I agree with most of these but there’s another missing benefit. A lot of the time my colleagues will be iterating on a PR so commits of “fuck, that didn’t work, maybe this” are common.

I like meaningful commit messages. IMO “fixed the thing” is never good enough. I want to know your intent when I’m doing a blame in 18 months time. However, I don’t expect anyone’s in progress work to be good before it hits main. You don’t want those comments in the final merge, but a squash or rebase is an easy way to rectify that.

I’d prefer they make it fatter if the battery would last more than a day as consequence.

I used Netscape “back in the day”. With some interim transition attempts including the likes of Opera, I eventually switched to Chrome because it was genuinely more featureful and faster.

I was a happy Chrome user until they decided to deprecate manifest V2 and fuck up my ad blocker, at which point I switched to Firefox and haven’t looked back.

Everything in this industry is circular I guess.

My problem is with the influence that a hostile foreign state actor has with TikTok.

Google is an independent company; I’m 99% certain their motivation is to make money and I’m confident their algorithms are tailored purely for engagement and profit. Whilst I’m sure they have some back room deals with US intelligence organisations I suspect that it’s a case of providing data vs providing influence (though I would not rule it out).

TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government. That’s not up for debate; if you have an entity in China it has to work that way. Imagine the damage they could do if they actively decided to increase, for example, messages of reunification with Taiwan in their algorithm by just 1% on a global scale. That frightens me and I’m not convinced it isn’t happening already on specific topics of concern to China’s foreign policy.

And that’s putting aside the amount of data that the Chinese are getting without even exerting any influence. They can likely discern worldwide sentiment on a range of topics and adjust political posture accordingly.

I’m not saying Google is perfect. I hate social media in general for the way it’s warping the zeitgeist. But I personally consider TikTok to be a huge threat to the world.

“They all looked like Silicon Valley startups,”

This hits too close to home.

https://youtu.be/pSlG_m-bbGM?si=iaAzX_pNlNBbdOnz

Name and shame the airline.

I fly a lot for work, internationally most of the time. Haven’t seen this in many years.

Where do you think GPT got this data?

Twitter silently backing into the bushes