How real is this "crawler plague" that the author refers to? I haven't seen it. But that's just as likely to because I don't care, and therefore am not looking, as it is to be because it's not there. Loading static pages from CDN to scrape training data takes such minimal amounts of resources that it's never going to be a significant part of my costs. Are there cases where this isn't true?
Readit Newsterminalshort commented on Websites and web developers mostly don't care about client-side problems utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/zdw
terminalshort commented on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law wired.com/story/bluesky-g... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
And surprise surprise, it's in the name of "protecting children", the same thing red blooded Americans have been falling for for decades.
Who is failing to protect them from what?
terminalshort commented on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law wired.com/story/bluesky-g... · Posted by u/BallsInIt
six months ago I would have said the same thing about US universities.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
terminalshort commented on Privately-Owned Rail Cars amtrak.com/privately-owne... · Posted by u/jasoncartwright
so how do you get a privately owned train car and get it to the tracks or etc?
from this page it sounds like you own it but Amtrak keeps it parked at their switching stations or something
The companies that make train cars have a way to do this, so you probably just pay them to do it as part of the price you pay them to make you train car.
terminalshort commented on Advice for Tech Non-Profits mitchellh.com/writing/adv... · Posted by u/ksec
100% agreed. Awesome!
Here is our 501(c)(3) tech non-profit. All corporate profits are directed to children. Clear and transparent.
Clear and transparent, yes. Useful, no. By that statement buying the CEOs kid a house is totally within bounds.
terminalshort commented on UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption theverge.com/news/761240/... · Posted by u/iamdamian
Just rejoice that in this one case, the spinelessness of our elected representatives has some, perhaps temporary, upside.
How is this an example of spinelessness?
If they were that good, why would Google have to waste money pre-installing them as defaults?
To keep somebody else from doing that. Now they don't have to because nobody can.
> My previous post lists other ways users can ingress to the internet. Chrome is not the only app that connects to the internet.
I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress.
Defaults and distribution matter. Google has your parents and grandparents on lock.
> Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there."
They've spent more in stock buybacks. No better way of saying they don't know how to spend the money.
It doesn't matter how much the trillion dollar company spent. They're an ecological menace. We need a forest fire to clear away the underbrush and ossification, to create new opportunities for startups and innovation capital. Google is like an invasive species. Like lionfish. They're ruining tech for everyone else, taking far too much meat off the bone across every channel.
> Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.
I wouldn't know because I use Firefox, but on the subject of apps - these are taxed by Google too.
> If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.
That's literally the point. Something with less surface area moves in and competes.
Companies should face evolutionary pressure constantly. Business should be brutal and painful and hard. Google is so big they'll never feel any pain. That's been bad for the web, for competition, for diverse innovation. Everything just accrues to Google.
Not to mention these tech conglomerate oligopolies get to put an upper bounds cap on startups and the IPO market. They get to dump on new companies and buy them on the cheap when they give up. It's easy to threaten to subsidize competition for any new company when you're making hundreds of billions a quarter.
If defaults are so unfair how did Chrome ever become the dominant browser in the first place? Build a better browser and people will use it, just like they did with Chrome. Probably won't happen today, not because of Google being the default, but because browsers are a mature product and it just isn't nearly as easy to make something noticeably better.
Is anyone actually going to switch their default search engine on their phone now? We're so locked into the Google ecosystem. Feels like a slap on the wrist that won't change user habits one bit.
Nope. This will benefit Google because now that you can't pay for default status, Google is the de facto default for free.
That is a very fatalist perspective. In HS, I was in a class with 3 kids, who were genuinely smarter than me ( not by a notch, mind; comparatively speaking I was just dumber ). I agree that pretending I was/am not dumb by comparison would not help, but suggesting 'nothing you can do about it' is not entirely accurate either. Frankly, the reason I slowly got less dumb is because of my exposure to them. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing a guy using cold logic to guide you through something and be 100% correct.
I guess you could call it fatalist, but is it fatalist to say I was born to be 5'10" and there's not a damn thing in the world I can do to be 6'? Isn't it the same with intelligence? You may feel smarter now, but are you really? What, exactly, makes you fell like you are? Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you?