lemoncucumber

Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases?

That’s not specific to a land value tax, the same thing can happen with traditional property taxes when the property is re-assessed.

California tried to “solve” exactly that scenario with Prop 13 limiting how much the assessed value of property can increase without a change in ownership and it’s been a disaster (and a contributing factor to the housing crisis, albeit far from the only one).

Apple does the same thing as Google, the button is only labeled "Get" for free apps, for paid apps it's labeled with the price.

Paid apps largely failed as a business model though (why would a consumer take a risk on buying a paid app that they can't try before they buy) so most apps that you pay for are free apps with IAP subscriptions... which I guess makes it a little more explicit that you're renting the app, for better or worse.

I do this myself (albeit pretty rarely) since the rear camera is significantly better than the front camera, especially in low light.

The Trader Joe's model is an interesting comparison with the Costco model.

Similarities:

* Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size.

* Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency gain).

* Both of them are cheaper than your typical grocery store.

Differences:

* I feel like Trader Joe's leans on store brand / white-labeling items more than Costco -- yes Kirkland Signature is a thing but Trader Joe's takes it further.

* The shopping experience is pretty different both in terms of the in-store experience and the quantities things are sold in.

* Costco requires a membership, Trader Joe's doesn't.

I wonder which elements of the two models would work best for a public grocery store.

[2016]

~10e2/3 is a very unclear what of writing whatever number you're trying to write

The meaning is the same, it just sounds weird to my ears in the same way that “since years” does

(Also I just noticed the extra “it” in my previous comment, oops).

To my ears it “since years” sounds like it’s missing an “ago” after it (or like the GP said “for years” sounds even more natural).

It makes me think of another similar one: I've noticed that British English speakers will say e.g. "the new iPhone will be available from September 20th"

To my ears that sounds like it's missing an “onwards” after it (or “starting September 20th” would sound even more natural).

This one drives me nuts. I get it if it’s a single page app, but in many cases right-clicking the same link and choosing “open in new tab” works fine so that’s not the issue.

Early Quakers rejected using different 2nd person pronouns for different people since it violated their principle of egalitarianism so they called everyone thee/thou (and got into trouble for it as you might expect).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-q...

there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future

Makes me think of how plists in macOS are xml because back then xml was the future

I thought this was going to be about phonemes that used to be part of English but aren't anymore (e.g. all of the vestigal "gh"es in our spellings that used to represent the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative but are now either silent or pronounced as another phoneme).

Reminds me of when they finally apologized for the train wreck that was IE6 [1] and resumed Internet Explorer development in the 2000s after Firefox came along and started eating IE's market share.

In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...

I've heard that Waymo relies on having very accurate map data for the areas where they operate, so perhaps they could perform worse than human drivers in areas where they don't have good map data.

But I also trust that the company wouldn't deploy them in those areas until the quality data they need is available. So perhaps "safer in the environments where they are actually deployed" would be more accurate, but that's also the only thing that matters.

Speculating about what would happen if they were used in ways they are neither intended to be used nor are actually used feels a little silly. Most machines can be unsafe if you use them in ways they're not intended to be used.

It was a great piece and I learned a lot, thanks for writing it. I hope you didn’t think that it was you I was disappointed with rather than the language designers :)

It’s ironic how context cancellation has the opposite problem as error handling.

With errors they force you to handle every error explicitly which results in people adding unnecessary contextual information: it can be tempting to keep adding layer upon layer of wrapping resulting in an unwieldy error string that’s practically a hand-rolled stacktrace.

With context cancellation OTOH you have to go out of your way to add contextual info at all, and even then it’s not as simple as just using the new machinery because as your piece demonstrates it doesn’t all work well together so you have to go even further out of your way and roll your own timeout-based cancellation. Absurd.

It’s great that they identified this (incredibly common) pain point and introduced a way to solve it, but I can’t help being disappointed.

Reading the examples I found myself thinking, “that looks like a really useful pattern, I should bookmark this so I can adopt it whenever I write code like that.”

The fact that I’m considering bookmarking a blog post about complex boilerplate that I would want to use 100% of the times when it’s applicable is a huge red flag and is exactly why people complain about Go.

It feels like you’re constantly fighting the language: having to add error handling boilerplate everywhere and having to pass contexts everywhere (more boilerplate). This is the intersection of those two annoyances so it feels especially annoying (particularly given the nuances/footguns the author describes).

They say the point is that Go forces you to handle errors but 99% of the time that means just returning the error after possibly wrapping it. After a decade of writing Go I still don’t have a good rule of thumb for when I should wrap an error with more info or return it as-is.

I hope someday they make another attempt at a Go 2.0.

You’ve got the first two backwards. The real accountability mechanism in the constitution for a rogue president/administration is impeachment by congress (which is a proxy for the people in theory). Unfortunately neither enough of congress nor enough of the electorate cares if the administration breaks the law.

"Retina" is Apple's marketing name for high PPI displays.

They also have a lifetime warranty which is great. With enough use their socks still eventually wear out, but you can get a new pair for free.

Python's standard library seems comparable IME

That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.

I would’ve expected the research to be coming out of Japan if it’s an anime based technology ;)

I think we're defining "less" differently. You're interpreting "less open" to mean "not open at all," which is not what I said.

There's a long history of Google slowly making the experience worse if you want to take advantage of the things that make Android open.

For example, by moving features that were in the AOSP into their proprietary Play Services instead [1].

Or coming soon, preventing sideloading of unverified apps if you're using a Google build of Android [2].

In both cases, it's forcing you to accept tradeoffs between functionality and openness that you didn't have to accept before. You can still use AOSP, but it's a second class experience.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-si...

Workspace vs Office

It’s a common pattern for upstarts to embrace openness as a way to differentiate and gain a foothold then become progressively less open once they get bigger. Android is a great example.

The app in question relies on the network effect (lots of people crowdsourcing information) so introducing that much friction would kill its usefulness. 99% of users wouldn’t jump through the hoops, and without enough users the app is useless.

Any provider with a free tier doesn’t have the issue so that covers a lot of them

My company has a style guide that every public type/method/etc. must have a comment and it results in a ton of these comments for trivial methods.

Basically this paragraph from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore:

"Singapore has consistently been rated as the least-corrupt country in Asia and amongst the top ten cleanest in the world by Transparency International. The World Bank's governance indicators have also rated Singapore highly on rule of law, control of corruption and government effectiveness. However, it is widely perceived that some aspects of the political process, civil liberties, and political, labour and human rights are lacking. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Singapore a "flawed democracy" in 2024. Freedom House deemed Singapore "partly free" in 2025, at 48/100 — 19/40 for political rights, 29/60 for civil liberties."

Agreed, I guess I should have said it's not directly about making money from Maps, it's all indirect business reasons.

Same thing with Apple operating iMessage for free without ads... they don't care about monetizing iMessage but it's also not about altruism.