His account has a published package available that was pushed about 3 months ago - hardly dormant, and based in their disputes process [0] it seems unlikely anyway:
> To dispute a user name [...] After 4 weeks, if the owner has not responded, support will address your request. The ultimate outcome is at their discretion and judgement.
And this statement on squatting confirms that it would be 'extremely unlikely':
> We are extremely unlikely to transfer control of a user name, as it is totally valid to be an npm user and never publish any packages: for instance, you might be part of an organization or need read-only access to private packages. If a user has not logged into their account in a long time, we may consider transferring a name if it is requested by a new user.
There was no activity on the package for 3 months when I wrote this! By his logic, that would qualify for someone else to take over the account if they like the username.
Completely unrelated to maps, but I really enjoyed your talk about the origins of the "else" keyword at !!Con West a few months back! Thanks for picking that topic. Really got me thinking.
Well, that would be up to the user to decide. And you don't generally install project deps that way beyond some dev-deps like linters and test runners.
Even that guidance has changed with the cultural acceptance of `npx`. At this point the only thing that should be `npm install -g` is npm itself, and that only depending on your philosophy of how current you need to keep npm versus the version that ships with your NodeJS install.
We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of _money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising, tracking and click counts.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when it comes to motivating the production of good things.
Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital subscription model.
Your point may be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an alternative to intrusive ads.
I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen. The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that.
Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is the worst.
For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable experience.
When consuming, it's never for free, unless it's a hobby.
Look at the Hacker News homepage right now and count the websites and projects created and maintained as hobbies. If it's not a hobby and it's not paid, then the content you're viewing is an advertisement.
From an economic point of view, the problem with free content is that it's killing the paid alternatives. This is capitalism and in terms of price it's a race to the bottom. And you can't beat a zero price tag.
Just an example, how many visitors of Hacker News still use a @gmail.com email address or a free Dropbox account? By my estimation it's the vast majority, judging by the comments I've been reading. So we are talking about a demographic that earns well (compared with the average) and that doesn't blink when paying for lattes, but that is unable to pay for services that keep their email or data safe. And then you see people outraged whenever new limits are imposed on the free accounts, which is quite unbelievable.
Not trying to shame anyone in particular here and I understand that this is simply how the market works, my rant is basically about human nature. We consume, but we never learned to give back unless we are forced and you can see this in everything we do, like for example in our relationship with nature. In my mind the problems with the environment that we've created are the same problem.
Part of this is just the plethora of content. There's too much content, too much to savor and focus on. There's always something new, but there's too much to retain. If you were starved for content, you'd pay for it more often, and you'd enjoy it more often.
And how would you find out if that question has been answered before? That would only work if there was single unified centralised question site. And then we are pretty much back at Google's single search field.
> What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately capture the world as it exists around you right now.
I challenge that. I do not believe it is true. Google wants to be the go-to directory for spatial queries so that they can display their ads and make tons of money. The quality of the data is irrelevant after a certain level, as long as there is no viable alternative or people just blindly trust Google. Google Maps' data is quantity over quality by a wide margin.
Google is a huge organization. It is possible for Larry or Sundar to have a 30 year plan that involves Maps making money while every engineer working on Maps day to day (including Director and VP-level people) cares deeply about product quality and has the freedom to actually put a lot of resources towards that.
I agree about quantity over quality -- the product strategy boils down to "collect lots of data and build models with it". In the short term, each new feature has middling quality data with middling quality models. But over time they get better and better. It's just Maps keeps adding new features that are at that early, kind of crappy stage, and you forget how much the really polished ones used to suck.
