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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is because most East Asian languages actually don’t conjugate their verbs at all!

    In Chinese, for example, you always use the same exact verb, you just add extra sounds called “particles” to the sentence to contextualize what you’re saying.

    e.g. “I’m going to the store” in Chinese is 我(wǒ - ‘I’)去(qù - ‘go’)商店(shāng diàn - ‘store’). I go store.

    To say “I went to the store”, you don’t change “去/qù”. Instead you still just say “I go store”, but you add “了/le” to the end of the sentence. “Le” is a particle that means “to finish; to be completed”.

    So to say “I went to the store”, you literally say “I go store (past particle)”, and the listener knows that the statment “I go store” already happened and ended - past tense.

    This is why native English speakers often think of this type of grammatical mistake when they think of common English mistakes that East Asian language native speakers make.










  • I’ve worked in the industry for the last 11 years, and my experience is that the industry has changed dramatically.

    In 2012, there were still huge niches in smartphone software that has not yet been filled. There were also almost no barriers to entry - a team of <10 people rapidly expanding didn’t have to think about Cookie Banners or Google Play store delisting. Finally, there was the promise of a huge payout - the win condition for a startup was to BE the next Google.

    In 2023, dominant players have captured all aspects of the software experience and when a new idea becomes popular (Snapchat in 2016 is a good early example), big tech has the lawyers and developers to simply clone it with a higher budget (e.g. Insta & FB Stories, Youtube Shorts). Because of scale, big companies can more easily afford to deal with regulation and can even sometimes regulate their competitors (Play Store). Finally, big tech is guaranteed high payout for developers - these days, the win condition for a startup isn’t to BE the next Google, its to be acquired by Google.

    The eventual end of all this is Google continuing to strangle open & free Android by buying/shutting down any new ideas and extracting more and more rent from its platform.

    The only way to opt out is to move to non-Play AOSP alternatives.