I know the people who were laid off were passionate about what they were working on - and this was a big disruption to their life.
But when I see some of these layoffs, my immediate thought is:
1.) Who is this company and how did they have so many people?
2.) OK, that industry experienced a COVID boon (edtech, mortgages)
3.) Taking advantage of others laying off people to get rid of poor performers
Netflix laying off employees; I'm sorry, but Netflix is mostly a catalog of garbage at an ever increasing cost, with legitimate competitors at this point.
When I rented from a personal landlord, when the dishwasher was leaking water across the kitchen they told me it was my problem to replace it with a like model as it must've been my abuse. I barely cook so I have no idea what I could've done wrong.
When I rented from a corporation it was no questions asked, even when I was at fault. They were even proactive with things like filters for the heating/cooling.
In Mark Randolph's book he talks about how Netflix would recommend content (DVDs at the time) to strategically fit Netflix's needs. For example, if they didn't have a copy of a movie ready to send out, Netflix wouldn't recommend it.
Now a days, I'm certain Netflix recommends content to feature either "no cost" (owned) or the content with the lowest licensing fee. I don't believe for a second they don't have the data suggest the best movie. They simply don't want to suggest the best movie. As you said, their goal (now) isn't to suggest the content the user is likely to enjoy most, it's to suggest content the user will tolerate. And that's exactly why they shifted away from a 5 star rating system, to a thumbs up/down approach... even if you didn't love a movie or show, you're still likely to give it a thumbs up unless it was totally awful.
If you have an Audible subscription, you may have noticed the same behaviour there.
Large numbers of books labelled as 'free with your membership', which likely only cost Amazon the price of delivering the files. Which makes sense, because once I have paid for my credit the worst outcome financially is that I use it.
People hate on "design by committee", but the real issue is you have a bunch orgs all trying make the design as close to their shit pile of code that is already written. (Outside of that, I think multiple designers with open minds is a good thing, but I shouldn't digress too much.)
(My coworker made an astute prediction (only semi-jokingly) that eventually all the standardized binary interfaces would eventually transitively refer to all the other standardized binary interfaces as the inevitable conclusion of that phenomenon, and few stingy large orgs properly separating their external interfaces from internals.)
The solution here is to pay a specific contractor to do the design and validate with a demo deployment. Oncely once it is proven to work, and the government can then set up their own in-house (i.e. proove it is real open source by doing the tech transfer) is the full money paid out.
This is the computer equivalent of a drug bounty, basically. It's high time publicly-funded engineering doesn't just deepen private intellectual-property motes.
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This a good comment. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. I then lived in London, spent time in Berlin & L'viv.
I can tell you my preference is not London. It's loud, even when it's not. It's dirty. And wow is it busy.
I think Berlin does a nice job blending big city, with accessibility and quality of life.
Ultimately without a European visa though I'm back in the American suburbs which I enjoy. I like the fact that it's quiet, private, and I have yard and the space to entertain friends and family.
"neither Mozilla nor Pocket ever receives a copy of your browser history. When personalization does occur, recommendations rely on a process of story sorting and filtering that happens locally in your personal copy of Firefox."
I know the people who were laid off were passionate about what they were working on - and this was a big disruption to their life.
But when I see some of these layoffs, my immediate thought is:
1.) Who is this company and how did they have so many people?
2.) OK, that industry experienced a COVID boon (edtech, mortgages)
3.) Taking advantage of others laying off people to get rid of poor performers
Netflix laying off employees; I'm sorry, but Netflix is mostly a catalog of garbage at an ever increasing cost, with legitimate competitors at this point.