I found Inkscape when I needed to make some diagrams, and even though that's not really what it's for, it blows dedicated diagram tools out of the water.
Inkscape is actually fun to use because it strikes a nice balance between easy and powerful.
My only problem with GIMP lately has been that by default it's used monochrome tool icons which are really hard to tell apart. Which seems like a real form-over-function decision (likely made by the distribution though).
My experience with Jetbrains was that they did not rely on vendor lock-in, but on actually making a product worth paying for. I could move my projects away from their suite easily, the build tools and scripts where all third-party open-source. I just didn't want to.
But perhaps things are different in other spaces. I can imagine using Kotlin might lock you in more.
A pet peeve of mine is documentation that describes how the code works. If I want to know that, I can just read it (perhaps assisted by an IDE or debugger).*
What I need documented is why the code works like that. How is it intended to be used? What quirks and gotchas are there?
*If the code is not readable it needs to be refactored, not documented.
Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.
But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?
Good thing the US doesn't recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, so there's no risk of them having to face consequences for their war crimes.
They even have a law that makes it illegal to cooperate with the ICC in bringing US personnel to justice, and that allows the president to use any force necessary to prevent it from happening.
Moving fast doesn't have to mean poor workmanship.
To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don't decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren't wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.
Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.
"Detergent sheets", "dryer sheets", it's like you're in a different world with these fantastically strange single-use products :D
They look like a tissue made of rough fiber, do they dissolve or do you have to throw them away after usage? Either way it seems less practical than just adding a bit of powder, but what do I know :)
Another replacement for fabric softener is hair conditioner (diluted with water so it runs better). I only use it when washing polyester fleece, since that gets fiercely static, so it's nice to be able to use a product we already have at home.
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn't even know optical was used professionally, and found the term "optical jukebox" to be hilarious :)
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn't particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there's now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I'm also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
No, that wouldn't make much difference. I don't think I've seen a real world attack via SMS that even bothered to "forge" the from-field. People are used to getting texts from unknown numbers.
And how would you possibly implement this supposed "caller-id" for a field that doesn't even have to be set to a number?
The app doesn't provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.
Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams
I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.
My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that's no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.
I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn't make me actually use their client or store.
But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn't seem like something that will ever happen.
I think the key was that Steam wasn't created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like "How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?"
Then as Valve wasn't the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.
If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam's near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.
Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.
That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I'm frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p
I found Inkscape when I needed to make some diagrams, and even though that's not really what it's for, it blows dedicated diagram tools out of the water.
Inkscape is actually fun to use because it strikes a nice balance between easy and powerful.
My only problem with GIMP lately has been that by default it's used monochrome tool icons which are really hard to tell apart. Which seems like a real form-over-function decision (likely made by the distribution though).