Legal blame transfer.

Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name.

So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.

I would suggest it's more the demands of poverty that make it a young person's game. So, so, so many pop musicians were "I was living in squalor for a decade plus was extremely depressed and was about to hang it up when <thing happened> and we got popular." Huey Lewis, Annie Lennox, ... I can go on and on.

There was a metal artist that was being interviewed about when they were going to tour again and was "Yeah, we'll consider it. But I've got a lot of work at my tattoo business right now." There was another guy that was like "Yeah, had this fame hit in our 20s this would be nice but in our late 30s it isn't really useful. We figured out how to do life by now, and we're not going to disrupt that."

Jimmy John's was making its low-level employees sign non-competes, for example. This was ridiculous on its face, and probably wouldn't hold up in court. However, the people affected by it were least able to take it to court.

That's fine in math. Math is true or it is not. People who overturn popular conjectures in math get fame, not approbation.

Being able to prove things in something like Lean means that stuff like Mochizuki's work on the abc conjecture could be verified or disproven in spite of its impenetrability. Or, at the very least, it could be tackled piecemeal by legions of students tackling a couple of pages every semester.

A modal dialog is supposed to be for something damn near irreversible--like about to blow away your application because of error. You are supposed to STOP and go get the guru or you are about to lose, badly.

Unfortunately, UI designers throw them up for everything and people get used to simply clicking "OK" to make them go away so that they can get back to doing their task. So, when the user gets an actual error, they've already blown away the dialog box with information.

Your 'Saving this image as a JPG will not preserve the transparency used in the image. Save anyway?' line is a horrifically excellent example. That is a standard "Save As..." response, and it should NEVER have been. That should have always been under "Export..." as saving should never throw away information and it would be perfectly fine to regenerate a JPG as long as you have the full information still available in the original file.

This is the stuff that infuriates me about the UI designers. Your job is about interactions, first, and pixels, second.

All corporate entities require a registration to operate in a state if they have a physical presence.

In this instance, you can also pass a law along the lines of "After setup, all care homes are required to spend 90/95/99% of their income on direct care of the residents or your charter gets revoked." This would prevent the incentives to buy them in the first place.

That's completely incorrect.

Covid demonstrated that. We have optimized so strongly for profit (outsource everything, just in time inventory, etc.) that we have no robustness in the face of disruption. There are now single chokepoints everywhere.

Yes, we could retool. But nobody will retool without a check from somebody. Everybody will simply hold their breath waiting for the crisis to pass. Everybody held their breath for Covid; they will absolutely do so with the knowledge that the orange clown will disappear in two years.

If that were true, they would be going somewhere and that somewhere would be visible. The last "new" thing that got any traction was TikTok and that is almost 10 years old at this point.

For a while, the Fediverse stuff (specifically Bluesky) seemed to be getting some traction, but apparently the Fediverse wasn't ready for the influx and people have started leaching back.

The social media sites have things pretty well carved up between them. If you want competition that doesn't suck as bad, you have to break them up.

I would argue that the open source people aren't the only ones paying attention right now.

If you are hosting proprietary code on Github, it has become clear that Microsoft is going to feed that into their AI training set. If you don't want that, you don't have a choice but to leave Github.

This company either does what it wants to abuse people, or is too incompetent to make their software work as instructed. Both possibilities are bad. I expect the same translates to GitHub.