aloso

Oh, didn't the domain somesoftwarecorp.com give it away?

Lemmy is like Reddit, which is used a lot to ask questions and get help. But StackOverflow fills a different niche, it's meant to be useful to as many people as possible and stay up to date. This is why

• there's a distinction between "comments" and "answers" (comments can be used to request additional information, and for meta discussion)
• both questions and answers can be modified by other users, for example to
  • add more information, or remove unnecessary details
  • correct outdated information
  • fix typos and formatting
  • rephrase sentences that are confusing
• a question can be closed as duplicate, so people always find the oldest thread of the question with the best/most detailed answers
• before submitting a question, you get a list of related questions to avoid creating a duplicate question
• questions have tags, making them easier to search for

Iframes cannot access the main frame's DOM if the iframe is from a different origin than the main frame, and they never share the same JavaScript execution context, so an iframe can't access the main frame's variables etc.

It's not required that iframes run in a different process, but I think they do at least in Chrome and Firefox if they're from a different origin. Also, iframes with the sandbox attribute have a number of additional restrictions, which can be individually disabled when needed.

They still have their place; for example to embed Google Maps or a YouTube video. Generally, whenever you want to embed something from a different website you have no control over, that shouldn't inherit your style sheets, and should be sandboxed to prevent cross site scripting attacks.

I do not use AI to solve programming problems.

First, LLMs like ChatGPT often produce incorrect answers to particularly difficult questions, but still seem completely confident in their answer. I don't trust software that would rather make something up than admit that it doesn't know the answer. People can make mistakes, too, but StackOverflow usually pushes the correct answer to the top through community upvotes.

Second, I rarely ask questions on StackOverflow. Most of the time, if I search for a few related keywords, Google will find an SO thread with the answer. This is much faster than writing a SO question and waiting for people to answer it; and it is also faster than explaining the question to ChatGPT.

Third, I'm familiar enough with the languages I use that I don't need help with simple questions anymore, like "how to iterate over a hashmap" or "how to randomly shuffle an array". The situations where I could use help are often so complicated that an LLM would probably be useless. Especially for large code bases, where the relevant code is spread across many files or even multiple repositories (e.g. a backend and a frontend), debugging the problem myself is more efficient than asking for help, be it an online community or a language model.

You confused revenue and profit. You must subtract expenses to calculate the profit. For example, if you buy something for $20 and sell it for $21, your revenue is $21, but your profit is only $1.

Facebook reported a profit of $39 billion in 2021 and $23 billion in 2022. This takes their expenses (salaries, offices, data centres, etc.) into account.

obligatory XKCD

Sure, but raw pointers and unsafe Rust are still covered in the official learning material, so I assume that most Rust devs know about raw pointers.

We have pointers in Rust, too :) see documentation

Microsoft does collect a lot of data. But storing every keystroke is first of all impractical, because it would take a lot of disk space to store every keystroke of every user, and secondly not very useful unless they also knew when, in which application, and in what context each key was pressed.

Fully agree with what you said. There are still just as many passionate people fascinated by computers in the youngest generation as there are in older generations. It's just that the sheer number of programmers has made them less visible in recent years.

Also, one thing the article misses is that programming 8 hours a day and then continuing to program in your spare time is not healthy for many people. People are different, and there are some who can do it without negative consequences, but for others it can lead to burnout, especially if they also have a family to take care of or other issues to deal with. I used to do a lot of programming in my spare time when I was in college. Now that I have a 40-hour-a-week job, I've learned that I need to be careful how much energy I spend, and I don't do as much open source work because I need a lot of my free time to rest and recharge.