Javascript in the browser was a mistake. And if we had to have it, the suitable scope of it was what we had around 2004.

Google invested tens of billions in it realizing they had a way of owning the browser space simply by making it insanely complex. Just hire all of the web standards people, tell them to go crazy and then also hire thousands of C++ browser developers for decades to implement everything. Boom, a moat!

Also: It's a bit of a culture shock to be served soft drinks made from very obviously chlorinated water in e.g. California (one of the richest regions in the world). Is it a taste that people just learn to live with? I don't understand how this is tolerated.

The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac

They have delivered 185 aircraft to domestic airlines. Maybe Africa is next?

Note that they so far use engines from western companies - GE and Safran. In fact, the vast majority of their primary suppliers are from outside of China: https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinas-comac-a...

I guess it takes a bit of a war chest to get into this business simply because it isn't very easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWX1nsvqBs&t=173s

a) Waggener Edstrom (now: WE Communications) or similar

b) Microsoft employees

c) Third-party Microsoft-only developers/IT people (with an obvious vested financial interest)

"They have changed, gramps. This really smart Satya Nadella is CEO. They are the good guys now. Don't be so bitter over old stuff like systematic use of illegal tactics to attempt to kill all of its competitors including Linux."

Also: Note that the headline undersells the news dramatically. The article begins with:

"GitHub has confirmed that roughly 3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension."

Silicon Valley built this machine. Many tens of thousands of software engineers worked on this.

And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly").

IPO time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 (in the last few hours)

Year 0-12: Coding lots, learning lots.

Year 12-22: A product I built really took off. Now primarily building new stuff by talking to other engineers. Lots of product management/politics. Atrophying coding skills.

Year 22-28: I'm tired of building by talking. Re-learning coding.

Year 28-: "Here's this thing called Claude Code". I interface with it by... talking.

Berkshire Hathaway, Novo Nordisk, ASML, TSMC, Saab, Atlas Copco, Texas Instruments.

(Perhaps not that many from the US though, relatively speaking? Not sure TBH.)

> each server (so called “shards”) ran on multiple Solaris machines (the map was split by regions).

Found this 13 year old Quora commment (from https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-technology-stack-driving-...).

Ruben Cortez

Those original servers were Sun Ultra II's running Solaris. If I remember correctly, it was a dual proc box (rare in those days), 300mhz, with 256MB of ram (which we subsequently upgraded to 512MB for a boat load of cash). The server weighed a ton, and certainly wasn't rack mountable. and they cost about $30k each, making one UO shard cost about $150k (not including external storage), which is a ridiculous amount of money these days for a single shard. We eventually built MMO shards for a lot less (including MCO, TSO, ENB, and of course SWTOR) cost per shard. Back ups were kept on internal storage, for which we sweated buckets over everytime we lost a drive. we eventually centralized backups on an Hitachi Storage array that was a monster and weighed easily 100lbs and provided a whopping ~10GB of raw space.

I think where we revolutionized administration of a distributed MMO was on the network side, specifically via the VPN, which was very new at that time. Short of ordering PTP circuits all over the country and world, we used a software VPN to create those tunnels over our public internet connection at the time (a SINGLE DS3 -- it wasn't until late 1998 that we had a second circuit!) to allow for login handoff, administration, backups, publishes, etc. our hub and spoke VPN design and subsequent fully-meshed design were what made distributing shards economically feasible.

I think it was around mid 1999 when we converted to Linux, but not before using Solaris x86 first for a time. We bought Dell Towers to act as servers (Dell didn't ship a true rack-mountable server until the following year or so I think) and they were slightly better on speed than the Suns and at a much lower cost. But i think we needed more of them per shard, especially as we released expansion packs (which in those days, meant adding a new server to handle the added land mass). We were likely closer to 10 servers/shard around 2000/1.

Credit to Mark Rizzo for the architecture and buildout of the UO's backend. It was way ahead of it's time, and the innovations we mustered back then is so taken for granted these days (but isn't that true for everything?!).

That timeline for Solaris (Sparc) -> Solaris (x86) -> Linux (x86) feels very familiar from my small company developer job at the time.

I kind of "enjoyed" this aspect of CVS (for small teams, at least) since it strongly encouraged trunk based development.

Popular science kind of backgrounder (can't vouch for the accuracy/relevancy - details are very scarce): https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/digital-logic/polymer-memory/

Every time the recipient hypes the shit out of it, of course.

It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.

Use browser based translation tools on https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/smaland/fanerdun-1.

Lots of promised investments, naive local politicians (the same guy is still municipal councilor, gah), lack of critical thinking.

The end result was just a lot of Swedish/EU visas. They had been advertised for $20-30k per family in China. Oh, and also about 100 "investors" + families who had "paid for visas" but not received anything before it all crumbled.

The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.