https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/1241557440795156482?s=20
Fun tweet + fun replies (after you filter for intelligence).
Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) Tweeted: ive been working on these 95 theses for months and the bishop of rome just…tweeted it out https://t.co/Pw8pZA4j30
https://twitter.com/AustenRisolvato/status/1241078769399578628?s=20
Another example of a web site (Instacart) gotten so big it can’t handle things that need human intervention.
«Hi Twitter – I need your help. @Instacart has completely screwed over the woman (Tammyra) who handled our shopping the other day, and they’ve taken her livelihood for helping another person in a scary time. Please share so they’ll finally pay attention to this. #instacart »
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article241353836.html
Oh, snap, they went there, as they say.
«It’s no more the fault of the Chinese people, or of their government, than it was the fault of Kansans that the “Spanish flu” of a century ago seems to have started in Kansas. Very close to home for Mr. Rodriguez, in fact, among World War I soldiers at Camp Funston, part of Fort Riley in Geary and Riley counties.»
We had a dev team meeting yesterday and I said something disparaging about Blazor. My manager responded with “well, Microsoft is the second biggest company in the world” with the implication that the Microsoft Way must be The Right Way. And everybody sort of nodded.
Since I can’t shout at my manager and teammates, I’ll just shout into the void here.
Amazon and Linux (and a horde of other suppliers such as Digital Ocean and Netlify) are squeezing Microsoft on the back-end.
Javascript and the Web (Google’s Angular; Facebook’s React) are squeezing Microsoft on the front-end.
MS has axed IE/Edge development and capitulated to Google (although I’m sure nobody would word it that way, probably for good reason). Mobile Microsoft is non-existent (Surface notwithstanding).
Microsoft’s only real play is to get WPF onto browsers via web assembly and Blazor. And to continue to offer “business value” a la IBM. That’s really an enterprise solution.
And they know it. So that’s what they’re doing, as hard as they can. They’ve really been caught flat-footed by this whole “web” thing, the same as IBM got caught flat-footed by this whole “TCP/IP” thing (remember LU 6.2?). They have really been locked into the desktop/Windows OS for years, and I’m sure it’s yet another example of large corporations unable to change culture quickly.
If they try to go back to their old methods of anti-competitive practices and dictating to/fooling customers, they’ll be dead. I think a lot of decision-makers aren’t standing for that nonsense any more. Linux cloud instances are half the price of Windows instances, and that money talks loudly.
Is the future WPF, served from Linux onto WASM? Maybe. Will Microsoft try to charge money for that? Will customers pay for it? Maybe (it’ll have to be worth the price). Will Azure surpass AWS? Maybe, if the Blazor solution is strong enough (because Microsoft will, of course, try to use Blazor to push Azure), but I doubt it.
Everything* can be compiled to WASM, so, apart from Javascript frameworks, who else has a UI story that can be an alternative to Microsoft Blazor? Well, JavaFX (ha). And… Google Dart?
Plus whatever those wild-eyed open-source hippies come up with.
*Well, except maybe C++, since it’s probably got dependencies on all sorts of close-to-the-metal libraries like DirectX or OpenGL or the network stack or some such.
(Also, WTF, WordPress.com? $300/year to let me put a footnotes plugin in my site?)
I think Macy’s just bought itself a ton of loyalty. Who else is doing this?
«Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE: M) today announced that it will temporarily close all stores by end of business today, March 17, 2020, through March 31, 2020. … Macy’s, Inc. will provide benefits and compensation to its impacted workforce.»
I hear Victoria’s Secret is doing the same, but, since I’m on my work laptop connected to work VPN at the moment, I’m not confirming it on their site. 🙂
https://www.wsj.com/articles/questioning-the-clampdown-11584485339
WSJ right on time.
«Some number of respiratory deaths will be avoided (really delayed since we all die) but we’ll be spending a lot more than we’ve ever been willing to spend before to avoid flu deaths. Eighty-three percent of our economy will be suppressed to relieve pressure on the 17% represented by health care. … Wouldn’t it make more sense to pour resources into isolating the vulnerable rather than isolating everyone?
….
But turned on its head here is the 50-year-old “QALY” revolution: the idea of measuring the burden of disease and benefit of health care based on “quality-adjusted life year,” typically valued at $50,000 to $150,000. In the present instance, the cost isn’t just medical intervention (e.g., ventilator use) but the cost of an economywide shutdown to limit the number of candidates for ventilation at any one time. I don’t know what the figure is, but the QALY value we are placing on avoiding Italy-like deaths is surely a high multiple of any figure previously considered realistic.»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/18/trump-coronavirus-economic-plan/
Which lawmakers, pray tell, WaPo? Of which party?
«temporarily backstop money market mutual funds, a sign that government officials are worried that an investor panic could lead to a run on these funds. A similar structure was used during the Great Recession, but lawmakers had sought to block its future use.»
Hey, Kentucky. Why do you guys keep voting for this clown? Because “muh rights”?
«In July, Paul blocked a bipartisan bill that would ensure that a victims’ compensation fund related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, never runs out of money. Paul questioned the bill’s 70-year time frame and said any new spending should be offset by corresponding cuts. After the amendment failed, he wound up being one of two no votes on the legislation.
He even briefly caused the government to shut down in 2018, using a procedural tactic to block the Senate from meeting the deadline to keep the government open because he objected to the price tag.»
Here, Read This 