Larger enterprises have their own images and would never put a preinstall on a users' desktop.

Surprised that nobody has taken the effort to explain "how" this is happening.

The article talks about flaws in DEX design, opening the risk of front running. What's happening is that DEXs work on chain, therefore orders are submitted on chain and thus visible in the mempool while waiting for miners to include it in a block. Front runners view these pending orders and then submit a similar order (but with a higher gas fee), thus incentivizing miners to take their Ethereum transaction instead of the earlier order (for higher fees).

While the article in question is correct with regards to what I explained above, I hate how generalizing it is. Not all DEXs are designed the same way. The first generation of DEXs did everything on chain which also has the downside of limited throughput (limited by blockchain transactions per second). The next generation DEXs are working to solve this with off chain solutions which would also solve the front running problem.

It's hard to avoid. My project has a firebaseConfig.js.sample file committed as a reminder to the deployer, they need to create their own. And I put firebaseConfig.js into .gitignore in case a developer is careless.

Would you recommend reading Ball Lightning before the TBP Trilogy if I've never read any of this...because it's a prequel?

I don't think it's a prequel - he just wrote it before TBP. There is one character in common with The Dark Forest, but only to the extent that this character is regarded as a great physicist in both books and makes some discoveries.

I've read (and thoroughly enjoyed) them all, didn't even know Ball Lightning was a prequel (it was written after the trilogy). Perhaps some repeat characters?

I don't believe there are any spoilers either way.

I only know about it being sort-of a prequel because of the afterward material in the audible audio book. The books can be enjoyed in either reading order.

Do you value the medium or the content? I can't see why you think 'digital self-publishing' is a bad thing.

If anything, digital publishing where you can circumvent the publishers should allow for more content to reach market (not saying it's all good...see geocities webpages as an example of this) but I'm not sure why you think this would be bad for the Chinese SciFi scene.

The problem with digital self-publishing in China is a unique one. I don't want to expand too much on this subject because it is pretty complicated, but in short, digital self-publishing is not merely a publishing channel, it has reshaped the fiction genre in return.

The Chinese online fiction is now a rat race, every author is measured by the characters they are written PER day, which ranges like 3000 characters to 10k characters. To output that amount of text per day is not trivial task, it is not writing more like manufacturing. And works that doesn't meet such standard gets no chance to even reach the readership at all, per algorithm.

So, to answer your question, medium and content in this case are intervened. Medium is not neutral, it shapes the content by itself, and sadly in China's case, it opts to optimize for volumes not quality, and changes the readers' taste and expectation along the way.

Tradition publishing has one unique quality to itself that it offers advice and quality control through editorship. Not the case for self-publishing though, the market is flooded with more products with lower qualities, and it makes no easier for real good work to stand out since there is too much noise.

Sounds a lot like the market for many genres on Amazon.

I will say you’re not wrong about the value of editors in traditional publishing. As far as I know, there isn’t really much of an answer to that in the “new media” world - even if you want to pay someone directly for the work, editors open to such engagements seem hard to find.

I don't think he automated it. It looks like he outsourced it to cheaper labour in the Philipines

Please, do not be those people who squat all the seats in coffee houses.

I see there are browser plugins, enabling you to read Quora articles without logging in.

But are there any plugins that remove/filter all google search results from Quora?

Would it shock you to find out that Cobol developers make almost as much as Java developers? And I'm pretty sure they don't need to constantly learn a new version of the language every few years.

While true - you are generally tied to your companies implementation and business logic, with little chance of moving around. So once the system goes your skills can be obsolete