And still every day it continues, it becomes a little bit harder to back out. Like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan this war cannot be won.

And if they had it their way, Oracle would have similarly strangled every last customer of Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, etc. to squeeze out every last dollar.

And then make it look like they're innovating.

First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average.

Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials.

Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.

I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...

Because we have such limited control over our devices, they effectively provide the security of a jail locking down what users can do. That is appealing from a healthcare or banking perspective because it obfuscates the client-server API and gives exact control over the UI. As a bonus, the coffee chain gets to glean lots of details from your phone that would be unavailable in a browser.

As individuals we can do little more that push back: don't let yourself be trapped by coffee chains (go to a different one) and bother your bank's service line about having to use their app. The rest is up to government intervention, I fear.

The problem here isn't that Patreon is centralized, but that the app store is. Apple could easily require a cut from any app using nostr and related protocols. Or simply ban them altogether.

Not saying government mandates are ideal, but I don't see any other way to force some sense into Apple (or Google). App stores should be some sort of independent institutions (non-profits) but companies have no incentive to cede that revenue. Until that happens, best not download from app stores unless absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.

It's tough for Juniors. I recommend specializing on one or two systems aspects, like performance, reliability, security. Understanding is design, how to measure the aspect, how to reason about it, knowing which levers to pull.

Still, stateful protocols have a tendency to bite when you scale up. And HTTP is specifically designed to be stateless and you get scalability for free as long as you stick with plain GET requests...

Relying on http has the advantage that you can leverage commodity infrastructure like caching proxies and CDN.

Why push protobuf over http when all you need is present in http already?

I have friends that made a descent buck 20-30 years ago translating technical documents like car manuals. Over the years, prices fell from quarters per words to fractions of a cent.

And even though machine translation was barely existent, tools were used to argue higher productivity and therefore lower prices.

On top of that the open source market will increasingly be flooded with (well intended) AI slop built by junior devs.