6/20/2023 0 Comments Google reader recommended itemsI suppose it's also possible that at some point we entered into bespoke repurchase agreements involving ships. I presume this wound up in our financial models because whether a ship is capesize affects its value, which affects the value of corporate bonds (or other corporate debt instruments) partially backed by ships as collateral. Digging a bit deeper, I discovered this particular field was being used as a Boolean, and a quick web search ruined the magic of what capesize really meant. In our language, Booleans are represented as IEEE-754 double-precision floating point numbers (0.0 is False, everything else is true, with the constant True being 1.0), so for a bit I was imagining gigantic container ships dressing up as superheroes and putting on capes, and going to parties out in the middle of the ocean. One thing I learned from poking around financial models (I was/am a maintainer for a domain-specific financial modeling language used by a Fortune 500 financial services company) is that some ships are capesize, meaning they're too big for either the Panama or Suez canal and must transit Cape Horn and/or Cape Agulhas. > (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs is just another proprietary walled garden now. It seems like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down too. Wave was announced and designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk system to ones entirely proprietary. Google+ was much more a walled garden with proprietary everything. You could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a bunch of other readers supported. You could import an RSS feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and Atom), which were open web standards. Google got a lot of early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about 90s Microsoft. I also see it as the marker for the turning point from "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google likes proprietary walled gardens now".
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