I have been writing small Zig projects for a couple of minor releases now, and this is no joke. They are not afraid to change core features in breaking ways. However, they do a good job with migration guides, and the breaking changes always feel like a very thoughtful step in a good direction. I'm very excited to see where Zig lands when it stabilizes.
Monopolies need to be restricted by regulations. In micro economics there is a term marginal cost, and economy of scale. In the software as a service era, the cost of serving one extra customer is minimal, so it make economic sense for such companies to grow infinitely. This is why our current system do not work. As the best strategy is to become as big as possible and capture the entire market.
There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.
Mozilla is a search traffic vendor with one client, not a combination of the EFF and the FSF. That's their behavior and motives in a nutshell. How big of a fraction of the Google traffic comes from power users? How would they find an alternative? Those are the questions the (rational) high-paid execs at Mozilla ask about us.
Google once already has decided that certain Web property brings in too little traffic, and shut it down, which was probably the largest blunder in their history, burning immense amounts of goodwill. They shut down Google Reader.
It attracted a relatively narrow audience, but that audience was special: active and future founders, CEOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, blogosphere and YouTube celebrities, etc. Each of these disgruntled users communicated their disappointment to hundreds and thousands of other, less affluent users. Most of them, once in positions of engineering power, now would think twice before relying on something from Google.
Same with Firefox. It may serve a relatively more narrow audience, but it's not necessarily the same kind of audience, on average, which Chrome or Edge or even Safari serves.
If these companies were breaking laws against big people (facilitating investment fraud, payment processing for terrorists) nobody would consider these methods of deflection for a second - it's only because the laws are being broken to hurt small people that the concept of aiding and abetting or acting as a willing accomplice is considered not relevant.
I was also a major fan of the em-dash, but my HN comments were too honest, harmless and helpful and now all major LLMs are RLed to sound like I do when I am supposed to be working.
I feel like both this comment and the parent comment highlight how RL has been going through a cycle of misunderstanding recently from another one of its popularity booms due to being used to train LLMs
While collecting data according to policy is part of RL, 'reductive' is an understatement. It's like saying algebra is all about scalar products. Well yes, 1%
What I was trying to say was that people are "concerned" about lots of things, but that doesn't mean much on its own. As soon as they actually have to give up some immediate comfort for the long-term better option, they will not act upon their concerns but choose satisfaction right now, reliably.
