gbl08ma

One could argue that this would fall into child labor laws, which exist for a reason.

This sounds like it would break a bunch of email address verification systems, password recovery links and the like. I wonder if indeed it does break them, but since it only affects smaller websites nobody seems to care.

On non-jailbroken iOS devices the only way to install apps is through the App Store or through some convoluted methods which involve having a developer account (which you must pay yearly for), and I believe the % of jailbroken iOS devices is much much lower than the % of people willing to install Android APKs outside of Google Play, anyway. Sure, they _could_ do that for few people who have jailbroken iPhones, but doing that is pretty much like giving up on their iOS app altogether.

All of that is bandwidth and clock speed, not latency

I had heard about this giant JSON from friends in the GTA V modding community. OP's idea of what it is used for is right. My guess is that this JSON was quite smaller when the game released and has been increasing in size as they add more and more items to sell in-game. Additionally, I speculate that most of the people with the knowledge to do this sort of profiling moved on to work on other Rockstar titles, and the "secondary team(s)" maintaining GTA Online throughout most of its lifespan either didn't notice the problem, since it's something that has become worse slowly over the years, or don't have enough bandwidth to focus on it and fix it.

It's also possible they are very aware of it and are saving up this improvement for the next iteration of GTA Online, running on a newer version of their game engine :)

The new default icon set drives me nuts as well. Fortunately, you can select other icon sets in the settings.

Based on what I saw in past discussions, I'm pretty sure that the takedown was not a run-of-the-mill scraper-based takedown (it makes no sense to be taken down just for linking to videos which, at best, is what any scrapers would have seen in the original test code). It was very much an intentional, manual one with actual lawyers behind it.

It doesn't work like that since certain videos use obfuscation methods that random cat videos don't.

MySQL not having a proper type to express time spans seems like a fault to me, and "poor design". Of course you can just use an integer for it, but that is a slippery slope, in the end you'll find that you can use strings or byte arrays for everything and you end up with no type system at all.

The surprise here is not that the type has limits but that they are so awkward and that there is no better strongly-typed alternative.

I, too, develop for Android and, like you say, we have the "luxury" of being able to do it on both Windows and Linux (and macOS as well, if I wanted). Even .NET development is more cross-platform than ever, with .NET Core. One of my points was precisely that developers were an exception in this regard, as our tooling is generally cross-platform. You can't say the same about people who do their work primarily using Adobe tools, for example. And even developers sometimes don't have this luxury: for example, if you do iOS development, to publish on the app store, at some point you must use a Mac to sign the app. Of course you can use stuff like Xamarin and use the Mac exclusively to sign, but this is often inconvenient compared to just using the officially endorsed stack. Overall, requiring a "traditional desktop operating system" to work is less and less the case for the general population.

The way I see it, "desktop-dependent workflows" overlap more and more with those "Windows-dependent workflows". Nowadays, most people don't need more than a web browser, and in that sense they do just fine with a tablet or phone (where iOS and Android dominate, and GNU/Linux is not really a viable option, at least not yet), or a Chromebook (yes, it's Linux, but it's mainly just Chrome).

Most people I know with a legitimate use for a desktop also have legitimate reasons to use Windows or macOS: gaming on Windows, content creation on Windows or macOS (graphics designing, video editing, ...), and MS Office lock-in. The only exception I can think of are developers, but even then, depending on the kind of development one is doing, using Windows or macOS may be the only choice.

I agree with you on the clipboard thing, but as with every other API that gives access to sensitive information, they could have put it behind a permission prompt. It wouldn't make the situation worse than it is now, and wouldn't annoy users and developers nearly as much.