Certainly many others would have tried to invent something like the web.

HyperCard predated the web browser and had the concept of easy to build pages that linked. Lots of people were working on ways to deliver apps over the Internet.

I think in some alternative timeline we’d still have a lot of interactive content on the Internet somewhat like the web, but probably based on different technology. Maybe more proprietary.

You get to choose how your 401k is invested, though. The only difference is a tax advantage.

The advice is just: save money, let it grow using compound interest, use tax laws to your advantage.

There’s no “trust the government” in that advice.

I think it’s more that it’s hard to understand when you’re extroverted and your job depends on talking to people all day.

I’m sure this is true for some businesses, but there are also tons of businesses that have no vested interest in commercial real estate. It doesn’t explain all of it.

Honestly I think a much better explanation is that on average, bosses like being in the office and they don’t understand why everyone isn’t like them. Top leadership tends to be extroverted and they got where they are by lots of networking. They don’t have enough appreciation that for a lot of other types of people and types of jobs, being in the office just makes things harder.

Rotten Tomatoes has both a critic score and an audience score.

If your pick has a low critic score but high audience score, that means it was formulaic or unoriginal but probably lots of fun.

Movies with a high critic score and low audience score are usually more artsy, film-festival stuff.

The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/zQ77HkGmK9E/m/HjaaCIG-BQAJ?pli=1

If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.

They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.

First of all, since the very early days Android has always allowed apps to make use of native code using the “NDK”, and in fact most games and most apps that do any sort of AI, image processing, or anything else complex like that make heavy use of native code already, for performance reasons.

Keep in mind that the decision to base Android apps around Java was made back in 2003 when Android was founded. Some of the reasons they picked Java were:

• It’s one of the most widely known languages by developers
• It’s hard to write code in languages like C and C++ without introducing memory bugs and security bugs. Using a higher-level language makes those bugs far less common.
• It’s portable - you note that Android only supports arm64 now, but at the time it was arm32, and Android has actually always had some level of support for x86 - you can run the emulator for x86, and some x86 Android devices exist. Using a bytecode language means Android is future-proof
• It’s not limited to just Java - the JVM has a rich ecosystem of languages that developers can use

Now 20 years later I think it’s worked out pretty well. It’s hard to imagine picking a different language would have worked out better. Java is still just as popular as ever, and Android developers can take advantage of all of the Java tools from any other platform or application.

Apple’s original option for iOS apps was just Objective-C, which is higher-performance, but overall it’s a more obscure, difficult to use language. Developers adopted it despite Obj-C, not because of it. Apple had to invent Swift to provide a more modern alternative, because Obj-C is basically not used anywhere else and it felt very ancient. While Swift is a pretty great language, it’s still somewhat obscure, only used for iOS and Mac apps - while Java and JVM languages are used everywhere.

Anyway, let’s say that Android really did want to switch, for some reason. I’m not sure why you think switching to compiled code would be less complex. How would all of the millions of existing Android apps migrate? What native languages would be supported? It’d be a huge transition for dubious benefits.

As it is, Android is extremely flexible. While the official APIs require a JVM language, because of the NDK you can basically write Android apps in whatever language you want. People have built frameworks enabling you to build Android apps in nearly every language under the sun.