It’s probably the same way monks copying books felt when the printing press came along. “Look at this mechanical, low-quality copy. It lacks all finesse and flourish of the pen!”
I agree with you that it is sad. And what is especially sad is that the result will probably be lower quality overall, but much cheaper. It’s the inevitable result of automation.
Thank you for taking the time to do a thorough read, I just skimmed it, and the prose is certainly not for me. To me it lacks focus, but as you say, this may be the style the readers enjoy.
And it also, as you say, really reuses words. Just reading I notice "phosphorescence" 4 times for example in this chapter, or "ooze" 17 times (!).
It is very impressive though that it can create a somewhat cohesive storyline, and certainly an improvement over previous models.
Is it not more likely the # of deaths are related to obesity for example, where US has 5-7 times as many obese as Japan for example. Which matches the % deaths statistic you have there quite well.
In other words: it's not easy. There are many factors at play.
While I’m not a consumer of this product, I met some of the product designers at the medieval week in Visby, Sweden today. And that the company supports a project like this, which is clearly a passion project, displays joy. After this I think teenage engineering is a great place to work. Not just a SV product factory.
The web distribution certainly makes it much more viable to offer apps outside the App Store, and have reasonable conversion rates. Now PornHub or similar could easily offer their app from the website.
With this available (which is a much simpler system), all of the App Marketplace-convoluted setups seems redundant.
Looker might look attractive, but it is missing so many basic features it is not competitive. You can't even query a view in BigQuery, you can't use window functions in data sources. All error messages are entirely opaque. Access management is very limited etc.
Likely because they anticipate increased competition to the App Store now, and want to pre-empt the attractiveness for developers of moving to the Epic Store or the Facebook Store etc.
Well first version it will be different WebKit wrappers, as they are the only option available on iOS right now.
But they simultaneously open the door to other browser engines, so I imagine Firefox at least will release their app with a new browser engine down the line.
I agree with you that it is sad. And what is especially sad is that the result will probably be lower quality overall, but much cheaper. It’s the inevitable result of automation.