wave84

This is kinda sad, Arc was the perfect browser for me. I wanted to give it a shot and download Dia, but cancelled the download when I noticed it was 861 MB large. That seems... absurd. For reference, the entire Windows 2000 installation kit was something like 370 MB. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was 4.7 MB. Apples and oranges perhaps, but still, what is going on with software these days?

Here's my take, as a Romanian developer (since 2004ish).

One day I got a letter from the national authority regarding personal data where I was asked to reply to 15 questions regarding a personal project of mine, invoking the GDPR. The sanctions for not complying within 5 days was an incremental fine of 600 euros PER DAY, until I complied. This letter was directed to me as a natural person (not even my company).

Another story: I had a publishing website with some ads on it. The moment full GDPR went into effect, some years ago, revenue instantly dropped by 30% because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB). Most of the "approved" cookie banners are insanely overengineered nonsense and almost all of them cost a lot of money. And they kill your performance metrics. And when I finally gave in and implemented one of those, revenues dropped even more because I was losing readers who just quit without consenting at all.

Third and final anecdote: at one point I was contracted by a Romanian DTH television company who mostly operated with prepaid customers. According to GDPR, they were supposed to anonymize data they no longer needed, but because their clients were seasonal or less predictable, that turned out to be ridiculously hard. Their legal department, together with external contractors such as us ended up spending months to adjust their systems to conform to GDPR, and the result was their losing business and time, while being unable to properly serve older customers because they could no longer identify them.

So in my opinion, despite originally being well intended, GDPR opened a huge can of worms, created a lot of issues and made everyone's life harder on the internet, for no real benefit. On the contrary, the large companies could afford the legal counseling that they needed, but the smaller ones were hit hardest.

As an art afficionado, I must note that Ai Weiwei is one of the greatest living artist of our times. His works are showcased all over the world. Also, he is a prominent critic of the Chinese government and now lives in exile, after being imprisoned by the Chinese authorities. All that should be taken into account and his article not so easily dismissed, despite the apparent "ragebait" that some commenters have noticed. His lens of the world if probably much denser and refined than most of us will ever hope to achieve. And yes, I believe the essence of the article is correct - I can sense a decline in the West overall that I have a hard time putting into words.

As a guy running a few Debian web servers for some small client projects and a few personal projects (some of which are medium sized, e.g. a website that gets 10 million pageviews / month) I actually tried to move from MariaDB to SQLite. The idea seemed great, at least in theory. Mainly to get away from mysqld, which actually crashed on me and corrupted some data once or twice in a timespan of 15 years.. think it was due to package updates every time.

Anyway, query and app logic modifications aside, I quickly ran into two unsolvable issues for me.

1. The lack of a robust web based admin tool comparable to phpmyadmin (no, phpliteadmin doesn't even come close) 2. No alter table. This hit pretty hard.

Plus lots of other idiosyncrasies - no enums, no type for dates, etc. In the end I decided it's not worth the extra work, trouble and risks and stayed on Maria.