What's absolutely scummy is that "laws are changing in your region" is not what happened. The law hasn't significantly changed. What has changes is that the regulator is finally enforcing the law.

My employer is the same. I was almost fired for attending a (unpaid!) hackathon during a weekend. A colleague was fired for doing volunteer work in weekends.

Yes, I'm looking for a new job.

Knowing how to swim. Basic life skill in a water-rich country, but many expats can't.

Google needs to be broken up. It needs to separate in at least 5 different companies:

1. Admob/Adsense
2. Ads/Adwords
3. Search
4. Android
5. Chrome

Advertisers, probably.

To all the naysayers: if the claims hold up this will be super useful for some industries. Example, I worked at a human genomics lab for diagnostics. By law we were supposed to retain raw data for a whopping 120 years. With a couple terabyte per individual for a WGS, the storage and backup costs were very much non-trivial.

This sounds like a very dangerous design.

Sigh. Our latest TV is an LG precisely because LG did not have ads in its OS whereas its main competitors do. Once they introduce ads, they'll have completely lost me as a potential repeat customer.

Guess our next TV will just be a large monitor, with no "smart" shenanigans whatsoever.

Why did this take the IRS so long where other nations have been doing this for decades?

What a tantrum-throwing manchild.

I'm pretty sure they pay effectively zero tax because they found some interesting ways to make their profit appear 0 on paper.

Flat design. I don't know what a button is anymore. Often I randomly click through an UI to see if it's a clickable element or just a text box. Please give me back skeuomorphic design.

Is there a way to disable the ads, news and recommendations yet? Until then I'm not upgrading.

Cars have gotten bigger externally, but internally it seems storage space is actually going down. My 2014 Nissan Note has a 10% larger storage capacity than a 2023 Renault Espace, even tho the latter is 50cm larger in all three dimensions and is literally called 'spatious'.

I've found that basically every topic I'm knowledgeable in is usually portrayed badly in most media. I imagine it's the same most basically all fields.

I am so glad I ditched twitter when Musk took over. Blocking abusive people is a critical function on that cesspool of a social medium.

I'm a backend dev. I needed basically a single js function for my personal website that called out to some NPM package. I thought: I'll do this the proper modern way, typescript and everything. Result: under 10 lines of code, but 12 config files (and 1.5h of fiddling with ES Modules vs CommonJS).

When the US does it it's just established practise. When a non-US entity does the same thing, it's suddenly a matter of national security.

The anti-Chinese vibe in the US right now is rather absurd. The rise of China should have been viewed as an opportunity, not a threat.

a.unwrap_or(b)

Popularity among 18 year olds of > 50%. Christ. A significant chunk of those will become long term users.