It's just nuts that the "penalty" for violating antitrust law is that the offender gets to sell part of themselves and receive compensation. Engaging in unfair competition or obtaining too large a market share should be punished with remedies that make the perpetrator worse off than it was before it began the offending behavior.
Cohost was an attempt to do exactly this, a chronological-only feed that just showed the users and tags you had explicitly decided to follow. And it died. Things aren't looking great these days.
I basically agree. The big problem is what the author talks about the end, which is essentially people releasing software without taking a deep breath and going "Am I prepared to support this forever?" Instead there is a constant rush to push out the next thing regardless of whether it disrupts the last thing.
I also think there are some variations on this depending on whether we're talking about a user-facing application or a library. For applications I think it's really important to not break people's workflows, and yet apps these days do it all the time. Firefox loves to change random stuff about the look and feel. Various programs will get a "fresh redesign" that adds little. The article talks a lot about "new features", but to me the issue isn't the addition of new features but changes to the ways old features can be used.
> use stable and minimalistic packages where needed, much like Windows does instead of Linux
I agree with this in particular. I mean, I'm not sure if it's "stable and minimalistic", but it's basically "make everything route through one pathway and maintain backwards compatibility on that at all costs". Until Windows 10, Microsoft essentially maintained this philosophy, and I loved it. I could use Windows 7 in almost exactly the same way that, 25 years ago, I used Windows 95. I could turn off automatic updates and do them occasionally when I wanted to, and when I had time to google and check that none of them was going to screw anything up, and I could disable ones that would screw something up. It seems like with Win10, though, Microsoft gave up and decided to adopt the approach of "you will be forced to upgrade at a certain time".
So I switched to Linux, which has its own set of problems. The big one being that everything is installed based on a complex dependency tree instead of the Windows approach of "every program dumps everything it needs in its own directory". The Windows approach is inefficient but thereby much more robust, since it means programs rely on upgrading various shared libraries much less than they do on Linux. The trend towards Flatpak-type stuff on Linux is promising, although it still seems like it hasn't been adopted as the mainstream.
Just two days ago I took the plunge to update Kubuntu. It seems to have worked, but it did force some changes in other software I use, and it's always a mentally taxing experience for me because of the likelihood of something going totally haywire.
We can only hope it's the start of a trend. I can't think of a single car feature I would want on a touchscreen instead of a physical control, except I guess something like GPS (which I don't really consider a car feature, but maybe that's just because I'm getting old and curmudgeonly).
The thing with Polars is it's really hard for me to get past the annoyance of having to do `pl.col("blah")` instead of `df.blah`. I find pandas easier for quick interactive work which is basically everything I do with it.
Matrix definitely has problems. I'm not sure if Revolt solves them (and it likely has problems of its own) but I'd say there's room for multiple approaches.
While you’re not wrong, you have to keep in mind that there are actors who try very deliberately to hide the fact that they are removing freedoms.
Most people aren’t on the lookout for every reduction in freedom and, at least in the US, we have surprisingly few institutional and/or powerful guards against the erosion of freedoms.
FiveThirtyEight was interesting in its time, but in the past few years I felt it ironically became exactly what it was initially trying to oppose: a site full of opinion-based punditry. All their "538 chats" were basically the same as talking heads on TV. Okay, the 538 talking heads maybe paid more attention to data, but the good part of 538 was the intent to cut to the chase, dispense with all the puffery that ordinary news sources shove at you, and just let the data speak for itself. In recent years they moved away from that and became less distinguishable from the opinion section of a mainstream news source.
I used this for all kinds of school projects and stuff back in the 90s. I even used it to make birthday cards because it had a handy template to print out in a way that you would fold in four to make the card. It was my first exposure to "word art" which still holds a strange fascination. Every once in a while I'd wonder whatever happened to it. I guess now I know.
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