I don't think the person you are replying to was expecting this. Rather, I read their comment as agreeing with you that the benefits and compensation were low enough that few people would be interested in the position except as a stepping stone into a better faculty position.
I ported his code to a macOS screen saver back in the day, but I see I haven't updated it since macOS 10.6… I guess the chance of it working on a Apple Silicon Mac isn't anywhere near 100% :P
Oh wow, that came out when I was in university. I often think about that series of articles and the little tricks and techniques he used to simulate the feeling of a city at night - almost entirely via artifice and very little intentional design. I always found these dirty little tricks in graphics super interesting.
Unless I'm mistaken, this strikes me as a really incredible claim. To the best of my knowledge, Rome didn't make much use out of cast iron. Iron has a very high melting point, it's not something that people were just casually melting. There were a few exceptions, but my understanding is that Europe mostly didn't use cast iron until late in the middle ages.
The idea that some random resort town was casually melting iron and hauling it around to fill cracks strikes me as really implausible. Some other, more easily melted metal perhaps, but not iron. Not unless my understanding of Roman metallurgy is really mistaken.
In his blog (acoup), Bret Devereaux had a decent sized three part series examining this debate. He mostly comes down on the "decline and fall" side (especially when it comes to the living conditions of people in the region), but does give a fair shake to the "change and continuity" argument.
it looks less like an 'oil painting' though. Looks to me like one of those stencil, spray-painted images you see people selling at tourist attractions.
Perhaps the Dall-E 2 unintentionally got that better.
It would be much less likely if we could get the market share back to 2010 levels.
Is that a realistic goal? I don't know, maybe not, but it seems like there's little will even in tech to try.
There was a time when tech was the biggest driver of alternate browser adoption, and even managed to make serious inroads into the mainstream. It's a huge shame that this attitude seems long gone.
(As someone writing this in FF, being a Mosaic/Netscape/FF user for ~30 years)
No that ship has sailed.
It would mean focusing on developing the best browser and spending money on marketing so people download and install the best browser. Cut every other expense. Take FF from the politics of Mozilla and make it a real open source project.
If I look at Opera marketing, they seem to aim for young people with themes and video integration.
I do think FF has no vision and no clear strategy to get back market share, even it this is the only way to save the web. Perhaps market share isn't even their goal, I have no clue what they want.
> There was a time when tech was the biggest driver of alternate browser adoption, and even managed to make serious inroads into the mainstream. It's a huge shame that this attitude seems long gone.
I think that was just a side effect of browsers like Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera offering numerous tangible benefits over IE and the other browsers of that era.
They offered things like better functionality, better security, better extensibility, better performance, better ad blocking, and so on.
There were many compelling reasons to switch to them, and many compelling reasons to suggest them to others.
I could easily show less-technical users how those browsers could make their lives better in many ways.
For a while now, though, that just hasn't been the case. Using Firefox today, for example, doesn't really leave most people any better off, but it does come with its own set of new problems. I can't bring myself to recommend it.
It's still pretty much the go to place for journalists to mine quotes and sentiment from "normal people".
I'm addition, it remains a significant platform for informal celebrity and corporate announcements.
People in tech are pretty bearish about Twitter these days (myself included), but there are clearly a significant number of people who believe otherwise.
I don't think the person you are replying to was expecting this. Rather, I read their comment as agreeing with you that the benefits and compensation were low enough that few people would be interested in the position except as a stepping stone into a better faculty position.
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