mikro2nd

This is the same Saudi Arabia that is now the 2nd-largest shareholder in Twitter.

Amara's Law: "We overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term. We under estimate its impact in the long term."

How does he recover 44B this way?

"engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do"

I have long harboured similar suspicions regarding the design of kitchen utensils. Clearly designed by people who've never washed the dishes and have overlooked (or blatantly ignored) the fact that these things -- made with all sorts of joins and crevices that are hard to clean by any means -- are meant to come into contact with our food!

"cross platform graphics stacks make a lot more sense"

Oh how they laughed when Sun tried this with Java some 25 years ago...

(As another KDE user) I'll second this. Electron-based apps seems to be the worst culprits -- ignore my preference settings for max/min/close buttons, frequently do away with the title bar altogether leaving me with no window resize/move and hiding away Application/Window settings options, no regard for themeing,... it's become a significant (read: near deal-breaker) for me trying out new apps.

Or maybe not. It's harder to change an organisational DNA than just changing the people.

tl;dr: MS is still evil.

Interestingly, Netbeans (though strongly Java focussed at the time) once had a fantastic collaborative coding plugin at one time, based on XMPP. It got killed because Sun wanted to foist their own "via Sun servers" thing on everybody. Needless to say, both solutions died on the vine. How sad.

Browser-based BS... I'm never going to buy it. Personal prediction (contact me if you're willing to put Swiss money on it; I am!) - in 5 to 8 years' time the pendulum will be swinging back to device-/locally-hosted apps because of $unforeseen-issues. And fashion.

You're looking at it from the vantage point of "the future". For some span of time, "plastic never degrades". Then someone discovers something new, and after that plastic degradation becomes possible (though not widespread).

What we know changes.

Not a single penny.

Fair enough, but a similar, albeit lesser impact, scenario holds if there's a localish (but not close enough to walk) dropoff point.

(anecdata: My closest dropoff point is a 40 minute drive each way.)

Which model is better for minimising environmental impacts of all sorts:

1. 50 people all drive from their homes to various stores/pickup points to buy shit, or

2. 1 vehicle drives to 50 homes, dropping off the shit they ordered online.

Summer is HERE. Dancing in the sunshine, me!

But everybody's not you. Sometimes we're on expensive, metered bandwidth. Sometimes we're in an online business meeting. Sometimes we're giving/about to give a presentation. Sometimes we're under deadline pressure and can't afford the additional time and stress of a potentially-breaking upgrade. We have lot's of times when we'd really rather postpone an upgrade, for perfectly legitimate reasons. We get the security issue, we'll upgrade when the timing is better. Just don't take that decision out of our hands.

Totally automated upgrades are an evil (unless there's an explicit opt-in) and must die.

No. I've seen several this very morning.

eta:... including a submission of a post by Elon Musk.

I think they're simply generally very low quality/low effort submissions that sink to the bottom of the "new" page fast.

I resent your assumption that only US senators should do mine hunting. Surely politicians everywhere of whatever stripe are good enough for this job?

The pendulum always swings...

Running jet engines on Hydrogen? Easy peasy!

Hydrogen-fueled aircraft? Never gonna happen.

The weight of H2 containment is prohibitive, and you get to keep flying that shit even after you've burned all the fuel. Makes no sense.

Not stupid, they just don't know what a lot of food looks like before it's been processed into food. Not their fault, just a fact.

As someone who lives "out in the country" I can tell you from experience that city people will walk right past a field full of food without even recognising that it is food. They're too used to seeing the polished, buffed and packaged thing that ends up in the supermarket.

OK. I was going with something Mr Musk quoted the other day, but my aging memory may well be faulty.

Vox bot, vox dei.

Was thinking along these lines earlier when I saw that Mastodon now has something north of 7M users (including bots? are there many bots there? some, for sure, but probably not a lot).

7M is the population of a good-size city. Twitter has something like 24M/day active (including bots. lots of bots!).

The difference is that Twitter is just one big, wide-open agora, lots of touts shouting at the tops of their voices, and heard over all the space. Mastodon instances are natural neighbourhoods. You eventually find one that suits you and settle there. You don't like it after a while, or you find somewhere better, you move. You can very easily avoid the dodgy parts of the city (or visit them if that's your thing) and just hang out where you're comfortable. For me that's the key difference between the two.

I think what's going on in those cases is that people are heavily invested in Twitter, believing their bulk audience is there, but (understandably) want to hedge their bets. Lots of them are posting the same stuff to both Twitter and Mastodon (tooling exists) and they'll wait and see how it pans out. As they see more interaction on Mastodon, perhaps they'll migrate their focus, too.

Interesting time, for sure.

Vandalism? More like willful self-harm!

Why are you so self-obsessed?

Bullshit. If the designers didn't go there first the consumers would have had nothing to vote on.

Pity the writeup didn't go into (or provide pointers to) how to go about it...

Funny... I think the exact opposite. The spammers and bot-herders will flock to buy blue ticks in order to look more legit. The rest of us don't basically give a fuck.

Citing some evidence to back your theory might make your claim more convincing.