I wasn’t there for it, but this opinion piece has a pretty good story about the whole thing. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Basically, once Google had most of the regular users, and had convinced many of the XMPP users to switch to them, they just cut off support for xmpp, effectively neutering any growth it may have had without their influence.

To compare that to webp, it would be pretty easy for them to fork their webp into a closed source “2.0” and most everyone would be switched over to that version without even having a say in it. Sure, original WebP would still exist, but since nobody uses/supports it, it’s basically dead in the water anyways. This sounds awful and unlikely, but it’s literally in their playbook, and it is a thing they have done several times. Android, chrome, XMPP, etc…

It’s just as likely that Google keeps WebP as open standard for all time as it is that Google remakes it into a closed source tool that only their closed systems can use. The fact that they have a history of being awful is why we need to keep competing standards around, even if they’re just not as good or as widely spread around.

No, exactly. That’s the problem. You can’t really advertise ergonomics without it looking really different; so everyone just says “wider and thinner than ever before” and calls it a day. So we’re here; with everything the wrong size and shape.

The most comfortable phone I ever used was similar to the middle phone in this picture; except the buttons were raised even higher, and the middle key wasn’t a scroll wheel, just another simple button. It was also thinner, and had less rounded edges.

Y’all appear to have forgotten what phones felt like before things got to this extreme.

It was for ergonomics; it’s easier and more comfortable to hold a phone when it fits better in your hand. The phablet phase broke this for most people by making the screens super big, so they tried to correct by making the phones thinner.

A reasonable size phone that is thin enough would be perfect, but marketing doesn’t like it when they can’t advertise a bigger screen number, or a smaller thickness, so here we are.

Yeah. The companies you mentioned are rare novelties because they chose to advertise very little. That means the thing that is normal is when a company advertises. Ergo, having a good reputation usually requires marketing.

Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit

Its a big list of major assumptions by someone who never bothered to verify if they’re even true. He’s mad he had to work with a heavily marketed product that his boss liked, and wrote this about it. Check out this quote from the article;

And the really fun part is that “astroturfing” a thread about your product on Hacker News or Reddit is just about impossible. If you go to the places where developers hang out and try to promote your product, you will be shot down faster than Mark Zuckerberg at a privacy conference.

Dude. Reddit is practically more bot than person at this point, and its impossible to know by how much, because of how good they are at fooling everyone. https://www.clrn.org/how-much-of-reddit-is-bots/

The Dollar Shave Club, go pro

I specifically know who these guys are because of their massive youtube advertising campaigns.

Krispy Kreme, tesla

Please. Walk outside. Or watch cable for a bit. Just because you don’t personally see them doesn’t mean they don’t also have budgets for advertising as well. Tesla in particular straight up gave up on the strategy of word of mouth once their product stopped being known as quality, or at least, higher tech than anybody else.

https://teslanorth.com/2024/03/29/tesla-advertising-spend-6-5-million-2023/

https://ingenuitydisplay.com/what-is-krispy-kreme-s-advertising-budget.html

trader joes, costco

Exceptions to the rule, like Stardew valley, which prove the rule. They are famous as not having a marketing budget because not having a marketing budget is weird and unheard of.

You can’t really have a “reputation” in this day and age without marketing. The fact that things like Stardew valley exist really only prove the point.

Find a car that fits your needs and then pull the fuse powering the sim card before it leaves the lot. If it breaks, put the fuse back and don’t buy it.

My 2019 corolla lost the right speaker and mic access when I did that. I fixed the right speaker by crossing some wires, and the mic hasn’t really been needed enough for me to dig deeper to fix it.

Traditional way is to just use a WordPress account, and then move onto a paid hosting service of you decide you like keeping up with your blog. No point in paying for something you don’t use. Their ceo was a dick with open source stuff, but the website itself is still solid enough to be used to check if its a hobby you want to actually keep up with.

If you want to spend just as much time managing the blog as you do actually sharing things, a raspberry pi, Hugo, nginx, and a lot of time are also an option.

I personally use Porkbun for the .com and hostinger for the backend, and it’s been great for the past couple years to host my own wordpress setup.

But actually, I think that makes me oldschool. The new kids are using neocities.

Oh. I was joking. I’m aware that my storage capabilities really are an outlier, even though I still feel inadequate whenever I go to a hoarding community.

I’ve spent around 1200$ USD since I started collecting things back on 2021, which is about 300/year, or 25/month. I don’t expect to purchase anymore for another three years or so, right around when a 24tb drive drops to 150/each. It’s still not like, super cheap or anything though.

Nothing “almost” about it. Retail drives are available right now at 30tb. Although, the more reasonable price/GB is at around 8tb with occasional outliers.

Yeah. Normal people have about 100tb of total space. My 96tb (64tb usable) of space is completely average and not at all an indicator of something being wrong or abnormal.

Oof. Top three, but at the same time, half as much as the top paying site does.

This is a vague and unprovable take.

Mr incredible had to work out to get his strength back, and managed to do it while having a job, family, and friends who all were happier with how much more time he was spending on them during his getting more fit phase.

It really depends on the source of the super strength. The juggernaut is a god-empowered being of strength; he looks muscley because that’s what strength is supposed to look like, not because it affects his ability to do work.

Superman looks strong because that’s the ideal humanoid form, apparently, and his eugenics-obsessed ancestors chose that as the look they wanted to breed for.

Mr incredible/robert parr from the incredibles had to work out, and used literal trains as his gym equipement. It’s likely his super power wasn’t super strength so much as fewer limits on how much improvement he could get from his workouts. He is out of shape at the start of his story, and getting rid of that, while relatively easy for him compared to others, did require actual work on his part.

If you had a superhero who had like, a psychic shield or similar that surrounded their body and gave the appearance of super strength, like Victoria Dallon from Worm, then yeah, they’d have to work a lot harder to look like the strength they use on a regular basis.

Except in rare cases, I think you’ve got it backwards. Heroes with super strength get their muscles from their powers, and only the rare few outliers don’t get muscles from their superpowers.

Fun fact; unlike video games, I was never asked to aim for the head when shooting. It was always torso shots to make fewer misses.

I was also specifically asked for a “headshot”, like this guy in the comic, for a passport as part of a deployment.

Blue shirt guy did nothing wrong.

I was under the impression it was a ride issue, and Fabio didn’t want their reputation ruined, so he called it a bird. Regardless, it’s not nearly as clear cut as the image would have you believe. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fabio-hit-goose-rollercoaster/

I use this container with AirVPN; https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn

Port forwarding was incredibly easy to setup with this VPN, and transmission is enough for what I have. As a bonus, this docker container in particular has a shitload of documentation and support tickets behind it, which made troubleshooting a lot easier for me.

I’m with you on this, and English is my first language. This feels like a foreign-to-australia sort of issue rather than a foreign-to-english one.

You can do this with Charles Proxy. https://www.donnywals.com/throttle-network-speeds-for-a-specific-host-in-charles/

I would strongly suggest this as your first choice. Bad website experiences are like alarm clocks that use your favorite song. You may love it at first, but you’ll hate the website within a couple months, every time.