Dropbox just announced that it’s laying off 11% of its workforce (315 people). Sad news for those affected.

I still don’t understand why the smallest amount of storage they offer is 2 TBs of space at $119.88 per year.

…I don’t know about this.

I mean, considering we’ll be wearing masks for a while still (right??? please wear your masks), I definitely appreciate any attempts at making them better. I like the idea of having your mouth be visible but illuminated tho? Also, I thought there was kind of an unspoken agreement that relying on people to replace filters on masks like these is not a good idea.

It sounds like it’s still very early in the concept phase, so I guess they have time to figure things out but… I’m not really expecting this to go anywhere.

From Emmanuel Felton of Buzzfeed News:

“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” said the officer, who has been with the department for more than a decade. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs … They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military,” the veteran said, referring to two suspected pipe bombs that were found outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

Twitter has banned Donald Trump’s account. It sounds like he joined Parler¹ earlier today.

Both Apple and Google are both either considering or have already removed Parler from their stores.

Edit: It will be interesting to see what happens with all the older articles that have linked directly to his tweets. From The Verge: Trump’s ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet

Clint Smith, from an article in The Atlantic:

The fact that this photo was taken the day after voters in Georgia chose the first Black person and the first Jewish person in the history of that state to serve in the Senate; that it shows a man walking past the portrait of a vice president who urged the country to sustain human bondage and another portrait of a senator who was nearly beaten to death for standing up to the slavocracy; that it portrays a man walking with a Confederate flag while a mob of insurrectionists pushed past police, broke windows, vandalized offices, stole property, and strolled through the halls of Congress for hours, forcing senators and representatives into hiding and stopping the certification of the electoral process—it is almost difficult to believe that so much of our history, and our current moment, was reflected in a single photograph.

For everything I know about this country’s history, it’s still hard to believe I watched a man break into the United States Capitol and walk around with a Confederate flag with the encouragement of the President.

Congratulations to Google workers (employees and contractors) and all the organizers who made this happen.

The MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) Web Docs is by far my most used resource during development. If you do a web search for any web development tech, the top few results will either be from W3Schools (🙄) or MDN.

Back in August, Mozilla made some questionable decisions about how to stay profitable, which included laying off all of the people responsible for maintaining MDN. Web developers in general were definitely very concerned about this.

Mozilla’s plan was to create a new platform for MDN that stores the documentation in GitHub instead of a database they maintain. Contributors can just update the repo to update the documentation on the new system. They just opened up that repo today with their Code of Conduct and information on how to contribute.

Overall, I think this is pretty convenient for maintainers and contributors, so I’m glad it’s moving along the way they planned. I really wish they picked a version control host that doesn’t continue to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but I’m still glad MDN will be around for a while.

Apple just announced their AirPods Max today.

It feels like this announcement is filled with even more marketing speak than normal. The headphones seem very well designed (of course) and have integration with other Apple tech (Siri, the H1 chip, etc) you won’t get on other headphones, but there’s nothing that’s actually revolutionary about these.

I would probably really like them, but I would never spend $549.00 for them.

I am very curious about Apple’s implementation of spatial audio though.

Update: It sounds like Apple rushed this out before the holiday. It’s missing the U1 chip and a few other things that were planned. From Mark Gurman on Twitter:

Looks like they made some changes on these to get them out the door as was deemed likely after several development set backs over the past many months — not seeing swappable bands, and Apple Watch Digital Crown instead of touch panels, and left and right sides aren’t reversible.

This is the original JavaScript announcement on this day 25 years ago.

Coinbase published this blog post yesterday. It has this summary at the top:

Tl;dr: The New York Times is planning to publish a negative story about Coinbase at some point in the next few days online, and it will appear in print on Sunday. Given that this story may be read by your friends, family and professional contacts, we wanted to give everyone a heads-up and provide some important context.

That doesn’t sound suspicious at all considering the drama they’ve been involved in recently. 🙄

Part of the voting line in my part of Astoria, NYC.

So now that Facebook is continuing to tighten their grip on Oculus VR headsets, here are all the circumstances where you might lose access to your Oculus account (and all your purchases).

1. You refuse to create a Facebook account.
2. If you have multiple VR headsets attached to one account.
3. If you decide to delete your Facebook account at any point.
4. If your Facebook account is suspended for any reason, including no reason at all.
   
   

From a Kotaku article published today:

Now combine this knowledge with the words spoken by Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook last week, when he said “I think people should continue to make sure their Facebook accounts are in good standing before they buy the headset. They can work through those problems before they do it.”

Are people really still interested in buying these things at this point?

Honestly at this point I don’t even try to understand Google’s messaging app strategy anymore.

From the article:

If you’re having trouble keeping track (understandable considering Google notoriously confusing messaging strategy) Chat is the company’s enterprise chat app originally introduced as part of Google’s business offerings. It has features similar to the original Hangouts experience, but has extra upgrades like reactions and reply suggestions. But starting next year, instead of only being available businesses that use Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps) the upgraded “Chat” app will be available to everyone who uses Gmail.