If you're a blackhat and you want to be annoying, you can use Stripe tokens to charge your target's customers. The target is the payee, so you won't make any money, but it'll add to the chaos.
Having well sanded features doesn’t necessarily remove bugs directly drive conversion, but it gives the entire product an established professional “feel.
Even though your customers feel it, they won’t explicitly articulate it
Is there actually a competition where the UI could decide the winner?
I mean, it is probably very rare to have two products that have the same features, and the only difference is how nicely done they are. For example, MediaWiki is in my opinion 100x better than Confluence, but Confluence has some extra features that I don't care about but managers do (stuff like easily attaching PowerPoint presentations to web pages), so the managers decide that the company uses Confluence. And I keep silently screaming in frustration every time I lose a part of text during editing, or the links break when a typo in a page name is fixed (because there is no option to add a redirect), etc.
The extra feature often wins, when the salesman describes the product to the manager who makes the buying decision. That's why we have the "checkbox features" that most end users don't care about, but it allows the product to seem better in comparison. Feature creep is how stuff gets sold.
The situation of two featurewise identical products competing only on better UI would probably be highly unstable, even if it happened somehow. There are network effects, so if one product starts winning, most people will switch to that product because "that's what everyone else is using". The other product will be left without money to pay for development, and will go out of business. Afterwards, the winning product does not have to care about their UI anymore.
I hate the fact that corporate IT collectively decided to block every port except 80 and 443, making it necessary to base new protocols on HTTP instead of TCP/IP.
Doesn't HTTP require binary data to be converted to base64 encoding, thereby increasing its size on the wire?
That seems suboptimal for a lot of use cases
That's not quite it. Golden handcuffs refer to financially significant unvested shares or options (e.g. RSUs) that you will forfeit if you leave the company. Some companies include quarterly RSUs as a significant percentage of total comp. They have a vesting schedule of four years, so that at any given time, employees have almost four years of unvested RSUs. (After four years, some RSUs fully vest and more RSUs are added.) No one wants to leave that much money on the table.
I love Svelte and agree with you about performance, but its built-in CSS management has some showstopper bugs that are more likely to become apparent the bigger your app gets. If you use :global to target elements in child components (which is inevitable), you’ll run into specificity issues caused by Svelte not removing CSS after components stop rendering. Apparently it’s “by design”, i.e. it’s too hard for the Svelte maintainers to figure out and/or cleaning up would hurt them in benchmarks.
I guess it’s OK if you use something else for CSS such as Tailwind.
Linux and macOS is a great combo. I recently bought a full-spec UM790 Pro (Ryzen 9 with 64GB RAM), installed Ubuntu and colocated it with my router. I run vscode on my low-spec Mac Mini (M1 with 8GB RAM) with all the grunt work handled by the Ubuntu server thanks to the Remote-SSH extension. I saved several thousands of dollars by not buying a Mac with a decent amount of RAM, get the great macOS user experience, and develop on the platform (Linux) that I’m deploying to.
