However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.

On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.

But this is the real issue. To what extent is a company "operating in" a country where it has no staff and no physical presence?

The principle that someone should become subject to the laws of a country they've never visited and where they have no assets just because they communicated with someone else who does live in that country seems questionable. Even if money is sent by the person living in that country to someone based elsewhere it still seems questionable.

Taken to their logical conclusion these kinds of arguments would kill off a lot of the value of the modern Internet (assuming they could be practically enforced). Can you even write a blog post any more if it might be controversial in any country in the world? Do you have to pay if you show ads next to that blog post and someone from the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere visits - but the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere has a law prohibiting online advertising as a social harm and imposing a fine of 1000% of global revenues generated through ads? What happens when the laws of two different countries are in direct conflict and one requires you to include an official warning of some kind alongside certain information on your blog but the other one prohibits such statements unless you're formally qualified to give advice in the field?

If you want to interfere with international trade or international communications at all then it makes far more sense practically - and arguably both morally and legally as well - to legislate so that your own people in your own country who are subject to your own laws are the ones who must or must not act in a certain way. If there's some kind of regulation on physical goods then make the person importing those goods responsible for compliance. If you want to tax international transactions then make the person in your country who is participating in those transactions responsible for declaring and paying the tax. But realistically this leads to a lot of non-compliance because your citizens don't have to be experts in international tax law so you can collect your $1.53 when they bought a new T-shirt from some online store based in another country and had it shipped.

Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.

I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.

If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.

On the other hand, if you value your own time so little that the only amount you're willing invest in the quality of what you read is $0 - I also don’t know what to tell you.

Either way, I hope you figure it out.

Medium (at least what it is today) tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price.

The alternative solutions the web has been to come up with is to take the valuable content and lock it up in hundreds of silos (Substack, etc), leave residual low value content marketing available, and then cover most everything else with a browser melting level of “adtech”

You're perfectly entitled to keep your content commercial if you want. Just don't put it in the same place as the freely available material that everyone else was working with and then complain when people find you irritating. Some of us are content to share our own work for free on the web and to enjoy work that is offered freely by others. We're all doing it right now on HN and many of us run non-commercial blogs of our own too. And we made the web an interesting and useful place long before sites like Medium came along and tried to centralise and commercialise it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page

I try to avoid engaging in online flame wars but I will say that the developers - including Francis - have been nothing but helpful and courteous to me personally and I've also learned a lot from their numerous positive contributions to Caddy-related forums.

That is the traditional spin but if they pull many stunts like this how long will it continue? Corporate IT teams are infamous for being slow and unwieldy but that's not entirely fair because the corporate IT teams are usually also the ones on the hook if anything goes wrong. Screw up some sort of data protection or regulatory compliance issue and that can have serious and lasting implications for the entire business. Move fast and break things is not what you want when x% of your global turnover is at stake if a regulator decides to make an example of you. Letting anyone else play with your toys is definitely not what you want in that scenario - why else do Windows Enterprise and Education editions not try to force the same hostile measures onto their customers as all the lower tiers?

This looks like a huge misstep to me - the kind of mess that could actually be big enough to move the needle. And for Microsoft the greatest danger is probably the needle moving enough for everyone to see it. Once no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft except for that guy who just did it really could be the beginning of the end for them.

Microsoft also seems to have just abandoned one of the most powerful brands ever - Office - in a move that I can only assume was intended to show that Musk wasn't actually the craziest PR guy in the world when he renamed Twitter. There seems to be an outbreak of delusional thinking in Redmond and if this stuff doesn't get backtracked quickly I don't see a happy ending for MS here.

Google or countless smaller but established services for all the online stuff. The days when all businesses used Windows and Office for everything and the competitors were half-baked also-rans are long gone.

There is no lack of IT companies that will take your money if you're willing to move out of the Microsoft bubble. This is a momentum problem not a lack of competition problem.

But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access).

Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has.

But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.

Google is a pile of its own risks. For all the problems MS has they keep backwards compatibility running for years if not decades.

It is apparently scrambling to offer extended support schemes right now rather than deal with the inevitable fallout of forcibly retiring Windows 10 on so many still-functional devices with no upgrade path to 11 even available.

It hasn't been very long since it forcibly obsoleted the Windows 7/8 generations that were also still in use on a significant number of devices at the time but did not include the level of control (or intrusion if you prefer) that Microsoft evidently wanted of its users' devices.

The difference this time is that it's showing contempt for even large customers' control. Corporate IT departments with all those externally imposed constraints can resist compromise and surrendering control much more strongly than most home users or small organisations.

Not that you're wrong about the privacy angle either.

Yes, you can do most of the driving, but "at the edges", when quicker reaction time is needed, it becomes noticeable. Similar to, ahem, drunk driving, though obviously, not as bad, and you can stop a conversation whenever needed.

Obviously, talking to a computer in your car would be less taxing than to a person, but when it misrecognizes the input, it might be the opposite.

We have a 20 old navi with voice control. You can't just say free form things, but it's very deterministic. Most commands you want to say aren't free form, so this doesn't really matter. It also confirms everything, so it will never do something without you knowing. It also has the best voice I got to know. Natural, precise, short AND friendly; no clue why all these modern voices with way more compute all sound like garbage.

It really isn't. Driving while distracted by a phone conversation is comparable in safety to driving while heavily intoxicated or while barely awake. This is not a hypothetical. There is actual experimental research behind it and the evidence is consistent and overwhelming. There is no justification and no defence. It's not a debate. It kills people.

Everyone is right in saying that those drivers should take public transport instead if they want to work or call or play a game while they are on the move. And yes - maybe in time there will be self-driving options that will make the whole issue obsolete. But right now anyone driving but not paying full attention is a danger to themselves and others and this is not something we should condone or attempt to justify. It kills people.

That seems like an unhelpful limitation for a lot of people. For me - and as far as I know literally everyone I communicate with using Signal - the reason to use it is the E2EE for the messages. Once we have the messages or media on our own devices we're fine with having control over them ourselves. By all means also provide an option to create a secured archive for those who want it. But as long as the data can only be read using a specific app on a specific device then whatever you're creating isn't really a backup for a lot of practical purposes.

But I just use this project to export my signal messages to plaintext: https://github.com/tbvdm/sigtop

I have it auto run periodically and it's great. Makes for easy full text searching of my message history.

IMHO the point is that it's not rational. Signal is as vulnerable to the analogue hole as any other messaging platform that displays the messages on a phone screen. There was never any credible way to prevent someone who has received your message from keeping or passing on the information it contained. The idea is as unrealistic as the "disappearing message/photo" applications when confronted with any cheap phone or camera separate to the one showing that message/photo. Ultimately if you don't trust the recipient of your information to treat it as you would wish then your only choice is not to send them the information in the first place.

(and IMHO there are edge case scenario where the additional friction in exporting messages provides some protection. Particularly when your threat model involves imperfect actors)

edit: here's an example. Let's say I use 4 week disappearing message with everyone I chat with. That's imperfect of course, but let's say right now only about 5% of the people I chat with are proactively backing up/screenshotting my disappearing messages and the rest let messages expire. If Signal rolled out an "export all messages to plaintext" feature, then suddenly that 5% might become 50%. And now a lot more of my messages which used to disappear, are being preserved.

If everyone I chat with is a perfect 'threat actor' that always backups up every message they ever receive, then there's no difference at all. But most people aren't, so practically there's a big difference because now exporting to plaintext (and bypassing time restrictions) is trivial for the masses.

I also know a large number of people who won't use it because it locks your messages up in its own walled garden. People use apps like this precisely because they want to have control over their own communications without any third parties interfering! I have never understood what kind of threat model they think they're protecting against by not letting people take their own backups and store them according to their own preferences. Whatever the reasons it is clearly a deterrent to wider adoption.

This announcement might seem like progress but I doubt it will convince any of the people I know who won't use it because at the end of the day it's still a walled garden. If and when the promise of the comments near the end of the announcement is realised and we can back up our own messages and media freely from our own devices to our own (presumably also secure) backup facilities then it will be much more interesting.

Objectively that sadness does not change reality however. At least within my own professional network no-one seems comfortable starting a new project using React today. Almost 100% of the paid front end work I've been involved with myself or discussed with others recently is now using alternatives - most often Vue though I've seen other choices at least seriously considered. I've even had a couple of recruiters I haven't worked with for years suddenly reappear desperately looking for someone to take on React work and openly admit it's because they are struggling to find anyone good who wants to go near it. All of this is a sharp contrast with the market of the early 2020s when React was clearly the preferred front end choice. And all of this is surely a direct response to the push to make React a full stack framework, the added complexity that has introduced, and the apparent capture of official React development by Vercel.