I think the sentiment is usually paired with discussion about those products as long-lasting, revenue-generating things. Many of those ended up feeding back into Search and Ads. As an exercise, out of the list you described, how many of those are meaningfully-revenue-generating, without ads?
A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an extra 1% of revenue on ads."
And, to be super pedantic about it, Android and YouTube were not products that Google built but acquired.
They bought YouTube but you have to give Google a hell of a lot of credit for turning it into what it is today. Taking ownership of YouTube at the time was seen by many as taking ownership of an endless string of copyright lawsuits, suing them into oblivion.
Youtube maintains an independent campus from the google/alphabet mothership, I'm curious how much direction they get, as (outwardly, at least) appear to run semi-autonomously.
Before Google touched Android it was a cool concept but not what we think of today. Apparently it didn't even run on Linux. That concept came after the acquisition.
I think I can see some of where this could be utilized, but I think I'm still missing a step and I'm hopeful someone can fill me in.
There's a comparison against Argo Workflows, but with the description here and in other comments, Koreo seems to be aiming more for what I would use Argo CD for - managing the entire state of the cluster, the controllers, configuration, etc. Because of it tying into repos, you can then define the entire state of your cluster in code, and Argo CD has tools for doing some of the interpolation of variables into your YAML.
The project looks cool, and I don't think that the world suffers from having multiple ways of doing something, I just want to understand it better.
My understanding of Argo CD is limited so forgive me but I believe Koreo is a bit more similar to Argo Workflows. Where the scripts and logic is baked into the Argo Workflow image, in Koreo it leverages other K8s controllers to do the heavy lifting of interacting with the APIs. If I understand Argo CD correctly, it is an implementation of Argo Workflows. In this way, you are able to build your own CI/CD workflow via Koreo if you so wanted.
Thanks for sharing! I was thinking how this is a good example of the kinds of things that you can do with a game engine that already exists, as opposed to having to write everything yourself.
Also a nice mention of octrees' use outside of voxels.
This is beautiful, genuinely (the SVGs are lovely bits of artwork) and it's a fun puzzle to read, and I've shared with friends that like esolangs, including your book (good luck on publishing!).
In the "Data Strands" -> "Value Strands" section, you describe it as "Value strands (and other data strands), begin with a hook that points up (as in the third strand below) or to the left (as in the first two)" for the following example:
1 ╵╰──╮╭──╯╶╮
2 ─┘└─ └─╮
3
5 ╷
but the way I was parsing it was that the hook is '╰' or '╯', in which case both of those are hooks pointing up? It looks like a fairly innocuous typo, but I'm never sure with an esolang so wanted to ask.
Yes, that's a typo: the first two strands have hooks pointing up, the third to the left.
I forgot to mention that you can run the interpreter with -p to convert the program to pseudo-code. This makes it much easier to tweak the examples and experiment. I'll add that to the readme, along with more pseudo-code for the example programs.
And thanks so much!! Very excited to publish (Sept 2025).
Thanks, as I said, easy to fool yourself into thinking you're wrong when esolangs are involved.
The CLI tool is fantastic. I never thought that I'd see an esolang where "ergonomics of using it" was something the author would work on. I'll play around with that some more later, thanks again!
I appreciate that the article is trying to describe a complex topic, and many of the issues described are shared by us here in the US. It does cite different statistics of other nations as comparisons, and calls out that access to jobs, ease of movement, and housing are all things that help make countries wealthy.
Now for the downsides.
I feel like this article maintains a tone throughout that I might describe as "dismissive nationalism." The comparison against France is preceded by a paragraph that, due to the framing, is presented as ludicrous, proceeds to describe all of the things France does better, and then somehow still makes the claim that Britain has "many advantages." Perhaps that's intended in a vacuum, but with how hard it's pushing for private investment (to the extent that it touts all that earlier infrastructure in Britain as "built by a total of 1,116 private companies" and that it describes the State's role as functionally just exercising eminent domain), it's hard to overlook.
And while the underlying paper is discussing foundational, long-term effects, that there isn't a single mention of Brexit in the article feels stark in contrast to the conclusory statement by the paper's authors of "it is vital that Britain should once more have the strength and self-belief of 1939 with which to play its part in the leadership of the free world."
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I'm not an expert in economics (as my critique above might have clued you in), but I do think it's important to be careful in which experts you choose to listen to. I also don't know the biases that this particular publication or the underlying paper subscribe to.
I may try read the Foundations paper (https://ukfoundations.co/ - it's not that long), but if this article is summarizing well and is all, then it feels "too shallow." What's the underlying mechanism that got them to that state? If the proposed solution is "allowing more private investment," then what about all of the social shifts that happened in the meantime? NIMBYism is brought up as "logical" given the incentives at one point, but I'd argue it's fundamentally a social issue, related to a perceived quality of life and a lack of perception of a larger group as being part of "your community."
I digress.
Thanks for sharing the link, and I hope others with more of an economic / politics background might have more fruitful critique.
> What's the underlying mechanism that got them to that state?
It's the people behind the ukfoundations.co site who got Britain to its current state. The site is literally the work of Adam Smith Institute members whose Thatcherite neoliberal policies have dominated the UK since the 70s.
Brexit isn't mentioned because it's not relevant - the perception that it was important economically is a hangover from the times when the establishment was telling everyone it would be. In fact there was no economic impact. Britain continued in about the same place it was before rankings-wise, there was no Brexit recession and even trade with the EU continued on its prior trend line! An outcome so embarrassing to the Remainer classes that they just ignore the real outcomes and talk as if the economist's models were accurate.
> What's the underlying mechanism that got them to that state?
The Foundations essay discusses that. It's a combination of a big overhang of very socialist regulation from the 1940s, especially related to construction, combined with the lack of a big enough libertarian faction in the right wing party that would fix it. America has a strong Republican movement that pushes for pro-capitalist, pro-freedom outcomes (or did pre Trump), and inter-state competition makes it easier to compare outcomes. The UK had such a government for a while in the 1980s but British society didn't produce enough Thatchers to keep it up and the reforms were never completed. Blair accepted the 80s changes were necessary but didn't continue, and after Blair stepped down Labour shifted to the left (reverting to its historical mean). Cameron took advantage by steering the Conservative Party towards being continuity New Labour i.e. a center left party. They found that maintaining and doubling down on super strict building regs satisfied both the left wing greens and the right wing pensioners/house flippers, making it into a winning electoral strategy. They didn't have enough people making the long term arguments about the economic damage of that strategy, and indeed the Conservatives set things up to suppress their own right wing in the belief that this would yield bigger victories. Everything continued to drift ever more listlessly to the left until their activists, funders and ultimately voters basically gave up on them. Labour won more or less by default (not because they became more popular) and is now acting much like they did in the 1970s, so it looks like history travels in a loop and things will get worse for Britain before they get better, unfortunately.
> NIMBYism is brought up as "logical" given the incentives at one point, but I'd argue it's fundamentally a social issue
It's mostly not a social issue but financial. The USA has unusually sophisticated investing culture, it's common for people to understand and engage in stock trading there. In the UK it's normal for people's only investment to be their houses, and the social expectation that house prices always rise is abnormally strong. Therefore, anything that could lower house prices became political death -> NIMBYism.
For anyone else coming along reading this thread, in searching for Brexit's impact, I see mention that while a sharp recession and many of the doom-and-gloom style predictions didn't happen, it _absolutely_ has had a negative impact on the economy, and that it's expected that the effects are long-term and will continue.
I do think it's potentially fair to say that some of those effects aren't relevant for this particular article or discussion, due to the recency. The movement around it didn't arise out of nothing, after all.
Can you show me the data showing negative effects post-implementation?
The expectation of long term effects comes, as far as I know, only from the same people who were wrong last time and are trying to save face by making new predictions with effectively unfalsifiable timelines.
I realize it may not seem that way, but even under Trump the Republicans are still quite a bit stronger on the pro-business pro-liberty agenda than political parties in other countries. Also Trump only really matters at the federal level, whereas a lot of the decisions that matter for this UK vs USA discussion take place at the local level. It's more about the councillors and governors than the President or the Prime Minister. That's where permitting decisions are taking place for instance.
Echoing a similar sentiment, so supporting legacy retro video game sprites are very important to ensure are in and never change, but including flags is not okay? I re-read the justification for it recently and it still doesn't hold water, because it felt like it boiled down to "It's hard."
I was thinking about how Minecraft has a system of components and layers that let you compose various flags on their banners. Obviously that's far, far simpler than country (and autonomous region, and county, and province, and and and) flags that can include text, symbols, and practically entire images. But I did wonder if there was some way that could be represented. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly well-versed enough in code points and their ilk to propose anything useful.
But, I am torn. Archival projects are important, too, and language evolves. These decisions will live for potentially hundreds or thousands (Linear A) of years, and interoperability in computing is important.
Flags are in Unicode, they are just encoded like "the flag of United States" instead of "seven horizontal stripes and a specific arrangement of 50 white stars in a top-left blue background". (And the flag of US changes, although it hadn't been for many decades.)
In that case, the post clearly identifies the problem:
> Identities are fluid and unstoppable which makes mapping them to a formal unchanging universal character set incompatible.
If you really want to have identity flags encoded in spite of that, you don't really need Unicode's blessing. The pride flag is already not a single character anyway, it's U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308 (white flag -- emoji force -- ZWJ -- rainbow) and you can always create new ZWJ sequences with your own font. Or you can make a font that automatically synthesizes flags from some ZWJ sequence pattern, which is no longer semantically valid but should be much more flexible. Once they got sufficiently popular, there is no other reason that your new ZWJ sequence(s) shouldn't go into Unicode per se.
Unicode's decision to not process non-country flag emoji proposals is because they are closely tied with (minority) groups and Unicode wasn't expected to do any resulting conflict resolution. If you can somehow resolve that problem in advance, then you should probably do that first and propose what you've done.
Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome.
Maybe a dumb question, but why not Dear ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).
I originally wanted to port dear imgui to fenster but that looked difficult and microui already had a very straightforward little bytecode to implement
But I had some of the same issues that people have described about synchronizing across multiple devices with notifications and all that jazz, and ended up landing on Amazing Marvin (https://amazingmarvin.com/).
It is the single, closest thing I've found to the same paradigm of Task Warrior's prioritization systems, and incredibly customizable, which is lovely to see as a web app. No connection to it, other than it being something I love.
I'm trying to read this in good faith, that what you're describing is about how "[formalizing] the rules of engagement for gray-zone operations using a third party" will help prevent certain kinds of tensions from rising again to a potential boiling point (arguably the _only_ point of the UN), but the tone comes off as so defeatist it's hard to see that as a positive.
Can you elaborate a bit further on why you see this as a necessary step for a given outcome?
Otherwise this just looks like giving in to bad faith actors and weakening our own protections in the process.
The existing status quo over cyberwarfare is untenable, and runs the very real risk of causing chaos if we don't tamp down on the usage of third parties for plausible deniability.
Most countries have offensive security capabilities directly under direct government control, but a number of them will also tolerate third party actors attacking a rival country so long as they don't attack the host country.
This is what LockBit (Russia), ChamelGang (either China or NK), Appin (India), etc has done.
Either everyone allows cybercriminals in their countries to attack other countries (and spark actual chaos in our entire internet infra that could escalate into actual violence), or all nation states agree to tamp down on third party attackers.
The Budapest Convention was the previous cybercrimes agreement, but most countries outside of the West that matter didn't ratify it. This meant terms of engagement over cyberwarfare weren't truly formalized, and a bad actor like NK or China could in good faith argue that a North Korean or Chinese cybergang did no wrong.
The brutal reality is that performative treaties like the Budapest Convention have no teeth, and a global Internet means that terms of engagement are needed for warfare, or the entire Internet splinters.
> Either everyone allows cybercriminals in their countries to attack other countries (and spark actual chaos in our entire internet infra that could escalate into actual violence),
This seems overblown. The behavior you're describing has been present nearly as long as the internet has been globally accessible. It's an inconvenience and it means we need to do a better job securing systems against attacks, which is hardly the worst thing from an evolutionary perspective. Better that systems get hardened now to prevent ransomware than that they remain vulnerable until there is an actual war and an enemy state takes advantage of longstanding complacency.
> or all nation states agree to tamp down on third party attackers.
This doesn't happen even with a treaty, because not all countries will be signatories, and even the signatories can just ignore the provisions as they do with many other treaties. Corrupt governments deflect blame; "the attack seems to have originated from here but we investigated ourselves and found ourselves innocent" etc. Proving otherwise without local cooperation is close to impossible because the location of the originating systems is not inherently the location of the attackers. And, of course, corrupt governments are the places where these things are already happening.
A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an extra 1% of revenue on ads."
And, to be super pedantic about it, Android and YouTube were not products that Google built but acquired.