jmcs

The users are the ones getting screwed. The costs of business are always passed to the customers. In the case of Google's and Apple's taxes this means all the customers and not even the ones doing IAP purchases because unlike actual sales taxes, apps aren't allowed to charge them directly to the buyer.

And their ads literally say "Same Safari Different Device".

The EU is up in arms and the browser question is going to be handled through the DMA. The legal process has been going on since the summer and it's hilarious.

Holy mother of all Overton Windows. Where are you from for that sentence to sound even close to reasonable?

And they knew from the very beginning ads would corrupt the search engine because Sergei Brin and Larry Page wrote an article about it:

Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented

...

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users

...

Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results [...] In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. [...] But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

What if you had to guess a number between 0 and 100 and the other person (or an application) only told you if the number is bigger or smaller? That's the form that's usually presented to CS students and most people end up figuring it out on their own. Then the trick is knowing how to generalize it.

Edge is basically Chrome anyway, and Google proposes new web standards all the time.

It's possible to implement parental controls without breaching the users privacy. For example, a website could have a tag saying it's for adults only and the browser could check this fully on the client side, and parents would just need to press a checkbox in the configuration to use it. Google has enough clout to pull it off through Chrome, the fact they don't proves that this is not about the children but a justification to collect more private data.

This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

So, Azure's bot protection is crap. Good to know.

Depends on how shitty the company or the specific organization inside of the company is. I had several team mates put in PIPs over the years and none of them ended up being fired.

You can configure your Gmail account to forward your emails to Proton. It's under the "Forwarding" tab in the settings. You need to login once in a while to keep the account alive, but if you use any other Google service that's easy.