The USDA has an awesome API called Food Data Central. The data is public domain in terms of licensing and the rate limit is about 1000 calls per hour per IP address (which is extremely reasonable especially for early testing).
We still have banks running code even older than that. Do you want banks to take a large risk and potentially impact millions of people because "old code is bad code"? There is a time for an upgrade where things make sense. Not everything needs to be re-developed. We discovered fire a very long time ago. I don't think we need to retire fire because its so ancient.
It's not just the people designing the hardware but also those maintaining it. I work in an "Infrastructure Engineer" position (I hate that since it also correlates with construction but mine is strictly expensive servers in data centers) and I make less money than the people running the virtual infrastructure even though that all runs on top of the machines I manage, lol.
I once had an internal customer open an on call event to ask why one of their machines was running so slowly. I said "it's because one of the DIMMs has thrown about 30,000 correctable errors within the past month". I was able to correlate that by mapping the EDAC label for the DIMM recorded in /var/log/messages and some gzipped archives of the aforementioned log file.
Of course I deal with CPU, memory, motherboards, GPUs, add-on NICs (OCP or PCIe), storage controllers (HBAs mostly, some RAID controllers), BMCs, and of course I also have to evaluate the link width of PCIe bridges interconnecting all the PCIe devices.
He gets my respect for that one both publicly acknowledging why he was leaving and their pantomime. I don't know how much the equity would be for each employee (the article suggests millions but that may skew by role) and I don't know if I would just be like the rest by keeping my lips tight for fear of the equity forfeiture.
It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.
Part of it too is not just age but also careful engineering to breed out bitter compounds. Case example: brusselsprouts
"About 30 years ago, a Dutch scientist identified the chemicals that made brussels sprouts bitter. He selected seed varieties with lower levels of the bitter chemicals and bred new high-yielding varieties that tasted less bitter."
It's been co-opted into the phrase "AI" in the same vein that "cloud" was used in "Cloud Computing". It's a marketing term to make the technology more appealing. That's why half the people started using the term "AGI" and even with that we see the tech companies leveraging the hype the marketing teams are bringing in while selling the illusion that building a computer smarter than a human brain (something we still barely understand) is feasible in our lifetimes or ever.
(sorry I am just venting my annoyance with it too, I don't mean for this to come off as hostile if it does!)
From the link: "A lot of Cloudflare's technology is well documented. For example, how we handle traffic between the eyeballs (clients) and our servers has been discussed"
Already 1 sentence in and we've already got Eldritchian horrors with customers described as just their watery orbs in their skull.
I feel like STP is basically magic when you first learn it in a course (usually sponsored by Cisco) but the illusion is broken when you learn computer science principles like a graph data structure and how to build an acyclic graph.
STP handles this through sending little messages with every node receiving the message appending themselves after whoever sent it. Then a node just checks if it sees itself in the message. If I DO see myself in the chain, I know now I need to not send information to the previous node that sent me the message.
The message just needs to be something that'll never succeed but flow through the network. If I have three nodes labeled "A", "B", and "C" then I could send a message intended for "D" (which does not exist in my network). A has a path to B and A has a path to C. B has a path to C and vice versa. Each node can talk to another.
A send to B. B checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A -> B. B knows it received the message from A so it will ignore this connection and send the message to all of its neighbors. C receives the message from B. C checks if its in the chain and if not, it appends itself in the chain. A > B -> C. C got the message from B so it ignores this path and sends the message to all of its other neighbors (in this case, A).
A receives the message and checks if its in the chain (it is). A knows it received the message from C. A now knows that a cycle has been detected, so A disables its connection to C.
Congrats! You've designed a tree! Its a graph that contains no cycles. All we had to do was send a message and check if we see ourselves in the chain. If we do, we disable our path to the last node that sent us a message.
Of course STP gets more complicated from here as we factor in path costs as weights to measure the decision to axe a connection. Maybe A -> B is a 1G connection and A -> C is a 10G connection, in this case A may disable the path to B.
I do agree that reducing reconvergence time is magic. I don't understand that one.
Non-dairy milks are about the same price as dairy milk where I live.
Tofu is pretty cheap (about $2.64 - $3 where I live). It is also very versatile.
Beans are very cheap whether dried or canned. You can usually get them for about $1 / lb and the price drops of course the larger the quantity you buy.
Oh and if you think beans are a good source of protein, why don't you talk to my friend: split peas.
The only example I can see you gave that would be expensive is the "processed capsule" for omega 3 supplements.