it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that.
> 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.
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.
I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
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)
I've made this argument before, but in relation to dating.
You'll never be more interesting than a smartphone. It's virtually impossible. You're a single human, and that device contains the entire world. If you meet a woman, she has her friends on there. She has her instagram account. Snapchat, TikTok, whatever. You are instantly contrasted against the entire world (against only the highlight reel) and you don't match up. And you never will. You're dull and uninteresting. Just wait until you find yourself swiping on Tinder while your date is in the restroom. No one is immune.
The same is true for children. I'll never be as interesting at a Twitch stream or a flashy YouTube channel. Because no one is "on" at all times. Even at my most interesting, I'm not edited down.
I'm glad to have experienced life before the internet and cell phones. We'll never be back to that point and we may not be fully aware of what was lost for some time yet.
IPv4 is just inefficiently allocated in general. Why does the world need 10.0.0.0/8 in addition to 192.168.0.0/16? Isn't 65k addresses enough? Is there a private organization in need of 16 million addresses?
Not to mention AMPRNet (amateur radio) owned the entire 44.0.0.0/8 up until 2019 (a portion was sold off to Amazon). That may have seemed reasonable in 1980 but now it's just plain crazy.
And I really can't believe I have to explain this at Hacker News of all places (jesus christ), but this is the difference between Chromium and Chrome.
Those people defending HTML5 DRM really have a lot to answer for here. "It'll be fine" they say. Proof right fucking here that consumers are oblivious.
Netflix not playing in Chromium is a Chromium problem, not a Linux problem. Don't blame Linux for Chrome and Netflix making the web a proprietary DRM shithole.
If you want Netflix in Linux it's as simple as installing the official Google Chrome browser.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".