• 10 Posts
  • 381 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • Spain seems to have a digital nomad visa option that seems pretty easy to obtain: https://movingtospain.com/spain-digital-nomad-visa/

    However, it seems that you need to have a job for at least 3 months before applying from a company outside Spain. Maybe you would have to obtain a job for a short period outside Spain and then obtain the visa to move back in. Another potential difficulty is that your employer would have to be willing to keep you employed in another country and possibly pay you in a different currency. There are contracting firms that can help with this, but it’s not guaranteed and ultimately your employer could just say no and let you go. Still, it’s a possible avenue.

    Also worth looking into whether your wife’s student visa allows you to work, but I’m guessing that you probably looked into it already and it doesn’t. But just mentioning it in case you haven’t already thought about it.




  • Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

    I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

    The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.




  • Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.


  • Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn’t have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the “conspiracy” you’re talking about - but it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.

    But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.


  • And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.

    Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.

    On the other hand, it’s also really sad to see what they’ve become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.

    The good Google is dead. I’d love to see them get completely buried.


  • This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.

    Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.




  • This is my fear as well. Neoliberal policies are exactly what have made the extreme right so strong and powerful over the past decades. When people have no means to get forward in life, they resort to despotism, which is exactly why the poorest parts of the USA are so strongly in favor of Trump, while the wealthier parts are still clinging onto the liberal train.

    Like I said in other posts, this is a good day for the current term, but if the Liberals aren’t serious about making life better for real Canadians (not the super-wealthy ones), there’s a good chance that this is only exacerbating an inevitable collapse.





  • I didn’t read the article, but I presume this is under the DMA which has provisions for increasing fines for repeat offenses - something like 10% of global revenue or something like that. I’m also a bit discouraged by how small the number is, but there is still some hope that it will either increase or get them to change their practices. But it is quite frustrating how slowly it’s going.

    In fact, chances are that Apple is going breaking the law until the last minute so they can squeeze every penny they can out of this scheme until they can’t do it any longer.