Another aspect might be that companies list job openings when they don't actually need them. It's probably just to gain visibility in the market, justify HR salaries or keep a door open for the next 10x developer who might land on their site. The only ones who lose here are the people taking the interviews and getting rejected for no apparent reason.
I'm sorry, I might have been misinterpreting, could I you explain what you mean by actual characters? Even VSCode's minimap draws some shapes, but they're too small to discern any characters.
In VSCode it actually draws the font with very small size. It might look better on larger resolution displays. You can also increase the size with "editor.minimap.scale": 4
VS Code gives you a choice between actual characters and coloured blocks. Actual characters might or might not be discernable, it depends on how large you set your minimap. I personally make mine quite small, so there's no value to actual characters, but if I make it larger, I can make out enough of them to see additional structure.
Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.
The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight.
Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)
> Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time
They had Orkut, they could have used it to compete with Facebook instead of creating a new service. Its the same thing with Googles multiple chat apps.
I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.
Agreed, Skype used to have much of the Swedish market until they fucked up their clients and pushed people to Facebook Messenger. Now it is irrelevant.
It's impossible to tell if Skype becoming irrelevant was due to new bloated features, new features that were badly implemented, or just that their users wanted to play with a new shinny tool that happened to be good and gradually moved there. They could have stayed put without adding any new features and would still be beaten by Discord.
This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.
There's a difference between "sitting on their arses" and "trying to grab every single customer possible".
TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.
Let's not rewrite history and pretend that Teamspeak was always terrible. Their "philosophy" panned out for a long time and made them kings of the space, but to reiterate the GP's comment: things change. Now users want more convenience. Now they want better mobile support. Now they want GIFs and reactions.
You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.
I would not confuse the need for further developing ones tech, with the need for growing (in employees, customers, and whatever else). A product can stay relevant, if it keeps up with the tech, but does not necessarily need to capture every possible customer on the planet, not even as a goal.
It takes significant evolution to just keep doing what you set out to do well. Running a successful mechanics business to repair cars means continuously updating your skills and tools. Eventually you become a flying car repair shop. It doesn't mean you have to grow to encompass every aspect of the automobile industry and compete with Repco and Mobil.
Except by then cars are rented to you by big advertising companies (in exchange for data), and they also do repairs (or outsource them to the lowest bidder).
Skills don't matter if your business case has disappeared.
That sounds horrible. We should focus on making good products that last a long time. What is the point of making something new and almost identical every 5 years?
How long did it take to upgrade from IPV4 to IPV6? IPV6 is a massively popular protocol in which virtually every technical person admitted we will need to move off of IPV4. IPV6 is 25 years old and we’re still not done with the migration.
Protocols have a massive problem with updating their feature sets and security features.
If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.
{ // Start of block statement.
const foo = "a" + 2; // Only available inside block statement.
console.log(foo); // "a2"
} // End of block statement.
console.log(foo); // Uncaught ReferenceError: foo is not defined
I can see in their FAQ that there are plans to monetize this. So they're building an ML model that feeds on the work done by millions of people and then selling it? How is this even ethical? Not to mention we'd be feeding the model while using it. Guess this is another instance where we are becoming the product.
If I spent a lot of time reading open source repos on GitHub to teach myself to code, and then went out and got a high-paying job based on that knowledge, is that ethical? This seems roughly analogous to what the machine is doing.
Regardless of the legality, one of these situations is clearly ethical compared to the other. In the case were you get a job based on your knowledge of GPL software, you still must respect the license if you use that code commercially (i.e. at your new job). And yes, if you reproduce GPL code you "learned" from, you are violating the license.
A company ingesting an entire GPL codebase without warning or any way to opt-out in order to create a closed-source feature that they and only they will profit off of is clearly not the same as an individual reading the code and getting a job based on those ideas.
You're intentionally conflating scale here to make them seem the same.
> no warning that somebody/something is ingesting the repo
An individual reading code on their own time is not the same as ingesting terabytes to train a machine. No matter how much you believe in AI working similar to the human learning (it doesn't), they are not comparable.
> private profit
Again, the difference between an individual reading code to work for a salary is orders of magnitude different from ingesting terabytes of code so a company can create a new feature. Claiming these things are the same only makes sense if you ignore the massive differences in scale and the differences between how humans and machines learn.
> Is it unethical to use software for profit?
When the licenses explicitly say that if you use the software for profit it requires attribution, the answer is clearly yes. My code on github is licensed such that if you use it, you must say where it came from. The only way this isn't at the very least unethical (because it goes against my wishes as owner of the code) is if you argue that github isn't "using" the code, which clearly isn't true, because if everyone was able to opt out there wouldn't be a product for github to be working on at all.
Fully agree on the color issue. Most color schemes in any editor today look like rainbows, very distracting for day to day usage. I ended up building my own color scheme for vim using only 4 colors.
Modding is a totally underrated thing right now, but I feel it might become big in the future. Someone just needs to come up with a solution to both keep mods free and incentivize mod authors.
The way I see it, the big boys create games that acts as platforms and users freely create content of their own using these platforms. Bethesda/Microsoft might be in a good position to achieve this, they have good modding communities around their other games, really interested what their next title brings to the table, hope they don't blow it up like the last time they tried to monetize mods.
You also have something like Roblox, where the concepts of game development and modding kinda blend together, so it's definitely a trend to keep an eye on in the future.
You should keep an eye out for S&Box! It's the successor to the popular Garry's Mod.
Garry's Mod is, imo, the sandbox and modding game and I think that S&Box will be even better. It's based on the Source 2 engine, and the main developer Garry has collected a lot of experience with GMod.
While GMod mods are based on Lua, S&Box uses C#, which is an awesome choice, imo. C# is a bit more verbose than Lua, but it probably enables mods of higher quality.
It's not out yet, but some keys get distributed to chosen people. Sadly, I'm not one of those.
People star these lists because it's a way of bookmarking them for later reference. If I had only 5$ to spare I'd rather donate them to one of the authors of the actual projects.
