namingthingsiseasy

You're right, but I think the main reason companies like it is because it's easier to get rid of contractors than full-time employees.

Vim when I can, and when I can't, Neovim with plugins (LazyVim). Both are fast. I have had troubles with Neovim and configuration, and it does some things that really annoy me (like autoclosing parentheses - it just messes up everything). Honestly, the only feature that I really need is Go To Definition.

But vim - I absolutely love it. I started using it nearly 20 years ago and it still does everything one could want if you're willing to learn the keymaps and commands. Macros, ci), block indentation and so on. It's even great for editing XML. If the codebases I'm working on these days weren't so large and complicated, I would still be using it with very little configuration in my .vimrc.

The bigger problem in my opinion is more about the fact that all elections that select a single winner will always end up in stupid degenerate systems like this where flaws and imperfections exist.

The best thing to do (again, my opinion) is to abolish all single winner races and have multiple winners with proportional representation. Get rid of directly elected presidents and have a prime minister selected by a proportionally representative parliament instead. All presidential systems suck, and the larger the number of people voting, the harder and harder it sucks. It's not just a USA problem - you also see it in France and Turkey, where they also have an all-powerful president that is elected nationally and the election is a complete shit-show every time without fail. On the other hand, having a prime minister selected as the head of state from a proportionally elected parliament is a much fairer and more stable system in my opinion. It has downsides too of course, but nowhere near as bad as nationally elected presidential systems.

In any case, the example you pointed out is a potential flaw in approval voting, but I don't think it's very likely to happen. First of all, it would require all those voters in the second round to conspire a particular way, which isn't very likely. Secondly, there's the fact that the numbers would have to line up in a very particular way which has a very low probability of happening - tweak a few numbers here and there, and the spoiler effect vanishes. Sure, the scenario you point out is a hypothetical flaw in approval voting, but I think it's a much smaller effect and probability of actually influencing anything - definitely nowhere near as much of a strategic voting effect as in plurality voting systems.

And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they're using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit's CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

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.

unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media

Sounds like this "mainstream media" is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can't put my finger on exactly what though.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

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.

On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it's easy to download the entire website as a single archive.

So they're not really that smart....

I wasn't aware of that, but it's crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn't make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that's a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.

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.