thinking001001

Good point! Taiwan is a political anomaly, an accidental offshoot that came about as a result of the rise of the CCP in China (people moved to Taiwan for refuge), and Taiwan has become enormously successful in an organic, unplanned way.

That was fascinating, thank you.

Simple: Chrome captured the market with a good product, at the right time.

I remember when Chrome was new, and it was fast, and Google had other game-changing products (like email with enormous storage). I was just an average consumer back then, and I went for Chrome.

Then, once you capture enough market share (due to poor competition), people start targeting Chrome as the de facto standard. Throw in Android and you have a browser that the world now depends on. Even Microsoft gave in (with a built in ad-blocker, cause they're bitter about it, too).

Should we all be running a C++ based Javascript interpreter? Absolutely not. But try explaining why to the masses...

Computer Science is, on a evolutionary level, a whole new field, something between a branch off of Mathematics and physical engineering so... no, it won't stop changing anytime soon. If you wanted something more timeless, perhaps you should've gone into the engineering of buildings, transport etc.

There are only 24^3 possible combinations of 3-letter file extensions, 34^3 if we start mixing in numbers. And they potentially will need to be constantly available for decades to come... We should probably use more sparingly to prevent a repeat of the IPv4 situation.

The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.

Big surprise, a state-funded (kinda) organisation doesn't know how to sell. Economics is all about sales, guys...

But the UK is getting a triple whammy from the financial fallout of Covid-19, Ukraine invasion & fossil fuel prices, and Brexit.

But maybe there isn't much to 'improve'...? I suspect this is the feeling shared by those who appreciate it.

Would somewhat agree/disagree. Debian installer is kind of a monster, but Ubuntu's changes to the installer broke compatibility with tried-and-tested PXE install software (i.e. Cobbler).

Ubuntu's packaging of Firefox as a Snap (outside of apt) though is very much a surprise at first, and makes it easy to mistake your system/browser as being up-to-date... And that Firefox Snap container is not sandboxed like OpenBSD, and has full filesystem access.

Depends if you're running Python or not (or an equivalent scripting language with OS dependencies i.e. Ruby, PHP, Perl)

Given the privilege escalations in sudo and the bajillion untestable features built-in, arguably the Linux community should've moved on from it many years ago, following OpenBSD's lead...

Just want to add that you can also create a full Alpine Linux filesystem with Alpine's official "apk-static" (statically compiled version of apk) and then run it as a container, with automatic network configuration, using systemd-nspawn. There is a guide someone online, I believe. This would be stateful like a chroot, but with a bit more sandboxing features, which may be desirable.

"Being smart is important, but knowing how to sell it also important. Americans know how to sell." - South African guy I met, who went to Yale on a scholarship

The reality is the technology industry has become heavily privatised, and privatisation means sales, and good engineers aren't interested in sales, but funding is required to build things... So, you need companies or governments with a long-term mindset, which isn't easy to come by. So instead you get entrepreneurs with borderline-capable engineering abilities, and typically businesses who think of short-term profits, and the end result is gimmicky 'products' rather than breakthrough inventions.

Note however, that there is greater room for complacency in the public sector, given the endless pool of money (via taxes, inflation), whereas the private sector is more touch-and-go and can be more competitive.

So I guess it is about balancing the public/private sectors optimally, which is ambiguous as to how to do. By the way I didn't read the article.

Given the Ukraine situation, there should at least be a read-only/no-login Tor service, I think

Oh so people are getting like facebook-login.tk and catching passwords or something, I guess. I'm sure there are tonnes of (free) @gmail.com or @yahoo.com accounts used for phishing though? Or AWS hosted serves? Maybe Meta should be paying engineers instead of lawyers, to protect users, it is kind of an arms race thing. Easy to blame the little guy (Freenom).

But I agree with other commenter - the amount of data Meta is scraping, and time wasted to addiction, is potentially more damaging than a few domain names.

It is true, encrypted /boot on Linux (i.e. where the Linux kernel lives) is time-consuming and error-prone to setup, even if you have been using Linux for years. GRUB only understands LUKS version 1, and is poorly optimised, meaning LUKS' default "2 seconds of password hashing" during install/setup from a running Linux OS takes significantly (!) longer when booting via GRUB. It is the age-old cathedral/bazaar issue.

Bravo, it is much more likely to be reliable if everyone is going down the same kind of path to set it up

At my last job, what I least looked forward to was having to go back to the office someday. It is an anti-freedom, but it is the only viable option for certain kinds of roles.

Undesirable work culture, or mentally unstable? Both?

Oh man just reminded me of a strange dream, the other day. A lady was enthusiastic about Haskell and was trying to encourage me to get into it. I was like "I like the language but the official docs are bad, I don't know how to learn it!"

But maybe I should get back into Haskell...!

In regards to using a VPN for privacy: The important thing about a shared VPN service is that it makes it difficult to distinguish traffic, and by sharing multiple IPs across different countries it becomes even harder to track an individual's activities. This is somewhat of a copy of Tor, but with less security-risk, at the expense of some privacy. Whereas if you run your own VPN, for example, all activity from that IP address gradually becomes more associated with you.

Learn C?

There may be something to be said for working in industry generally, e.g. all the soft skills issues such as dealing with management, colleagues, deadlines, interviews, the touch-and-go nature of private companies. These can help with career development, regardless of the tech you work with.

As if office politics wasn't tricky enough already, throw in Elon Musk

Oh my, was just thinking about this phone this morning. God bless, R.I.P., never forget. So much potential, just too late to market. Hope the developing world will see it before it is too late.

Emacs as a religion

Maybe any of Cloudflare, Oracle, IBM, since they don't have as much data (yet)

I dread to think of all the state-funded technology companies with backdoor-ed firmware/software coming out of China