I mean, he’s been implementing hard right policies all along, so…

Firefox’s stance on privacy, like Apple’s, is to some extent branding. Arguably it always was. You should still use Firefox (or any other third party browser) if it works for you. Ecosystem diversity matters.

Yes they exist, although it does seem like it’s a bit of a niche medium these days. Hit the art show at your local convention.

I can ask some folks I know if they’d care to comment here.

Vast question. Finding out who you are is a lifelong process.

My thought: “male” and “female” are, in fact, abstract ideas, simple labels that each imperfectly, awkwardly covers entire, partially overlapping universes of complexity. And in practical reality, no one is all the way in either universe to the entire exclusion of the other.

So perhaps you are fine in a masculine body enjoying feminine-coded traits and activities. Perhaps the body shape that you would like to see in the mirror fluctuates with time or with your mood. Perhaps you are fine with your genitals but would like to have breasts, or perhaps you are fine with your chest but are thrilled by the idea of a vulva between your legs. Perhaps you would love the way you look and feel in a skirt and high socks. Perhaps you just thrive socializing and belonging in groups of women. Perhaps – likely – none of the above, but something else, something lovely I can’t even begin to imagine. Only you can find out.

Ultimately all labels are, to some extent, bullshit. Each human is a rich multitude that defies naming and containment. I hope you love whatever it is you end up finding out are.

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

Interesting deep dive and very much worth a read. I’d say it probably underestimates the weight of finance-related pressures coming from the CFO’s office, though.

Correct, AFAIU.

Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.

This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.

It’s difficult to answer without a better understanding on your customers’ workloads and how those trigger your outages. There’s a bunch of valid angles from which to look at this.

If your product consistently buckles under customer workloads that they paid to be able to run, it sounds like you have either an underprovisioning or an overcommitment problem.

If you accept customer workload spikes that you don’t have the resources to serve but would be able to process if they were more spread over time, it sounds like you have an admission control problem.

If it’s a matter of adding resources to respond to customer activity spikes and you just have to do it manually, it sounds like you have an automation problem.

If your pager load is becoming such that you can’t do project work to address whichever ones of the above are relevant to you, it’s time to hand the pager back to devs. If you don’t have the institutional authority to hand back the pager to devs, it sounds like you have a management problem.

Spoilers. ❤️

But seriously, maybe it just didn’t work for you and that’s okay. Nothing is everything to everyone.

He’s an African actually, look it up.

We’ve got a perfectly good planet right there under our feet and we’re failing rather spectacularly at keeping it functional, so as things currently stand the idea we could go to a dead planet and somehow turn it livable is, at the very best, dubious.

If you are interested in the topic, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame have a book coming on this very subject: https://www.acityonmars.com/.

They never took it off. That was an Internet meme. They just never did.