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I agree, but it’s definitely getting worse. It’s a lot less focused than it was.

I think that is very much GPs point.

I once worked for a company that had a .company gTLD but not the .com

It was also a bloody nuisance. Spam filters were one thing but there were so many validation forms that failed.

Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com

Ugh, what a nightmare.

Domain holders are the landed gentry of tomorrow if we keep this up.


> Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com

Even then it seems better to come up with a different prefix, or suffix (or both!), just to stay with ‘.com’.

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and I did the same, my personal homepage used to have a ‘.xyz’ address.


> Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com

That also means that customers WILL confuse your company with others in non-domain contexts so perhaps it's a good idea to choose a more unique company name.


Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.

As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.

Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.

Self-fulfilling cycle.


This isn't the 90's anymore where browsers behave wildly differently for the same page content. If you're not using absolute, bleeding age web APIs, Firefox and Chrome work identically. In my experience, there are exactly 3 types of websites that work differently between Firefox and Chrome: The Toy Hobby Experiments (who are just demoing some bleeding-edge API feature), The Monopoly-Bootlicking Liars (who reject my request based on UserAgent string alone, and when I spoof a Chrome UA the site works perfectly), and the Evil Monopolist Themselves (a few of Google's own sites run notably slower on Firefox, most notably Google Cloud Console).

Weird how vmware console and my bank don’t support firefox.

Oh, and Microsoft Teams for a super long time (haven’t checked in a little while).

Theres dozens of examples tbh.


Teams has worked on Firefox (on Windows at least, haven't tried on Linux) since at least the beginning of the pandemic.

Can't speak to the other two. What does the console start screaming about when you try?


Companies have run some absolutely outstanding PR then.

I have never worked in any company where I explicitly trust the CEO to always do the right thing in every situation.

There is usually no governance board, or review system to inquire about public harm: those things are usually external and fought against as they are regulatory burden.

So, in practice what tends to happen is that someone in the company just does stuff. Since humans aren't perfect this "doing stuff" is not always super enjoyable. If it's the CEO who "does stuff" then you're cooked because nobody except the board of directors can say anything meaningful: you gotta hope that the media wants to put pressure on.

Our elected officials on the other hand, are supposed to represent us, and thus media pressure is a lot stronger; issues that affect many people are meant to be properly reflected, and their decisions are open by default.


They key is multiple, competing companies. As long as they don't collude, if one company misbehaves, others will catch it.

Hows that going for…

… browsers

… phones

… operating systems

… network appliances

… payment transaction systems

I feel like if it fails so often then it can’t be relied on.


That's not the trade-off you make though.

The involved ISP and respective governments do still see everything, but also cloudflare and the US ISPs they use see it in the clear.

Also the US has a history of abusing its position here, even with less honeypot like companies.


those folding phones are permanently bulging and enormous.

I feel like I'm the only person on earth sometimes who just wants the phone to be small so it's easy to carry and use one-handed.

I want to live life when I'm out and about, the phone I have is the heaviest thing I am constantly carrying.


What I want is a phone/wifi in a watch - e.g. Dick Tracy like.

Then I am free to wander etc.

If I need a screen then I can attach an iPad or smart glasses to the wifi from the watch.


If the alternative is carrying a tablet then a folding phone is smaller.

Yes but smaller than an iPad mini.

My pockets are not wide enough for a mini but would take a folding phone - the depth is much less of an issue.


> it's quite difficult to become a CEO

on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.

What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.

I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.


>convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them

And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.


Investing has some nuance, it’s not a homogeneous thing. It varies from insanely conservative to high risk gambling. I like to think everyone involved with NFT type investing is fully aware they are gambling.

To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

> To be fair, raising money takes connections, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

FTFY


>> To be fair, building connections takes skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

FTFY


Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions.

This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.

Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.

I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.


This totally depends.

For some people, Linux package management is not solved. Static binaries at least work for deployment.

More useful for client software, but you can’t just dismiss someone for having this preference given the poor viability of running arbitrary binaries on Linux due to GNU’s userland style.


No, it does not depend. Your parent is correct with his analogy.

Linux package management is solved, if it depends on something, it depends on the specific Linux distribution, but "Linux" package management is definitely solved.


i built a program that watches wifi traffic and if it sees my phone connected to the office wifi; it marks me as in the office on our internal chat tool (Zulip).

And the inverse as well, of course.

Runs on a raspberry pi that I was otherwise using to take backups periodically… has been working pretty good honestly.

I also built a program that fills/submits my time reports, and does the same for all of my subordinates - then signs them off… Saves everyone like 5 minutes if we remember to do it, or 12 minutes and frustration if we’re reminded by HR about it (which happens because who the hell cares about time reports?)


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