TheGrumpyBrit

You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.

Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.

Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.

I'd disagree. The users of OPs tool certainly are, but it doesn't seem like that's the responsibility of the developer.

UK here, and we don't print return labels for Amazon. We just take the package to the local store, and they scan the returns barcode on my phone which then prints a shipping label right there, and also doubles as an electronic receipt of where I handed over the parcel.

Dislike of a particular aspect of a product doesn't need to be concrete/provable - a vague feeling of "I don't like this so I won't use it" is all it takes.

With Pocket in particular, the bundling with Firefox moved my impression of it from "this is a potentially useful tool" to "this company feels like they need to force their product down my throat by bundling it with a browser - I don't know why they're doing that but it makes me not want to keep any data with them"

In the early 00s there were a number of text services providing the same function. I got banned from one for the questions "What is the collective noun for a clitoris?" and "What is the resonant frequency of a clitoris?"

I imagine they were a fun place to work at 2am.

A net?

Great write up! While this one probably isn't for me, it's planted the seed of an idea. I have a new kitten who we've just started allowing free roam of the house at night, which is fine until dawn when she thinks we all need to be awake and starts running around like a mad thing at half past stupid in the morning.

If I can make one of her noisier toys smart, maybe I can get Alexa to call her downstairs by turning it on, thereby giving us some peace without locking her away all night.

...over multiple decades

Their long term product vision is based on an incorrect core belief.

This seems pointless. The fact that it's not primarily a chat app means nobody is going to use it for day-to-day messaging - you already have to have payments in mind before you start a conversation. So if you want to use it to request payments for an existing group chat, you've got to switch context and invite everyone into this separate chat app just to allow payments.

Or you can just drop a paypal.me link into the chat you're already having.

For me, it's become too clunky for a basic blog, and the fact that it stores your content in a database makes managing it a pain. It ties me to Wordpress and only Wordpress - anything I want to do requires logging in and navigating the admin interface, which I'm not a fan of.

By comparison, flat-file CMS's allow me to edit, search and process my content using whatever tool I like. I can update my blog directly in the terminal, or in Github from work and have the changes pushed out automatically by CI. They're not making hundreds of database calls every time I want a page, so they're blazing fast. I can have simple scripts output to a text file and have it rendered as a status page. And if I want to migrate to another solution, my content is literally a bunch of text files that I can just copy to whatever shiny new thing just caught my eye.

Also, they're seedless grapes. Planting them would be kind of pointless.

Because there's a global pandemic in progress and it helps with contact tracing. Privacy concerns and public good are not mutually exclusive.

Sure, and when the entire business has the lease terminated because they failed to deal with this, they can all claim that society failed them.