I told my son I would disown him if he worked for Facebook, for the reasons stated above.
Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.
That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.
I had a Mac Studio that would kernel panic on a semi-weekly basis. Apple Care put me through the reinstall OS / remove all external devices tap-dance for weeks, insisting that hardware was the last thing to suspect - before Apple Silicon, kernel panics were almost always hardware, particularly RAM.
Ultimately I bought another Studio and swapped it in - kernel panics went away. With that evidence, Apple acknowledged the problem and exchanged my Studio for another one from the factory. I returned the swap unit within the 30 day window, so it didn't cost me anything but annoyance.
Only partially. As long as the third-party doctrine is valid in the US, they can claim that they're just integrating data from private companies with existing government records.
And those third party companies can, if they choose, tell Palantir to pound sand if they don't have warrants.
The real problem is those third parties know a LOT about us, and it's essentially impossible to opt out of their data gathering. License plate scanners and credit bureaus, anyone?
I worked as part of a distributed team from 1989-1994. I was on the US east coast, one guy was in Ohio, two guys were in California, and two were in Japan.
I worked at the end of a Telebit Trailblazer, so I had a 19200 baud link to the internet. I remember emailing myself GCC - staged the tarball on a remote host, uuencoded it and sent it home as multiple email messages.
We mostly did stuff via email, with the occasional conference voice call. I had to learn to restrain myself and not try to solve user problems when I first saw them - because of the distribution of time zones, I would tend to be the first person awake.
This was definitely coding - we were selling and supporting Interlisp-D and its many derivatives.
I'm on the fringes of this project, trying to shake enough free time loose to contribute to coding - I'm still employed beating code into submission for NASA.
What we have is access to the source code for the D-machine emulator that Interlisp-D/Medley Common Lisp ran on in the 1980's.
The emulator was quite usable on 1980-s hardware - I worked for the company that sold it in the late 80s and early 90s.
We are still deciding stuff like what exact open source license to use, and how much priority to give to the two main goals:
* Historical - can it run old system dumps with important systems like NoteCards, LOOPS, LFG...
* Modernization - integration with host OS (clipboard, file system, networking), increasing memory space, adding Unicode
The only good thing about the ST mouse was that you could use it in confined spaces. It was possible to lift the mouse a bit, twist your wrist, and scuff the pointer across the screen - I called it "ballistic mousing".
I actually built a just-swap-the-pins adapter to use a Xerox Star mouse on my ST.
Did not see it mentioned in the article, but I believe Quintus Prolog was the base for Prolog on the Xerox Lisp machine line.
They went to the effort of writing special microcode for the unifier, which meant the basically 16-bit 1100 series workstations were competitive in performance with other Prologs at the time.
Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.
That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.