if you watch his browser hacking videos, you can actually see this play out live. He finds a layout problem, searches for the relevant spec, and reads through until he finds which detail was missed. He then literally copies that spec chunk into the code, then conforms the code to it. I find it fascinating to watch and I think justifies his claim.
As for Google moving the goal posts, if you read through the interview, you can see he's not interested in following bleeding edge, he's interested in the solidified parts of the spec that people actually use today.
While I do agree it would be good for those who haven't experienced poverty to get a taste of it, it's not realistic to expect people to feel satisfied simply because they are more fortunate than some other group. Success is always perceived relative to your surroundings and the possibilities available.
That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my uses of it, I went from really liking their service to tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.
I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their core value proposition.
I can't comment on the bus line example, but the New York Times had a great write-up (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...) about subway building in New York. At least in New York there's a lot more going on than the reasons you point out. Particularly damning is the fact that Paris is successfully building subways at a 10th of the cost in far less time despite having even more constraints around digging.
The best people can pretty much always vote with their feet. MS may not see significantly higher attrition, but they may still see attrition of significance. I hope so, for all the employees' sakes.
I don't believe I've ever seen 4 junior engineers who don't know what they're doing build anything other than a mess. I don't have any experience with rails, so I can't say whether the mess would be worse, but those engineers are definitely going to make one without guidance.
I agree with your overall point, but I think you're framing it too strongly. It absolutely is possible to form a shared culture remotely. Many open source projects have demonstrated this as well as various forum and chat communities. However, it requires a different kind of socializing, one that not everyone is adept at or interested in.
Are you using it as a daily driver? Seems like every time I look into Linux phones, there's always been some fundamental bit of functionality that wasn't working yet, like waking from sleep for phone calls. Are we beyond that now?
In what way were they collecting monopoly rents? It seems like what happened was someone came out with a better product and took a bunch of their business. Isn't that exactly what monopolies are expected to prevent from happening, and, as I understand it, the reason they are considered so bad?
The nice thing about htmx is it gives a middle ground between the two. Build with the simplicity of an MPA while getting a lot of the nice user experience of an SPA. Sure, you don't get all the power of having a full data model on the client side, but you really don't need that for most use cases.
My example appears to have distracted you from the point I was making. Let me make the point again without an example: being vulnerable to one attack does not mean there's no value in not being vulnerable to another attack when the attacks require different strategies and levels of effort. Or again: making breeching security more difficult does in fact reduce your risk of random security breeches. Or to put it another way, a determined attacker will search for an opening, an opportunistic attacker will move on. There's value in protecting yourself from opportunistic attacks.
True if you are being specifically targeted, but there are whole classes of vulnerability that you are better off not having even if you have less than perfect opsec. To take an extreme example, my personal server may have an unpatched vulnerability that a determined attacker might exploit, but that doesn't imply I might as well share the same password across all my accounts.
The idea seems to be that you will either trust a provider like Apple or Google to keep you private key safe and let them sync it around, or you will create a passkey for each device that you use. If you lose the device, deauthorize the passkey. If you somehow lose the passkey itself, create another one, either by using an older form of authentication, or by creating using a different device to authenticate. There is no need for passkey recovery or backup.
I don't know that I would rely on performance on a single search to categorize how a search engine performs even in related areas to that one search. Also, maybe this is a stupid question, but are you letting Google personalize your results? If so, the comparison becomes even more problematic.
If the HOA is entirely elected by the people who live in it, it sounds as if it would be more democratic and more accountable than a town or city government. Your vote will have more power and the people elected will literally be your neighbors.
Housing for people and office space for corporations are very different issues. I agree that companies buying all the personal homes is problematic, mostly because people are not business entities, they live in communities and they have needs and desires beyond "this makes the most financial sense". I agree that some legislation might be enacted to curb the problem, although I suspect it would go away on its own if communities facilitated the process of building houses. Greatly increasing the housing supply would make buying large numbers of houses a bad investment.
It would be a closer analogy, but analogies aren't true or false, they are more or less useful in making a point. As it happens, my analogy was not that useful because apparently many people didn't understand it. The point I was trying to make was that flexibility, cost and location are actual things of value being provided in both cases. The fact that the duration differs is no more germane to my point than that one of them is mobile and the other not. And in no wise does the consideration of when it becomes more prudent to buy a car bear on when it is prudent to buy a piece of property.
> At some point we have to stop accepting this narrative that monopolists and other rentiers are doing us all a favor by "taking on the risk" of actually owning things, freeing us of that "burden" and graciously allowing us to pay them for the privilege of that freedom...forever.
Why? The setup you described seems strictly worse than the one we have now. Currently a business can, but does not have to, buy property. You propose a world where they must buy property, claim it will be OK because banks won't mind lending them more money, then put scare quotes around things instead of refute them. Why do you think there is no risk or complexities in buying and owning real estate?
What is your exposure then? I don't think I've ever worked at a place that had any interesting in owning the office building they were located in. Usually, they are only interested in part of a building, and they don't want the bother of renting out the rest. In fact, as I said elsewhere in this thread, I worked at a place that built and sold a building, then leased it back, because they specifically did not want to own the real estate. They preferred to have a building management company take on the risk, taxes, and mortgage burden and were willing to pay a bit more in order to have that outcome.
Land ownership is not free money. It usually involves taking on debt for purchase, then trying to recoup that money through rental. They take risk from the possibility that the land value will go down, they won't be able to service the debt, and they may have to sell at a loss. The service it provides is that it allows businesses to do business in a particular area without having to take out loans to buy land or buildings and incur those risks themselves. Businesses find that valuable.
I'm confused. The company engineered the right to some office space, the landlord engineered a stable income to pay the mortgage, and the bank engineered a loan that pays them interest. Who has what problem? And who got a bonus and retired?