They didn’t, mostly. There have always been traffic deals, but otherwise:

• Netscape: initially charged money for the browser, but free later.
• Internet Explorer: initially charged money, bundled with Windows later. Not intended to be profitable directly, but to prevent the web from making the desktop OS where Microsoft had a near-monopoly irrelevant.
• Opera: built-in banner ad, pay for ad-free.
• Mozilla Suite, later pivoting to Firefox: initially nonprofit.
• Safari: bundled with Apple operating systems, but also offered for Windows for a few years. Safari was never meant to make money directly, but to give Apple more control over the web experience, and probably to keep the web from competing with native apps too effectively on iOS.
• Chrome: never intended to make money directly. I’m not sure the initial plan was to spy on users either; Google was a different company in 2008. Instead, I think Google really wanted a browser to make the web the application platform Microsoft feared, and found the existing options lacking.

People in a wide variety of circumstances report positive experiences with psychedelics.

I think someone in a bad situation they can’t improve through their own effort might feel better numbing their experience with drugs. The trouble with that is people aren’t always good at judging whether there’s anything they can do about their bad situation.

Let businesses change their hours instead of making people change clocks.

Most businesses in the USA can change their hours , but the hours that make sense for them depend on schedules they don’t control.

They used a procedural trick which only had to pass by a majority of those present to create a situation where it would need an absolute majority to fail in the next vote.

This happened as many MEPs have already left for their summer break and were therefore absent and unable to vote. It appears that Parliament President Roberta Metsola engineered this, but I haven’t looked in to it in detail.

I think it’s best we just maintain some recency bias when it comes to how harshly we judge people for their past internet behavior. If you were an asshole ten years ago and haven’t acted that way recently, I’ll just assume you were 12. We were all 12 once.

I tried pointing a text classifier at a subreddit’s comments 15+ years ago. It would be surprising if we weren’t seeing widespread use of automated moderation by now.

Interestingly, a sentence starting with “you are” ended up being one of the most damning features a comment could have with regard to civility.

Flight instructors jump out of planes to their deaths all the time? I hope you’ll forgive my request for some citations.

Even the headphone jack is an option you need to buy, it’s silly.

This is only true of the 16; the 12 and 13 have it built in. That makes me think there was a technical reason.

It is exactly fundamental attribution error, with a bit of motivated reasoning.

It’s an easy, comforting answer.

“That person’s life sucks because they do drugs” doesn’t raise any uncomfortable questions, and it makes avoiding a similar situation seem easy. “That person is using drugs because their life sucks” leads us to ask why their life sucks and whether the same thing could happen to us.

updated its mobile apps to no longer support GrapheneOS

This is not accurate. They updated the app to actively block GrapheneOS and other third-party Android builds.

The distinction is critical; unsupported combinations often work.

That’s a Scandi grind, which is easier than most knives to sharpen at the correct angle because there is no secondary bevel at the edge, just the wide primary bevel. When sharpening, you keep the whole bevel flat on the stone. That’s one of the harder aspects of freehand sharpening, so this knife makes that part easy.

That kind of thing is true of purely standalone products. Your local Starbucks franchise is making more money than your cool indie coffee shop because on average, people like Starbucks better.

People use smartphones to run third-party apps. They want to have the kinds of smartphones that run the apps they use. The same effect made Windows dominant even though most people didn’t really like it.

We do have an equivalent to Ada. It’s Ada. The open source GNAT compiler is actively maintained. Eiffel, too has a maintained open source implementation, but with a weird one-year release delay (probably not a big deal with a 40 year old language).

If you’re not choosing them for your own projects, then you are part of what you perceive to be the problem. You probably have a good reason, like lack of libraries or general inconvenience compared to popular modern languages. That’s fine; maximizing safety over velocity is the right call for avionics and safety-critical public infrastructure control systems, not the average software project.

Volunteering to have fewer than two children is consistent with a belief that a reduction in the human population is desirable. It does not require suicide.

This article in obvious LLM output.

Additionally, run an ad/tracker blocker so you don’t leak data to anyone else.

So nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?

the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical

Do they? I don’t automatically assume there’s anything unethical about the more expensive option in any other product category. The PS5 itself costs more than an XBox Series S, probably not because Microsoft is morally superior to Sony.