eh, i really did look for a joke. all i see is a “well actually” opinion that somebody here probably holds

Yes if you remove all frivolity I’m sure the joke will be funnier

Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn’t actually build the cars

Why would you discourage interesting, original journalism over such an obtuse nitpick?

They are clearly criticising the same capitalist structures that you are. They single out the tech industry because the article is about the misuse of tech, not because they think rank and file tech workers are deviants.

Frankly it comes off as fragile and dismissive, and if that’s what we’re doing we could have just stayed on reddit.

They’re also extremely toxic. An example from 4 months ago when they vandalized cppreference.com

What does this even mean? One dopey teenager defaces a website, so now everyone associated with Rust is toxic?

This whole argument is just young edgelords bickering with old edgelords, in an eternal and pointless cycle.

The real question is how we got any portable solution to this problem in the first place.

To me problems are fundamentally economic and political, not technical. For example, the unique circumstances that led to a portable web standard involved multiple major interventions against Microsoft by antitrust regulators (in 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013, etc). The other tech giants were happy to go along with this as a way to break microsoft’s monopoly. Very soon after, Google and Apple put the walls straight back up with mobile apps.

If you go back before HTML, OS research was progressing swiftly towards portable, high-level networked GUI technology via stuff like smalltalk. Unfortunately all of the money was mysteriously pulled from those research groups after Apple and Microsoft stole all the smalltalk research and turned it into a crude walled garden of GUI apps, then started printing money faster than the US Mint.

Whenever you see progress towards portable solutions, such as Xamarin and open source C#, React Native, or even Flutter, it is usually being funded by a company that lost a platform war and is now scrambling to build some awkward metaplatform on top of everyone else’s stuff. It never really works.

One exception is webassembly, which was basically forced into existence against everyone’s will by some ingenious troublemakers at Mozilla. That’s a whole other story though!

this would make a great print, no joke