But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".

https://www.fsf.org/

But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.

> medium you are consuming may not exist at all

I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.

Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.

I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.

This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.

I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.

> aren’t these shared libraries a supply chain attack vector

Not any more than the apps themselves. If you're downloading a static binary you don't know what's in it. I don't know why anyone trusts half the Docker images that we all download and use. But we do it anyway.

I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.

The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.

But it doesn't help that Tesla is a tech company and their product is sold as a tech product. No one wants to buy a 3 year old used iPhone, either.

With that said, I also see benefit in having limitations. There is a certain comfort in knowing what a tool can do and cannot do. A hammer cannot become a screwdriver. And that's fine because you can then decide to use a screwdriver. You're capable of selection.

Take PostgreSQL. How many devs today know when it's the right solution? When should they use Redis instead? Or a queue solution? Cloud services add even more confusion. What are the limitations and weaknesses of AWS RDS? Or any AWS service? Ask your typical dev this today and they will give you a blank stare. It's really hard to even know what the right tool is today, when everything is abstracted away and put into fee tiers, ingress/egress charges, etc. etc.

tl;dr: limitations and knowledge of those limitations are an important part of being able to select the right tool for the job

Our industry is a laughingstock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbPHp6QfkQ

I had a mk7 and it is the best interior + UX I've seen in a car. Everything is as simple and ergonomic as possible. The volume adjustment is a knob, with soft rubber knurling and indents for feedback. It's not some awful feeling smooth afterthought that you see on certain Toyotas or Hondas. It's not a push button (beep beep beep beep) you find on old Pioneer stereos from the '90s. It's exactly what you want to adjust the volume. The AC is similar. Heated seats are a button with 3 LEDs indicating high/med/low. Everything just makes sense.

And then VW got cheap and greedy. The mk8 is almost the complete opposite of what the mk7 was.

Here's a more detailed article on the cabal process (starting on page 2):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210823181232/https://www.gamas...

From 1999 and much more detailed than the video.

Now, game development is inherently waterfall. You work for years and built up to this huge release. Nowadays you might have some agile processes embedded into milestones, etc. But fundamentally it's all leading to a huge waterfall.

That's important. Because what agile does, today, is that it turns autonomous developers into cogs of a large machine. But Valve's "cabal" was entirely free to do whatever they felt best. Gabe Newell probably had final say and input, but ultimately the group had flexibility. The developers had full system awareness. They weren't pulling Jira tickets off a board like a blind man in the elephant parable[1]. They knew how the pieces fit because they put them there. And if the pieces weren't fitting, they had the authority to make them fit.

Perhaps more interesting is how the story of Half-life can be viewed through The Mythical Man-Month[2]

> When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system.

Their cabal has a bit of overlap with the "surgical team" concept and usage of formal documents. The rest of the employees did nothing while this group operated. Thus, they reduced manpower that actually allowed them to move forward. Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast (from the US Navy Seals). Most companies do the opposite. They crank up the number of employees to hit deadlines, which creates more bugs and more work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th...

Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.

But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.

There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.

All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)

not sure what event you're thinking of, but Google was a public company before 10 years and they started their first ad program just barely more than a year after forming as a company in 1998.