Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.

See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar

They knew this and decided to maintain Perl 5 alongside Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) for what is looking to be noticeably longer than the 11-year transition from Python 2 to Python 3.

Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

The most prolific poster on my Mastodon feed is a retrocomputing enthusiast who uses a decades-old (pre-Intel) Macintosh PowerBook G4 as their daily driver.

GCC has tended to support more historic instruction sets than LLVM. If a device's instruction set is supported by GCC and not by LLVM, it can run programs written in C, C++, Fortran, and other languages supported by GCC. It can also run programs in an interpreted language whose interpreter is implemented in a language supported by GCC, such as Python and PHP last I checked. It cannot build programs written in languages supported only by LLVM and not by GCC, such as latest stable Rust. What keeps gccrs (the Rust front end of GCC) from entering production is that the Rust language is still a rapidly moving target, with popular programs routinely requiring features added to the language or the standard library less than six months ago.

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.

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

And the right decision would be for phone operating system publishers to provide functionality in the included web browser to let a website act as a progressive web application. Safari for iOS has a history of lagging behind other platforms' browsers in PWA features.[1] This is particularly evident with respect to what the browser allows websites to do in the background. For example, Apple implemented Push API seven years after Mozilla did, and it requires the user to add the website to the home screen to enable PWA features.[2] Do you want Nintendo Music to pause when you switch to another application? Or if you've chosen to let Nintendo's website notify you when something becomes available, do you want to miss the notification if Safari suddenly decides that your domain's notifications shall be silent (without vibration, without sound, and at the bottom of the list)?

[1] "Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied" by Alex Russell
[2] "Push API" on Can I use...

With two exceptions I can think of. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it:

1. For lightweight web hosting, a low-end VPS from a company like DigitalOcean is likely to be less expensive than upgrading a home office from home-class home Internet to business-class home Internet to unblock inbound ports 80 and 443.
2. SMTP is still an old boys' club, with major mailbox providers (such as Gmail and Outlook) blocking connections on port 25 from on-premise IP addresses as likely sources of spam.

The alternative is developing a progressive web application (PWA) that runs in Safari instead of a native iOS application.

Of course we know, because we don't see the source tree to the next GTA game posted anywhere, do we?

Steam offers developers the option to sell their own Steam keys. In theory, that lets developers use all of Steam's infrastructure services without paying - Steam doesn't take a cut of those sales. Essentially the only condition is that they don't offer those keys on better terms than for Steam buyers.

That's basically the exact opposite of abusing your market power. To the degree you can do better than Steam, with help of a third party or not, they let you keep Steam's share accordingly.

The small game developers I've talked with have all said that Steam is by no means a replacement for a marketing budget. Random indies on steam don't get noticed, as a rule.

So the main leaked info is email addresses? All the other information mentioned is public in Sweden, as far as I know. Well, apart from the fact that the victims use municipal trash services, I guess.

Yeah I don't know if that's worth 1.5 Bitcoin, extortionists.

I often wonder in such cases if the extortionists weren't scammed themselves. Buying access to exploits, tools, collection and laundering infrastructure etc. and being told it's a surefire way to get rich quick.

Swedish criminal gangs have been gaining especial notoriety lately, because they've started recruiting kids around 14 for assassination jobs on each other.

People, including the kids, think it's because the court system can't convict kids that young, so they get off with less punishment.

But it's not. The actual reason is that kids are easy to manipulate. Even a little older, you'd struggle to find even one 18 year old who could be convinced becoming a gang assassin was a cool idea.

And that's the mechanism at work here too. Hey kids, wanna work for Peter Thiel's totalitarian fever dream? It'll be cool and all, like, cyberpunk and stuff! Except you'll be on the winning side!