The healthcare system in the US isn’t great, but you do get a decent experience if you have an employer that offers good insurance. My employer pays most of the cost of my health insurance. I pay around $200/month for my wife and I, but that’s pre-tax money, and the plan is great for US standards. $15 for doctor visits and $100 maximum for ER visits.

In Australia we pay a 1.5% tax to fund the public health care system, so for a $60k salary that’s $900/year.

An important note missing from this article (but included in others) is that Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack Overflow, donated 2.2 million Euros to Mastodon. That’s likely partially where the 1 million Euro payout for the CEO came from.

Why don’t you like people being paid for their work?

us software salaries are insanely high compared to the rest of the world, because the cost of living in SV is insanely high.

I moved from Australia to the San Francisco Bay Area. My starting income was maybe 3x what I was getting paid in Australia, but the cost of living definitely wasn’t 3x higher. Major Australian cities are considered HCOL (high cost of living) areas too. Some things like electronics and food were cheaper in the USA too, at least until inflation and tariffs made everything go up.

I wonder if Google will ever release a new version of the Coral, with some of the newer TPU tech.

(yes, I know Google handed that off to Asus…)

I’m 95% sure the settlement with the publishers would have included a clause requiring the Internet Archive to delete all “infringing” material in their possession.

I have mixed feelings. I’m glad they survived the lawsuits, and now they can spend their funding on their actual goals rather than it going towards lawyers.

On the other hand, it’s really sad that they had to delete so much of their archive - over half a million books, and a bunch of recordings from their Great 78 Project (which was archiving 300k+ music albums released between ~1900 and 1950). A lot of the things that can’t be archived are eventually going to become lost media.

This is a great post that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for the link!

I feel the same about software development. For personal projects, I’ll often use a technology stack I’m very familiar with, like C# and MySQL on a Debian Linux server. Maybe not the fanciest, but they’re proven, reliable technologies that have been around for a long time, and will likely still be around a long time from now.

New frameworks, libraries, and languages pop up all the time, but some of the ecosystems move way too quickly. I have some Node.js sites I built years ago that I can’t even run any more without major changes.

Relevant: https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring-stack.html

I wish there was a law stipulating that smart devices must allow for local control. That’d never happen in the USA (since companies couldn’t make as much money selling the data, and we can’t hurt the poor companies’ revenue streams), but maybe it’s happen in Europe one day.

“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.

They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.

The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).

This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:

As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.

but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.

Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:

Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data centre.

I like Notepad++. It can handle anything you throw at it.

I switched to Linux (Fedora with KDE) and I like KWrite for similar reasons.

The current UI is very different to the original UI though.

Some Windows apps do handle it properly. For example, if you have an archive open in 7-zip and try to delete it, Windows Explorer should correctly tell you that it’s open in 7-Zip. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way for all apps.

might be rolling in it in a couple years

Doubtful given 70-90% of startups fail.

VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn’t care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.

“AJAX” (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.

I’m hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There’s a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.

Even visual basic for the web would make sense

This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There’s a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.

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