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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s probably predominantly because of the switch to mobile computing / smartphones / web being dominant, and everyone referring to programs there as “apps” / applications.

    i.e. If you write a mobile app with a function-as-a-service backend, you will never compile what someone would refer to as a “program”, so calling yourself a “programmer” (as-in, someone who makes programs) feels inaccurate and a not helpful description for people. “Coder” (as-in, someone who writes code) is a vaguer in terms of the type of code you write and more accurate in terms of what you spend your time producing.



  • Downvoted for sane-washing meta glasses.

    Down voted for wash-washing any point being made.

    You can’t just declare something washing and therefore bankruptcy, you have to explain your reasoning why.

    I also disagree with your other takes, mainly boiling down to the insinuation that competence and intelligence is how capitalists make money in a system that’s rigged in their favor…

    Yes but we’re not discussing a binary system of capitalist and “not-capitalists” we’re discussing a single company. And while they have not outcompeted their rivals on the basis of serving the best product for their users, or making the world better, they have outcompeted their rivals at the actually game they’re all playing (i.e. making money), all in the face of others who are playing equally soullessly.



  • Capitalism is deeply flawed, but what you’re experiencing is a failure of social media and journalism.

    Everyone guffaws about Meta because everyone hates them, so bloggers write shitty vacuous click baity articles that just twist and distort everything meta does to make them look as terrible as possible. And while they’re shitty, they’re not shitty and incompetent in every single possible way or else they wouldn’t be as rich as they are.

    But these vacuous articles that bend over backwards and diatort the truth to paint them as incompetent in every possible way then leaves people going “how could anyone be that stupid?”, and the reality is that they’re not that stupid, you were just misinformed by outrage journalism.

    Despite the guffawing about shutting down Horizon Worlds, there’s a good chance that Meta’s reality Labs bet will still be a smart financial play in the long term. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc have made billions by controlling the dominant OSes and Meta has far and away the strongest augment reality operating system as we head into AR glasses actually being viable from a technology standpoint.










  • The Chinese government has consistently and actively worked to make sure that when we trade with them, they benefit more then we do.

    And yes, that’s not particularly different from our relationship with the US.

    But you don’t have to be racist to oppose trade with a more powerful entity that attempts to control and abuse you. I still think it’s worth engaging with China economically, but I can also see how someone might oppose it just from a standpoint of respecting their competence and going in eyes wide open about their motivations.



  • Let’s remember that the US has been, by far, the richest country in the world since the world wars, largely because it stayed out of them til the ends, and issued massive loans to European countries that they continued to profit off of for decades and decades.

    You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could thus afford to spend similarly. The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.