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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • They didn’t, mostly. There have always been traffic deals, but otherwise:

    • Netscape: initially charged money for the browser, but free later.
    • Internet Explorer: initially charged money, bundled with Windows later. Not intended to be profitable directly, but to prevent the web from making the desktop OS where Microsoft had a near-monopoly irrelevant.
    • Opera: built-in banner ad, pay for ad-free.
    • Mozilla Suite, later pivoting to Firefox: initially nonprofit.
    • Safari: bundled with Apple operating systems, but also offered for Windows for a few years. Safari was never meant to make money directly, but to give Apple more control over the web experience, and probably to keep the web from competing with native apps too effectively on iOS.
    • Chrome: never intended to make money directly. I’m not sure the initial plan was to spy on users either; Google was a different company in 2008. Instead, I think Google really wanted a browser to make the web the application platform Microsoft feared, and found the existing options lacking.










  • We do have an equivalent to Ada. It’s Ada. The open source GNAT compiler is actively maintained. Eiffel, too has a maintained open source implementation, but with a weird one-year release delay (probably not a big deal with a 40 year old language).

    If you’re not choosing them for your own projects, then you are part of what you perceive to be the problem. You probably have a good reason, like lack of libraries or general inconvenience compared to popular modern languages. That’s fine; maximizing safety over velocity is the right call for avionics and safety-critical public infrastructure control systems, not the average software project.










  • I was in a collision with a cyclist once. He ran a red light and came out from in front of a box truck in a turn lane right in front of me on a road with a 45mph speed limit.

    He was badly injured, but I was driving a sports car with a low, long hood, so the injuries were to his legs instead of his chest or his head. Large four wheel drive pickup trucks were already the norm in the area, so he was lucky in a sense.