> When a story about laws actually being enforced is news, it’s a good reminder that the weight of the law holds very different meanings in different countries.
I don't think the weight of the law holds very different meanings in different countries, so much as the weight of the law holds very different meanings for different capital levels.
In the USA like in Mexico, there's plenty of cases where companies will just count fines as operating costs.
I discovered pandoc in college, in 2013 or 2014 and it quickly became one of my favourite pieces of software. It was like magic; hassle free and incredibly powerful. Writing problem sets in Markdown with embeded LaTeX saved me hours and my sanity.
I havent used it much after graduation, but I will always remember if fondly. This was an amazing read, both to learn about its history and as an update on what's been happening lately. Thank you for this great tool and all the work put into it over the past 20 years!
I have friends who moved to Germany, so although I haven't been or experienced immigrating there myself, it's been in the conversation amongst my circles.
What I hear about it is that it can feel closed and lonely. Germans are not necesarily mean, but they won't fully assimilate you into their circles easily, especially if you're not European. I also hear dating can be tough if you're not German or European. It's an important factor for choosing to stay somewhere permanently if you move there in your early 20s, like my friend did.
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
I like electronic music production and mixing, and at some point embarked on the quests of writing a DAW (for which I wrote my own state library too) and a dj application. The DJ application I started this year, the daw has been going on for 5 years now.
I think it's helped me at work. Even though I don't have a job with anything related to music or audio, getting in the weeds of building a complex app like this has a way of teaching you all sorts of things. But even if it weren't, it's fun! When work is stressing, for some reason I find coding something completely unrelated, fun and fully my own de-stressing too.
I find you working 30 years on this game engine/application platform very cool and admirable! I hope this or some other project of mine accompanies me for that long.
> Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac.
I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.
IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).
Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.
Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.
Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.
> I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.
This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.
Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.
When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.
It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.
This is not a laptop announcement. This is an attempt at a software announcement disguised as a laptop announcement.
All that's shared about the actual laptop are renders. The website and the video spend much more time and pixels advertising hypothetical software features. The worst part is it's not a hardware announcement, but it's also not even a software announcement since the software is also just conceptual renders and nothing material. It's a website to advertise non-existent software features, running a non-existent google-branded laptop, for the purpose of what exactly?
I can imagine two reasons this website exists today. It exists because someone at Google has seen the possibility of getting a promotion by relaunching Chromebooks, and it was launched today hoping people will hold off a few months on buying the MacBook Neo, to weigh their options once this launches.
I don't think the weight of the law holds very different meanings in different countries, so much as the weight of the law holds very different meanings for different capital levels.
In the USA like in Mexico, there's plenty of cases where companies will just count fines as operating costs.