The service worker API is explicitly designed to avoid downasaurs in "offline-first" use cases. It acts as a proxy to serve the shell document, style sheet, scripts, and stale data, even without an Internet connection. That's why I asked what obstacles there are other than a downasaur.

I have not presented my ideas to Grab because I am not a user of Grab. I would imagine that most readers of Slashdot are likewise not users of Grab.

The 45 minute builds back in the 1990s .....

Obviously someone never tried compiling the Linux kernel back then. An hour to build was considered fast. It also was a good stability test because questionable computers would almost always crash.

These days the Linux kernel takes 5 minutes tops.

Android is also a beast to build - back in the early days, half a day to build it was common. Even on a high end machine you did a clean build in around an hour and a half. If you got a super tricked out Threadripper PC with SSDs you got it down to around 45 minutes. 64 core builds at the time were impressive. Of course these days we have 128 core PCs, but even Android 14 doubled the build time over Android 13.

Windows reportedly took 8 hours to build in the NT days.

In a little over 20 years we went from build times on things like Linux, GCC, Glibc, and other big projects which took the better part of an hour to just a few minutes. Fast enough that OpenEmbedded Linux builds everything from source - you set up a project and build it and it compiles the cross-compilers, the host libraries, and build tools and then spits out an image you can use in about half an hour.

Of course, the real thing is likely more WFH stuff - because if you walked in the door to the office, you were on the clock. At home, I suppose you could go through all that, but most people I know just close their laptops which puts them to sleep, so they just need to log into the VPN the next day. Hell, I'm super lazy, I just lock the PC and leave it running. It's not like the few watts the laptop consumes is going to kill me - I'm saving tons on gas and other things not going to the office so leaving the laptop plugged in and on isn't going to hurt matters.

Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".

And knowing the Japanese, this is basically the kiss of death to them using Firefox.

As if Mozilla really needed ANOTHER reason to see their marketshare go down even more.

It's like they're purposely tanking their numbers so they can blame "Google monopoly!" for their dwindling numbers, when in reality it's because they're pushing users to alternative browsers.

Pushing away the Japanese like this certainly isn't a good move. But watch as they blame Google for destroying Firefox instead of themselves for pushing users away from Firefox.

Do they really need to give people reasons to not use Firefox?

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

The problem was, selling bricks didn't make Lego much money. They fell on hard times because toys went electronic and the 90s were rough as everyone drifted towards computers.

They basically reinvented themselves - no kid is getting a $400 Lego set - but adults do. And adults love to collect. These sets basically brought Lego back. So while they're limited in a way, they also do sell, and licensed sets are one of their bigger revenue streams.

That said, they do make generic sets, and you can buy bulk lots, but they're more oriented towards kids who do take them apart and build more stuff with them. But they also realize there's a growing crowd of builders who want special pieces so you can order them by the brick, and a growing adult segment that wants to do a build with their kids, but have something on display.

The beauty of Lego is it can be all things. You can build this with your kid, you might then buy them a bunch of random sets for them to play with - they can choose to build the desired outcome, or who cares, open all the bags, and build whatever comes to mind. No one's touching my Enterprise, but if I give you a Mona Lisa set and you use it to make a spaceship, more power to you.

And yes, people do buy sets often to collect pieces - there are sites that value the sets on how much you get per dollar.

No one has any qualms if you choose to buy this set and build something else completely different. Or if you buy 10 of these sets to build your collection of pieces and have absolutely no intention on building a USS Millennium Falcon.

Nah, that's been the norm for the past 30 years.

Vibe Coding is the next Visual Basic. You know the tool that basically runs Fortune 50 or so companies because some middle manager saw a demo version, cooked something up with it, then it spread like wildfire. Eventually it started accruing features in an ad-hoc manner and is now this unworkable blob of an application that someone has to keep running on a mysterious Windows XP machine that no one dares touch. It started using the demo version, then someone's kid found a pirated version so you didn't have to take 3 million steps to install it every month. Eventually someone actually bought a legitimate version.

Attempts had been made to bring it to VB# but it's only been a buggy mess since, so no one's actually moved from VB6, but the timeline is "sometime" and everything has to be made both to the app everyone uses and the failed VB# version they can finally retire that Windows XP machine and move onto Windows Server 2008. Because as we all know, VB# is also end of life.

Oh sure, some new middle manager sees this and is currently vibe coding their way to a replacement for both the Windows XP and obsolete VB# version, but it only seems to work half the time, and features that worked yesterday mysteriously broke today, so those vital reports that barely worked on Windows XP, well, if it worked, it would be wrong, despite even the Windows 2008 version having that working for years.

People expect to be paid for commute time too, at least in the sense that they will want more money if the commute is longer. Work from home made just coming to the office at all something which people want more money for.

$6 billion could do a lot to end hunger in many parts of the world. Instead, Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a hellsite, and told people to have more kids.

I was expecting someone who has used the product to help others in this discussion understand why Grab probably chose and continues to choose to develop iOS apps instead of PWAs. The answers might have taken the form:

A. PWAs weren't capable enough 12 years ago for X, Y, and Z reasons, are now, and the engineering resources to port the native app to a web app would exceed the cost of acquiring and maintaining Macs capable of running the latest macOS
B. PWAs still aren't capable for X, Y, and Z reasons

People paying $2.99 for a flash game on their phone have finally figured out that you can play them for free on the interwebs. News at 11.

Erm... so a minimum wage employee has to risk their lives so you an feel better about "something" being done. I bet you also wonder why the modern world is fucked.

Also clue by four: if shops could stop shoplifting tomorrow they'd not lower prices, they'd just increase their profit margins. Hence if there is anyone to blame it is really the stores themselves. There's a load of changes they can make to store layouts to minimise theft and shrinkage, however they wont as it will reduce the purchase of impulse items significantly. Until shops are willing to do that, they're just complaining that someone else hasn't fixed their problem and protected their profits.

The local ASDA (UK supermarket) recently installed barriers that only open one way at the entrance to the store but still keeps impulse items outside the barriers... which makes them about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The barriers are waist height so they won't stop anyone and if you want to leave the shop you can just walk through the dozen or so unmanned checkouts. I suppose it will deter the casual theif... sometimes.

Knowing them, they hired some AI wiz kids who wanted to move fast and break things. Meanwhile the poor engineers who are slowly making really important and valuable improvements to the core browser aren't getting any help. Maybe some vibe coded Javascript engine updates are next on the list.

You can't trust these billionaires. Musk said if someone explained how he could end hunger for $6 billion, he would do it. He was presented with a credible plan by the United Nations' World Food Program, and quietly forgot about it his promise.

This feels self serving. What are the chances that if they discover some miracle cure for cancer, they charge top dollar for it?

Conspiracy implies a degree of secrecy.

Clearly some of their customers want EV trucks. But why don't more of them want them?

Could it be because Trump doesn't like EVs, and because Republicans have done everything they can to stifle installation of the infrastructure that makes owning an EV convenient?

It seems to be the way they went about it, as much as anything. The volunteers would probably have accepted first drafts created by AI, or suggestions for changes, but Mozilla just overwrote their work, bypassing them entirely.