It is perfectly possible for both sides to approach a salary conversation as the negotiation that it clearly is. In reality, many job candidates barely think about negotiating the salary, but I doubt that’s due to not having enough data points. I think it’s probably more to do with not wanting to be perceived as ‘greedy’ or some other moral badness, and finding it more comfortable to let the recruiter/employer play them like a fiddle. Moral pride to spite their face. Sure, we can feel good in the moment by angrily pointing out that companies take various measures to maximise income and minimise expenditure, as if it’s surprising or ‘wrong’. But it might also be helpful to remember that we are in exactly the same situation. Then perhaps we can start negotiating better deals for ourselves, thus improving life for ourselves and our dependents.

If a page downloads 1MB JSON, that could easily take 10MB (maybe much more?) RAM when parsed into an object. And JS code itself probably has a similar increase in size just by getting parsed into an AST. And all that is before really executing anything - once the dozens of shitty third party scripts start whirring, they will generate tons of uncollectible garbage because they are written by miserable people who don’t give a shit, understandably. And I bet LinkedIn has a hell of a lot of junk third party scripts injected by random spies I working in various corporate departments who need to spy on users to collect data to persuade their boss to let them do some dumb project to prove they deserve their job.

Tabs also render a bunch of compositor layers as bitmaps stored in VRAM, or just RAM, for smooth scrolling. Oh and there’s the DOM, I bet that adds up. I’m probably only scratching the surface. There’s so much going on in a browser tab. The front end is a marvel of engineering. Sites like LinkedIn of course exploit this for banal evil, sadly.

But even that obscures the most important considerations: what does "some data" mean, and to whom are you revealing it? So if we make it a bit more verbose (but still keeping to the facts), it's more like: "I'm happy to reveal my browsing and purchasing history to unknown third parties, in unknown juristictions around the world, in order to get top notch search results." If you're happy to do make that trade, great, but I'd argue it's not such an obviously good deal as you make it sound.

In contrast, the original comment (@zaptheimpaler) convincingly argues that the NYT has made a moral error in this case, regardless of where you stand on the ideological issues clouding it. It makes a strong argument by sticking to the facts, carefully avoiding appeals to emotion or bundled claims that could undermine the central point. That is what makes it such a good argument, and it's probably why it's the most upvoted comment here.

Hello,

Thank you for your email. I initially reacted by pulling the extension, in fear of possible legal consequences. But on reflection I would like to propose a better solution.

There are hundreds of extensions that customise websites, in many cases to help 'power users', or to assist people with accessibility problems not provided for by the websites themselves. These extensions are often made by the websites' most avid users. A great example is the Refined GitHub extension, which GitHub itself has embraced as a proving ground and source of inspiration for new official features. [1][2]

That said, it is of course vital that people understand that such extensions are unofficial, and that they are unsupported and not endorsed by the website owner.

I would like to notify you of my intent to republish my extension with the changes outlined below, which I hope will satisfy your concerns.

• New extension title: "BetterSlack: Unofficial customizations for Slack"

• Modify store description to include an explicit warning that installation and use of the extension is at your own risk, and is not endorsed in any way by Slack, and that Slack offers no support for it.

In the interests of transparency I will publish all of our correspondence on my blog, as I think this is an important issue of interest to the wider community concerning the rights of individuals to control their own computers and customise their own experiences.

Best regards,

...

[1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github/issues/1469 [2] https://blog.github.com/2018-08-28-announcing-paper-cuts/