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If you're against what I don't like, you're authentic and fighting the good fight.

If you support what I don't like, you're receiving paychecks from other governments.

Yeah right.


I believe that both the US and Chinese governments would see Google entering the Chinese market (in a censored form) as a benefit to each of their respective countries. Who said anything about other governments? The US gains visibility this way.


And how do we know Stylus won't go the same route?


We can't know for certain that they never will, but right now, I have more faith in the open-source community than an adtech company.


It's open source. You can install from source.


All extensions are open source. Just download the xpi/crx and decompress. Doesn't help much unless you are willing to read all diffs, or never update them (and be exposed to bugs which could lead to other security issues.)


You're right, we should never install software ever again unless we wrote it ourselves.


You could (and should) minify JS for builds, which essentially renders it useless for editing purposes. Heuristically you could still find parts that phone home and disable those but getting further than that is going to be a pain.


You're confusing 'source available' for 'open source'. Source available is where you can look at the source but don't have any right to do anything with it.

Open source is libre software.


>Whites officially commit suicide more than blacks because blacks who are even slightly inclined to self-destruction find it all to easy to get into situations that produce death by means that won't officially be viewed as suicide.

We all know what you're implying but you're making that statistic up.


> We all know what you're implying

Implying? I was being explicit, if general because I was referring to a broad class of phenomenon. If you think I was using code for something narrowly specific, you are mistaken.

> but you're making that statistic up.

I'm not presenting a statistic, made up or not.


Yes, you're saying that suicide rates for blacks are lower because they are killed by means that aren't seen as suicide at a higher rate. That's a statistic. Please back it.


People like to believe bad PR kills companies because that makes them think they have control over their lives. Poor bastards...



>usually decreeing that a true winner would at all times play in the manner of a big tough macho caveman who has no need for nuance and no time for thought

Sounds like this was written by someone with a grudge.


>It sickens me when I see workers with those sprayer packs or trucks that look like small chemical plants.

I hate insects. They are often annoying and sometimes outright dangerous.

We live in the same Earth so we'll have to reconcile our points of view.


Quite a lot of insects are harmful, but no insects means no birds; and some insects are vital pollinators in ecosystems.


Nobody actually paid for WhatsApp. At least, nobody I know off. They supposedly required you to pay 1€ a year after the first year, but everybody kept using it for free forever. I'd say they never made any money.


> Nobody actually paid for WhatsApp. At least, nobody I know off.

People did pay. Its just that the charging was somewhat selective. Obviously you and your friends weren't in the group that was selected.

Originally, it was a paid app ($1) on the iPhone. Eventually, that was dropped in favor of using in-app billing to actually charge the $1/year on Android... but this was only enforced in a few selected countries at first. Once the Facebook acquisition happened, this effort was dropped. If it hadn't happened, then charging users would have expanded gradually over time.


Or people would just mass jump to Viber or Telegram or any other messaging app...

I can tell you with confidence that very few users in eastern Europe would pay even an euro for an app that used to be free and has free alternatives.

In fact my friends and I discussed that exact particular scenario when we once got a notification from WhatsApp about future payments.


Talking about things is not the same as doing the things. The network effect is pretty strong in messaging apps.


Same here in Spain.

I mean, let's be honest, it's just a chat application. It is almost trivial to build and maintain. And since it uses your phone number, there is no friction to switch to another app--if they decided to charge for it, Telegram would eat it alive in months.


> It is almost trivial to build and maintain.

I'm interested to know what you've made or helped to make that is more complex and more difficult to maintain than whatsapp.


I find it amusing just how many people make this assumption up-front. Probably because its one of those "problems" that seems simple on the surface, until you start digging deeper. This gets especially true once you take into account offline delivery, presence management, delivered/read receipts, group/broadcast use cases, efficient use of the network, complexities of reliable/efficient cross-platform media transfer across a variety of formats, and... robust end-to-end encryption.


[flagged]


Please don't do this here.


I ended up paying at least once, maybe twice before they made it "free".


I paid too. $1 is nothing for an ad free service. I knew friends who paid too.


They had $7m in the bank (from this $1 fee) when they were acquired if memory serves me correct.


Yep, been using it on iOS for years and have never paid a single cent.


This.

But not on iOS, they had to pay.


They made it free on iOS too one year before they were acquired by Facebook: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-on-ios-now-free


Properly written C is portable (and much faster than Python)


Depending on how you define "properly written." It was easy to write seemingly proper code that assumed TSO and worked for x86 but does not work on architectures with weak memory consistency.


Code that assumes TSO is likely broken on x86 as well. The use of the volatile keyword doesn't really change that in any meaningful way either, given that part of the language is a bit under-specified. Basically, C compilers are free to do a lot of non-obvious optimizations which can reorder around volatile accesses.

Put another way, there isn't anything in the base C spec which can provide a guaranteed memory ordering barrier, which is why you absolutely have to depend on 3rd party specifications to get those guarantees. For example, if a program is using pthreads or openMP, their synchronization primitives must be used as well to assure portability.

That isn't to say that given a particular piece of code and compiler/switches/version the resulting program is wrong, just that its quite possible changing compilers/flags may result in "incorrect" code generation.


True, but outside of memory ordering, x86_64 and ARM64 are probably among the easiest to port between. Endianness, alignment and type sizes are the same, for example. Plus a lot of code already has been ported to both.


Because they hire lots of designers and they have to keep them busy so they don't leave.


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