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cjpearson
Joined 1,054 karma

  1. You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.

    There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

    Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.

  2. A big factor in the quick return (and maybe one reason for its popularity) is that Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. The ROI doesn't look as attractive in France, the US or Norway.
  3. The author was for a long time a developer on Chrome and now works at Microsoft on Edge. I would not expect them to lead an anti-Chrome crusade.
  4. > Perhaps Google and Mozilla, leaders in JavaScript standards and implementations, will start developing a real standard library for JavaScript, which makes micro-dependencies like left-pad a thing of the past.

    It's not wrong, but this take is kind of tired and well out of date. For about a decade or so left-pad's functionality has been standard in all browsers or runtimes. Plenty of other micropackages have been obsoleted as well and the current zeitgeist is to avoid publishing or using any sort of micropackage.

    "Zero dependencies" is now a top marketing term in the frontend world. Unfortunately, their removal is an ongoing process and it's taken way too long already to fully purge the ecosystem of these packages. However, it's not because the JavaScript community has never thought of this issue before. "Add more features to the JS standards and don't use is-number" is not a particularly new idea or valuable insight.

    But beyond that, there were plenty of not-tiny packages impacted as well. Continuing to beat this dead horse may be fun, but it distracts from the actual issue here.

  5. In many cases it is required to access the content. Courts have allowed "Consent or pay" for sites such as newspapers.
  6. For a magazine like the New Yorker, there was money. You might be interested in Bryan Burrough's experience writing for Vanity Fair in the 90s and 2000s.

    > For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

    https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-...

  7. Those are perfectly good reasons and in the hypothetical world of housing affordability such utility should compensate for the depreciation. Similarly many people find value in owning a car despite the nearly guaranteed decline in value. Ideally neither would be viewed as a wealth-building tool.
  8. There's a common view that home-ownership is important because a home is the most expensive asset most people will ever own and its increasing value is key to their comfortable retirement. But this view of a home as an appreciating asset is incompatible with increasing housing affordability.

    There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.

  9. I've generally not had an interest in working for one of the big tech companies, but the opportunity to escape JIRA is tempting.
  10. It basically comes down to the face that the quarterback position has an outsized importance in the game and those players become the face of their franchises. They are often credited with wins and losses despite those being a team stat.

    Some of the players do find this fan/media obsession strange. They may be asked about playing against QB X and reply that they're actually playing against the opposing defense.

    There are rivalries between players who are on the field at the same time, but they're less prominent. Those between a wide receiver and cornerback are probably the most common. Throughout the game they are racing, pushing and deceiving each other and fighting over the ball and it can become heated.

    However, it's also possible to have a competitive rivalry without directly facing each other on the field. In individual sports like golf this is the only way. But in other sports players can also compete with each other on some individual aspect. In baseball, the 1998 HR chase and Dimaggio brothers are some prominent examples. In Brady's case he had a strong desire to be number one. The threat of Peyton winning MVPs over him, having better statistics than him or Peyton's team winning over his was a strong motivator for Brady to protect his status.

  11. Soon, hopefully, QUERY will save us all. In the meantime, simply using POST is fine.

    I've also seen solutions where you POST the filter config, then reference the returned filter ID in the GET request, but that often seems like overkill even if it adds some benefits.

  12. I sympathize with the pedantry here and found Fielding's paper to be interesting, but this is a lost battle. When I see "REST API" I can safely assume the following:

    - The API returns JSON

    - CRUD actions are mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE

    - The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

    - There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters

    Like Agile, CI or DevOps you can insist on the original definition or submit to the semantic diffusion and use the terms as they are commonly understood.

  13. I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:

    - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project

    Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.

    Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.

  14. Some examples that come to mind: cell modems, video game engines, retail space leasing, fast food franchises.
  15. A different type of radio program (and he also did television), but Vin Scully announced Dodger games for 67 years.
  16. Germany certainly has its issues with digitalization, but bringing TikTok into the classroom should not be its top priority.
  17. Possibly, although the fix for this particular issue (Temporal API) is available in the current release of Firefox as well as the preview release of Safari, but it's not in that dominant browser.
  18. The same way people are replacing C++ on a language without a standard library

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