> Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to.
Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
> True write once run anywhere cross platform support, and one click zero install distribution with no gatekeepers.
We had (have) that, and the apps were miserable to use for the same reasons enumerated above. The place where it has come closest to succeeding? Video games.
Unfortunately, platforms are too diverse to target as a generic platform without making major sacrifices as to either consistency or usability.
Python is of course a major boon to humanity, but the things that need funding are typically things that corporations aren't using. It's our reliance on private spokes of technology (think: app stores & sales platforms, operating systems, hardware designs, etc) that are major risks to the long-term stability of our society and economy.
> Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.
This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.
It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.
> Only a very small percentage of the world has a complete grasp on the evidence for natural selection, climate change, the big bang, etc...
I'm guessing only a small number (1-2 digits of people) has a "complete grasp" on the evidence for any one of those topics at all, and there isn't a single human on earth with a "complete grasp" on all of them. To support the article, integrating knowledge of fields that you don't have "complete grasp" on still requires faith in institutional processes that produce what we call "science".
And this is even more complicated when it comes to the replication crisis—I'm guessing having a "complete grasp" on the understanding the literature represents of difficult to reproduce fields is 0. I don't know much about climate change work myself, but it seems like such a dynamic and chaotic field that many results on specific claims of cause and impact are going to be difficult to reproduce.
> There isn't anything actually wrong with JavaScript in 2023, either.
The semantics of the language can be quite complex and it took decades for browsers to agree on them for most use cases. WASM arose out of a failure of browsers to figure out ways to deprecate this—mostly unnecessary—complexity.
> The idea that it needs to be replaced stems from countless failed attempts to shove a bunch of crap into the client with a bunch of frameworks and without a shred of actual engineering discipline.
The same can be said about the implementation of javascript in browsers as well.
We're stuck with it regardless, but our reliance on javascript and its myriad interactions with html and css functions much the same way for large browser vendors as regulatory capture does for large corporations at the state level.
> You are a member of the intellectual dark web, and care more about finding the truth than about social conformance
Isn't this a declaration of what social conformance you prefer? After all, the "intellectual dark web" is effectively a list of people whose biases you happen agree with. Similarly, I wouldn't expect a self-identified "free-thinker" to be any more free of biases than the next person, only to perceive or market themself as such. Bias is only perceived as such from a particular point in a social graph.
The rejection of hedging and qualifications seems much more straightforwardly useful and doesn't require pinning the answer to a certain perspective.
We've needed a search engine that excludes the work of corporate giants that dominate our modern internet for a while. It's just never been so clear and dire as today.
Interestingly google used to have a per-user, user-controlled domain blacklist that go excised around ~2008 or so—presumably because this would have enabled automated blocking of high-value clients.
> Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out?
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
That seems to remove the advantage of using the browser in the first place—leveraging native controls and integrations, giving the user control over how things are renderered, and accessibility concerns.
Of course, I can see how this is mostly irrelevant for some applications like games, but that's still rather niche compared to, you know, useful and wide-spread apps that people actually want to use.
> I remember listening to stories about a black preacher that converted a KKK leader and he did it through tolerance and compassion not by screaming hateful things back through a megaphone
The fact is, nothing in society was won by polite persuasion, but the compulsion to make people comfortable is the core of white supremacy. You might want to check your own judgement on hate if tolerating hateful people is your litmus test.
Sure, but that's just Popper's old paradox of tolerance: tolerating hateful people makes a hateful society. Anyone who is fine tolerating hate isn't working towards a tolerant society, they're working towards a hateful society. You don't need to look any further than e.g. the contemporary indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians to see this. Or the deep fear and lack of empathy americans have towards the poor.
> I've been looking for books that explain the underlying structures and dynamics of "wokeness" for a while.
Fear & fear of tolerance is a universal theme throughout history, there's not much to it. "Coddling" is a pejorative used by people afraid of tolerance.
Gravity's Rainbow is just a shadow of Pynchon's best work by a large margin, Mason & Dixon. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's probably the best novel I've ever read.