agressivelyPassive

I'd say the former.

Many queries don't find relevant questions, and the relevant questions are often not answered properly. I often find the exact same problem I'm having, but the answers are just a bunch of those CV padders that post completely irrelevant answers based on a buzzword they saw while skimming the question.

To make money. If user engagement drops, revenue drops. The existing content is the only real asset this company has.

It won't. Some people will scream bloody murder, most people will ignore it.

SO was in decline anyway. Most answers you'll find are several years old and outdated, because some idiot thought the new ones are duplicates.

So now a few people will leave, the spamming idiots will keep spamming the platform with low effort nonsensical answers and its relevance will dwindle just a bit faster.

Look at Reddit. Last year there was a huge outrage and today it's pretty much the same as before.

Most people don't care. Most people feel so powerless, that they'll accept every privacy scandal, every exploitive business strategy, every sellout of their platform.

Have you considered something like tailscale?

It's a waste of computing power, though.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and barely ever actually used the CPU. Putting these chips in iPads, which are mostly used for drawing at most, is just a waste, and one of the reasons they're so incredibly expensive. Apple could have just kept producing M1s and putting those in current iPads.

The reality is, there's zero innovation in Apple products. The switch to M1 was really great, but everything since then was just "more M is more better", utility stayed the same, price went up. Awesome.

And how many buyers actually care about that?

I'm pretty sure, nowadays institutional buyers define the market. Tons of regular people don't even have laptops (or desktops for that matter) anymore.

Not really, especially not in countries with sane workers rights. Google won't just fire a bunch of people because a project is a bit late. They'll finish the project, eat up the costs and maybe decide later on what to do.

Of course, given the absurdity of the US labor laws, big corporations will also fire people, but ceteris paribus, a larger corporation will be more likely to be able and willing to keep you employed than a smaller shop.

And my aunt gets headaches from 5G.

You're not getting headaches from water bottles. It's placebo (or nocebo, in this case).

Smaller companies offer much less safety, though.

If a project is late at Google, you can pull in resources from other projects, delay the release, etc.

If a project is late at a small company, that could mean bankruptcy, even if everyone pulls 80h workweeks.

I personally would prefer a company that is just small enough not to require much corporate bullshit, while still having enough buffer to survive rough patches.

My current project is together with Cap Gemini and holy shit are those guys corporate drones. Absolutely horrible.

As someone who had the wonderful experience to work with HR I can tell you that the bullshit they're telling us is 100% an attempt to justify their own existence.

HR adds less than nothing to the entire recruiting process. They inflate requirements, they smash together templates so that the result makes no sense at all, they add buzzwords they think are important. If someone actually applies, they "filter" applications based on elaborate models of a coin toss, and during interviews, they want to make clear that they are, in fact, not useless by asking nonsensical questions.

In short, they are parasites and don't want corporate to know.

I've got my current job via a recruiter and it was a super relaxed process. One video call of an hour or two with my (to be) team lead and his boss. Both of them were actual developers. HR was only involved for the formalities, as they should be.

"Random crap" is what's used in agriculture as well, if you buy a big plastic tub, it won't leech more into the soil than your coke bottle already did. There's only so much plastic that can leech out and planters can be used for years, the plastic you're using around your house gets thrown out in a week or two and replaced. Much higher chemical content there.

And you can absolutely use store bought potatoes, they are clones, there's no difference between seed and regular potatoes. At most, there might have been something done to prevent sprouting for a bit, but that's it. You can simply wait for them to sprout, if that's a concern. You know how I know? I've been growing "old" food potatoes in pots for years. Works just fine.

As I wrote in another comment: you can create your own soil with earthworms. You can get a small batch of worms in fishing supply stores for like 5€ (or collect them yourself), these guys turn almost any plant material into pure fertilizer.