They also make things hard to talk about. When you mention testing library in an ordinary conversation without @ signs and dashes, people won't know whether you're talking about the concept of a testing library or a specific one.
It's not just that people haven't read enough of the article to see how limited the evidence is, they haven't even read enough (three paragraphs) to understand the mechanism by which the author argues that ads make people unhappy: by making them aware of things they want but can't afford.
But this also applies to a lot of media that people consume on purpose, TikTok, Instagram, TV and magazines about the rich and famous.
It implies a curious understanding of what makes people happy. Why do people follow rich celebrities on instagram rather then homeless people, to feel better by comparison? Is it because they don't know what really makes them happy or is a relative measure of happiness perhaps insufficient?
Youtube, Android and Google Maps got better (and became financially viable at all) when Google bought them. Github got better and cheaper when Microsoft bought it.
I'm not necessarily talking about the product itself getting better, I'm talking about the overall consumer situation being better.
All these products were acquired very early in their lifespans, so them getting "better" was practically inevitable.
GitHub's acquisition effectively took at least one competitor off the market. Now, Microsoft doesn't have to seriously develop a competitor, they just bought their competitor and adopted it. They never had to improve Azure DevOps (VSTS) enough to be attractive, they just bought the market leader. If GitHub was never acquired, my company might be deciding between BitBucket, Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure Repos. Instead, Azure Repos is more of a niche offering where most of Microsoft's effort has focused on GitHub. Microsoft removed an option which likely raised prices or reduced user choice.
Google Maps was acquired in basically a prototype stage before it was ever a public product, so that case is irrelevant.
Android is worse in a number of ways due to Google's integration. Google Play Services APIs and other Google technologies have led to heavy Google lock-in. If Android continued as its own project, it would have been much more vendor-agnostic.
In the case of YouTube, I'd argue it's worse in a number of key ways: ads are wildly pervasive (sure, monetization would have had to happen anyway in some fashion), many of the platform changes are user-hostile (removed dislike count, background playback limited to premium subscription), content moderation more heavily influenced by Google's advertisement-based business model (e.g., if YouTube had continued on its own, it might have chosen a different monetization strategy less advertisement oriented, but Google is an advertisement company. Advertisers are more sensitive to their products being presented next to objectionable content) and competitors were snuffed out due to ecosystem integration (YouTube videos as Google search results rather than agnostic video results).
Remember the era where YouTube got extremely badly integrated in to Google+ and basically forced you to use it? That was a pretty terrible user experience.
Piracy is seeing a big uptick because streaming increasingly sucks. 10+ years ago before studios started chasing their own streaming platforms, and Netflix was the only game in town, it was an excellent deal. $10ish, as opposed to $50+ for cable (might be low on the cable subscription - I never had one).
If you wanted an equivalent catalog today, you'd need at least 3 or 4 streaming services, and you're paying $50+ or so. Netflix + WB (inc HBO) surely gets them back to roughly where they were. Will Netflix jack up their rates on the back of this acquisition? Inevitably, but I think they'll have a very hard time approaching a similar monthly rate. My gut says that they'll have a hard time getting beyond $30, with Disney and Youtube anchoring in the low teens. So, for the consumer, it's a win. For competing studios, of course, not so much.
You're assuming a free market working perfectly would bring the price down, but the free market is kneecapped by stupid and arbitrary licensing and IP games, which is the result desperate overreach of an industry hanging on by its fingernails as its business model has been upended multiple times over during the past 2 1/2 decades. But as we used to say about the music industry while happily napstering, your broken business model is not my problem.
> The Commission initiates legislation, but it has no reason to be reticent. It cannot make policy by announcing new spending commitments and investments, as the budget is tiny, around one percent of GDP, and what little money it has is mostly earmarked for agriculture (one-third) and regional aid (one-third). In Brussels, policy equals legislation. Unlike national civil servants and politicians, civil servants and politicians who work in Brussels have one main path to build a career: passing legislation.
This is also relevant in debt-brake discussions. Many who want a smaller government support limits on debts, but a smaller budget leaves passing laws as the only way for politicians to assert themselves. Often, spending money is a less harmful way for a politician to get a headline then passing a law.
In the same way that we budge the quantity of dollars we can spend, we should probably budget the quantity of laws we can create, and laws that can exist at any given time.
The budget is ultimately limited by the government's ability to extract value. There are no similar limits to the quantity of laws and regulations that can be in effect at the same time. Legislators can of course impose an arbitrary limit, but they can just as easily increase the limit or repeal it, if they don't like it.
The number of laws is limited by several factors, among them:
The ability of the governed to remember and attend to them all
The resources of the government available to explain, interpret and enforce compliance
The willingness of the governed to obey them without a gun being brought out
The willingness and ability of the government to bring out a gun to enforce them
For instance, when the rule of avoidance in late imperial China created a 5x increase in rate of new regulations, the result was up to 30% decrease in tax collections and a counterintuitive increase in the power and influence of local clerks, gentry and militias, laying the groundwork supportive of the eventual mutiny against and collapse of Qing rule
You should put standard keyboard bindings as a pitch on the website as well. Most people in the market for a terminal editor are probably looking for something that doesn't require them to learn a set of keyboard shortcuts that's entirely different from every other piece of software that they use.
I searched for that desperately until I discovered micro[1].
Here's a quick comparison between micro and fresh:
- Fresh implements more standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+ArrowLeft and Ctrl+ArrowRight to skip to the next and previous word, Ctrl+Backspace to delete the previous word and Ctrl+Delete to delete the next one.
- Fresh is extensible in typescript, Micro in lua.
- Fresh is able to open the wikidata json dump (1.7T).
- Micro is included in most repos, so if you rent a new VPS you can immidiately dnf install it.
> Robbie Bach (Chief Xbox Officer): I said, okay, well then, let’s not do it.
> Ed Fries (VP, Game Publishing): And then somebody says, “What about Sony?”
> Jeff Henshaw (Software Design): Microsoft had owned the den and the office. And the thought of Sony owning the rest of the home is offensive to Bill [Gates].
> Ed Fries: Bill kinda pauses, and he thinks, and he says… “I think we should do this.” And Ballmer’s like, “yeah, we should do this!” And then they start getting excited and it starts going back and forth. “We should do this!” “We should let these guys do this!”
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that Microsoft and Google were so bent on competing with each other for its own sake (Bing, ChromeOS) that they allowed Apple to dominate the next generation of computing with the iPhone. This seems like another part of the same story.
I like this. I like walking, and I already walk quite fast, but I'd like to see more while I walk. (Though, as I'm thinking about it right now, I might also just consciously practice walking faster.)
I don't find these knobs any less irritating then the knobs in other music software. Sliders are the perfect way to change numbers with a mouse or a touchscreen. I don't understand why music software sticks to a level of skeuomorphism that has been abandoned in every other field.
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