This reminds me of another blog I enjoyed -- there's a link shortener called https://y.gy, and .gy is the Guayanese TLD. Venezuela was invading Guyana, so the y.gy owner wrote a whole essay about what it would mean for the .gy domain if Venezuela seizes their physical domain admin infrastructure. Crazy stuff. https://app.y.gy/blog/guyana-war
He had the same point, where it feels like browser extensions are a big, somehow under-appreciated market. Browsers are huge platforms -- creating add-ons and making them more capable should be a popular, value-generating thing to do! But for a number of (developer) UX/UI issues, that just hasn't been the case. I hope this changes!
The article suggests heavily that, the way things are going, that's not going to be the case in the future. Right now, Europeans are still living off past prosperity, but if they don't build a real technology industry and innovate, then future Europeans will be much worse off.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting. Didn't know about all the B&N litigation. In some sense it's a big landmark against software patents. Huge amount of blowback, and now it's much harder to get a software patent. That's a good thing.
Besides the point, but why would you abbreviate "Downloadable" as "D/loadable"? The confusion vs. two extra letters trade-off doesn't seem worth it at all to me.
Can confirm. We were spending $1000/mo on Twitter up until earlier this year, when we realized that the ad impression quality had become total garbage. We were still getting clicks and impressions (at least according to the Twitter Ads Dashboard), but Google Analytics told a different story, and none of it was converting on our website. It honestly made me wonder if Twitter is engaging in click fraud.
They're often -- but not always -- touched on in advanced undergraduate classes, e.g. after real analysis and abstract algebra. Not every math undergraduate takes number theory these days.
This is neat. I hadn't seen it before. I'm still convinced that the internet -- and young, first-time programmers -- lost a really valuable tool with Flash. It's a shame they could never get the security paradigm to work. Flash Applets had a lot of capability and a rare low barrier to entry.
Postal mail isn't encrypted because it's not viable for ordinary citizens to encrypt physical mail.
However, tampering with mail, or opening someone else's, is a federal crime with harsh penalties attached. The message is clear: "postal secrecy" is highly valued.