> However, some LinkedIn commenters seem to see very little wrong with Fireflies' dubious early business practices.
Seems to be a good example of today’s zeitgeist.
Many of the comments on this very post, seem to take the same position.
I’m not horrified about what they did. This kind of shysterism is pretty common, these days.
What does disturb me, though, is an “end justifies the means” acceptance of these practices.
In law (and law enforcement), they have a “fruit of the poisoned tree” doctrine, where starting something wrong, immediately nullifies everything after that, even if it solves the case.
Coming from a perspective of wanting a lot more ethics and integrity in technology, I think we might be well-served to consider something like this. I’m deeply disturbed by the blatant moral decay in tech. I keep flashing on Dr. Malcolm, taking about “could,” and “should.”
The REXX scripting language originated on the IBM mainframe and is ported to Amiga, OS/2, Linux/Unix and Windows platforms. This is a 2025 survey of who seems to be using it.
If you’re near Pittsburgh the Large Scale Systems Museum is definitely worth a visit. Working PDP11, VAXes, SGI, IBM midrange and mainframe systems can be booted up and used.
The second floor has smaller micros and Macs; not sure if there’s a working NeXT machine or not.
Tree shaking in this context is not unlike a compiler: it looks at all the code and determines if it will ever run in the image, eliminating any unnecessary code and delivering the minimal image needed. The code is in a “tree” format like an AST, and you’re shaking the tree to test what can be removed.
That's why China, India, and Vietnam have continued to purchase Russian oil, even if resorting to barter agreements such as Vietnam's procurement of the SU-35 [0] and India's agreement for a JV to domestically manufacture the SJ-100 [1] (which also helps their French partner Safran recoup costs, as Safran is part of India's domestic jet engine program and was a partner in the SJ-100 project before sanctions began).
And it's not like Asian countries are purchasing less from other sources either - they're just using the Russian barter to force MFN deals and discounts from other suppliers.
Uh. So we should jack up prices to reduce consumption elsewhere. That will reduce oil consumption and every other consumption at the same time, it's an environmental win-win.
Canadian health care sucks but in a different way; so that’s not the solution either. You can look up the wait times for different procedures on the provincial websites.
Things you can get in 72 hours anywhere near a decently sized American city such as an MRI scan can take months in Canada.
Every developed country would say their medical system sucks in some way. We (Americans) happen to both pay more for a system that sucks more than those. The results are in our poor life expectancies, and we basically pay twice (privately and once again via taxes) for it.
Yeah, that same MRI scan can, and often takes an infinite amount of time here. I never said Canada's system was perfect, but it might as well be compared to what we have going on here.
I had them via a previous employer and had serious surgery; they asked me to go through the “get a second opinion” process which was getting all the records to their system and then a virtual/video call, but after that, they paid for everything.
