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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: May 24th, 2021

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  • In this context the use of “they” is just proper English though. I can’t fault someone who speaks a gendered language from using gendered pronouns as is proper in that language, but the use of “they” in English is correct and hardly political or exclusive. Every language is going to have rules that may be strange to non-native speakers, but any “confusion” is easily remedied by explaining that’s just how the language works. I find that’s also part of the fun of learning another language. I especially love trying to mix the rules of one language into another to see how silly it sounds. :)



  • I’ve never heard of Skiff, but it’s sad to see more software gobbled up by VCs. Though it sounds like the back end was never OSS to begin with?

    I used to be so excited about a future where people were software literate where we would be building open systems and make a decent living. Instead, people have been force fed locked down systems in the name of “user experience”, all so that a few people can make an absolute killing while the rest of us feed off the scraps (even if the scraps of the software industry are still pretty good). It just makes me sad.

    I am extremely appreciative of folks who do make honest open source software though! Many of them do make a decent living too. It’s hard not to lose hope when reading stuff like this, but then I remember that I’m typing this comment using Firefox on KDE Plasma running on a Linux kernel, right next to an Emacs session. Sticking to good open source software is a wonderful thing!




  • Clearly you’ve never read Hacker News. :)

    Every point I’ve made has several threads on pretty much every Hacker News post about Mozilla or Firefox.

    I was using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix, and I switched to Chrome briefly about 10 years ago when it was actually a bit better than Firefox. At the time, most people I knew in the tech sector were using Firefox. It’s Firebug extension was a major boost for development. Chrome was a bit better and their dev tools were even better than Firebug at the time.

    I switched back to Firefox when I saw the direction Google was taking it, and I know a lot of other people did as well. Still, many people stayed with Chrome. There’s no shortage of comments on Hacker News about “I dropped Firefox because X” or “I tried to switch to Firefox but X”, where X is one of the things I mentioned.

    Chrome got to where it was in no small part to us “computer people” saying it was good. And now not enough of us are saying Firefox is good. It breaks my heart to see so many young and smart developers choosing Chrome.

    We’re heading back to the bad old days of IE dominance, with proprietary extensions, playing fast and loose with standards, and market dominance pushing for things that only benefit one company. ActiveX still gives me nightmares.








  • My issue isn’t with the technology but the fact that only an announcement created $100,000,000,000 worth of “value” while at the same time people are losing their jobs.

    And even if the tech works, there are any number of reasons it won’t be successful. A competitor may beat them to it, or an open source one comes out, or the UI is terrible, or a middle manager cancels the project, or…

    I have no issues with people making piles of money for creating useful things, but I do take issue with the speculative market moving around so much money while inequality is on the rise and people are out of work. And some of these are the very people who created that “value”.

    I don’t really have a solution, but I also refuse to accept it as just the way things are.