Androider

You don't need to be a monopoly to have antitrust action taken against you, you just need to have sufficient market power and engage in behavior which is anti-competitive.

House Antitrust Committee chairman David Cicilline yesterday:

“Because of the market power that Apple has, it is charging exorbitant rents — highway robbery, basically — bullying people to pay 30 percent or denying access to their market,” said Rep. Cicilline. “It’s crushing small developers who simply can’t survive with those kinds of payments. If there were real competition in this marketplace, this wouldn’t happen.”

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295778/apple-app-store-...

Oh it is possible to get Apple to change. Not by asking nicely, but perhaps by carrying a big stick. The arrogance Apple displays today is much the same as Microsoft back in the day. Let's hope for a similar outcome as back then, which fundamentally changed Microsoft for the better. It's possible, but not if we don't try.

Both the EU and the US are already looking into Apple.

Here's the CTO of the Hey app and the chairman of the US Antitrust Subcommittee discussing this very case yesterday: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295778/apple-app-store-...

These "nothing's going to change, why even try" attitudes are so lazy. Absolutely things can change, but surely not if we don't try. Microsoft was massively impacted by the antitrust action against them, every decision they made since then has been run through the lens of that verdict (I know lots of people inside MS) and it fundamentally changed their culture and reduced their stranglehold on the industry.

If you make something like say, oh an email client, excluding the 1.5 BILLION people on the iOS platform is not just a handicap, it makes your entire business non-viable. So now Apple is the gatekeeper of new businesses and services. Fortune 500's and small one man shops alike have been terrified to speak up against Apple, because Apple has the ability to deliver a death-sentence by kicking you out of their store on a whim or simply because an app reviewer takes a personal interest in you.

I think what the Basecamp folks want is entirely reasonable, and Apple's behavior is entirely anti-competitive: Basecamp doesn't care to be in the app store, nor do they want to benefit from the app store discovery and other services for free. What they want is the OPTION to have a link on their web page, that when clicked, prompts the user to install the notarized/signed/whatever application. Basically you'd just have the "double click the power button twice to install" card pop-up immediately, bypassing the entire store. Do that, and Apple can charge whatever they want in the store. Suggestions that this somehow subverts the quality of the platform or the experience is entirely bullshit, Basecamp pays their developer fees and notarizes their apps on Mac, there's zero reason this wouldn't work on iOS except Apple's greed and anti-competitive behavior, and let's not forget that sweet, sweet 30% cut of every single business and service under the sun.

Works out just fine on macOS.

I bought into this mindset, and regret it. That's what you do when you have kids, move to the 'burbs, right?

We moved from a big city to suburban hell a few years after having a kid. In those first years, we took our kid to museums, parks, playgrounds, etc. all over the city. Now there is jack shit to do in the suburb we're in except going to the mall, cannot walk anywhere, have to use the car 100% of the time to even go to a shop. A backyard is a sad place compared to something like Central Park. I feel so sad for my kid. If the prices keep going lower in cities and remote work becomes the norm, we're moving back. (Un)fortunately my wife hates it here too, and we've often talked about moving back to a city.

3840 x 1600 is the perfect resolution for programming in my opinion, and is now starting to become more widely available in 38" wide form factor (equivalent to a "normal" 32" but wider). At this size, you can finally comfortably have 2-3 normal-size windows side by side: your editor/IDE, your browser/app, and one third for documentation, without having to go multi-monitor. The 1600p vertical resolution is fantastic for coding. If you're interested in this size, LG 38WN95C is a great one just starting to become available that hits all the marks: Thunderbolt, 144HZ refresh rate (including G-Sync and Adaptive Sync), IPS panel (must) and looks "normal" without any gamer aesthetics or RGB lighting.

Unfortunately it's going to be a very long time before we get high-dpi equivalents. 4K, which is frequently 1080p equivalent in terms of workspace, is just not doable after you've been using 1600p.

Huh, TIL that GitHub has a trending page. I have a few projects with a few thousand stars, but have literally never seen this thing.

The choices on the trending page do seem weird, and kind of useless.

Report URI is run by Scott and was featured in the article.

By definition you have to run such a service entirely separate from your own infrastructure: you should use a different CA than your other site(s), a different domain name for sure, preferably a different infrastructure host etc. It makes a lot of sense to use something like the Report URI service for it.

TIL about Network Error Logging[1], which is having browsers send you reports that your DNS isn't resolving, your load balancer is timing out (HTTP / TCP errors in general), or your TLS certificate is invalid. Basically all types of issues that don't end up in your own application server logs.

Report URI should lead with this (it's not even mentioned on the front page)! It's super useful for every site, I can't think why anyone wouldn't want this. CSP monitoring on the other hand, which seems to be their focus, is a much harder sell, a pain to setup and maintain, and a bit questionable value in my opinion.

[1] https://report-uri.com/products/network_error_logging

Writing the software is the easy part of SaaS.

It's brand new as of April, it's definitely coming from a warehouse in an area where there is no Whole Foods store (I can track the path of the delivery van in the app). It's also not someone delivering with their own truck as before, but a blue-gray Amazon van, and the availability of items is spot on which was never the case even pre-covid.

Amazon's Whole Foods delivery in my area is now direct from warehouse to home instead of in-store picking. It's so, so much better than Instacart. On my last large order of almost a hundred items, not a single replacement, I got exactly what I ordered the same day. Instacart is such a sub-standard experience, it's just fundamentally the wrong approach and we wouldn't accept it for any other type of online purchase.

A cancelled credit card does not mean bills are automatically void or the recurring subscription cancelled, but it's a scale whether it's worth it for the company to try to collect or not.

If your rent autobill fails, I think everyone realizes it doesn't mean you don't have to pay. If the credit card for your gym membership expires, I think most people would likewise fear (and has been known to happen) that your bill would eventually be sent to collections. A $5/mo subscription? Not worth the time of the company to try to collect. A Salesforce or Adobe subscription on a card? I certainly wouldn't gamble on that, and would try to properly cancel the subscription.

Interestingly the law firm our company uses has converted to permanent remote only just now. So it's not just tech companies.

I think, once the boss gets a taste of working from home, they too want to enjoy their fancy homes and spending times with their kids instead of sitting in traffic all day. And Covid now provides them a generally acceptable way to push that change through.

Obfuscation. If web app companies could, they'd send your browser a binary instead of HTML and JS.

My take is that we're never going to see ES Modules in the wild in web apps as we know them today, outside of some tutorials or open source apps. There's too strong business incentives to the contrary, legitimate or not.

That's super interesting, never heard that about Figma. Is the entirety of Figma in WASM or just the core drawing engine?

On what do you base your opinion that the "the majority of ordinary Americans are not for sustaining the lockdown measures"? All the polling strongly suggests the opposite, the vast majority of Americans are very concerned about the virus and support the lockdown, and the protesters represent a small fringe.

For a funny take, see https://xkcd.com/2305

CDK8S doesn't replace Elastic Beanstalk, because the folks using EB are going to continue to use EB. If it ain't broke...

ECS predates EKS, and is better integrated than EKS with their other services. If you want a painless container experience on AWS, ECS for Fargate is what'll you'll want to use today. So both existing folks who use ECS today as well as new customers are going to keep using ECS.

Folks who like K8, perhaps from prior experience, are going to use EKS despite it having some rough corners.

See, Amazon is perfectly happy to support everything under the sun as long as there are paying users. See their database offering for very much the same strategy, and it would be silly to say that they should drop DB x since they now offer DB y.

That requirement has now been delayed until Oct 2021.

Turns out it's not really an issue in practice, since you rarely serve naked Node.js to the Internet. If you put something like a load balancer (ELB) or reverse proxy (Nginx) in front of your service which speaks HTTP/2, you already get 95% of the benefits. I expect HTTP/3 to likewise just be a toggle offered by AWS/GCP/Azure/NGinx etc. in the future, and your users will see an immediate benefit.

Presumably HTTP/3 could do WiFi-> 4G -> WiFi -> 5G -> WiFi... hand-offs as you're moving around.

When did you last look at the current state of renewables? Even two years ago, the picture was completely different, but renewables are absolutely catching up. The change is fast and accelerating.

17% of energy production in the US is now renewables. 26% in China. 46% in Germany.

The economic case for deploying renewables continues to improve, and will soon hit a tipping point where operation of legacy generation systems will be more expensive than deploying and operating newer ones. Even in the US, who will want to be in the coal business then? The companies all know this, and are all pivoting from being coal|gas|x-companies to being energy-companies.

The CDC suggests it might be possible to re-use masks after storing them in a paper bag for a while https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hcwcontrols/recommendedguid...

I also wonder how such re-use of a mask combined with more durable N99 masks that are ordinarily rated at hundreds of hours for the filter (compared to 8 hours for your average N95 mask) could be used as a more permanent mask for households if only used occasionally when going to get groceries for example.

Okta has a single signing key with no ability to set per-provider keys, only Azure AD does the right thing out of the box per the article.

I don't think that's true, source? At least I've never seen that as an Enterprise admin.

Based on some quick googling, are you perhaps mistaking Zoom the video conf software with the confusingly similarly named ZOOM International, which does call-center / agent software but is a completely unrelated and a much older company?

Anyone find out what is the purpose of the drwho.csv file? :)

The name is great, as is the slack command /screen, just keep using it. Saying this as a user of GNU Screen. It's OK, approximately nobody is going to be confused by this in the real world.

What percentage of meals were previously consumed outside the home, at workplaces, schools and daycares? Add all of those to the baseline grocery shopping rates pre-coronavirus, add on some anxiety factor, and you'll have the new baseline.

Similar for toilet paper in stores. Previously you spent 8-12 hours at work using your company's supply, now you have to use and buy your own. The in-home usage per day has pretty much doubled and shifted to retail.

Can't agree on the NLB part. Everyone should be using ALB by default, and only reach for NLB in very specific cases (you'll know when), in my humble opinion having worked with AWS for 8 years and being a certified architect.

Enable the dropping of invalid headers, enable HTTP/2, let the ALB terminate the TLS, and you'll see benefits even if your full backend isn't HTTP/2 enabled and you'll have eliminated a whole range of other headaches you no longer need to manage. It's one of the most reliable services AWS has.