It is unfortunate, but there is also reason to be optimistic. It’s clear that they want to make use of existing items, especially under-utilized ones from previous releases. It’s something that they’ve repeatedly talked about over the past year. It’s even one of the design principles from Jeb’s internal handbook. Take copper: added in 1.17, used for brushes in 1.20, and used for copper bulbs, doors, grates, and trapdoors in 1.21. They even briefly played with copper horns in Bedrock. Or tuff: also added in 1.17 as a totally useless block, with variants fleshed out in 1.21 that makes it surprisingly useful for building. Not to mention the crafter and potions of infestation/oozing/weaving are entirely made from existing items, or the new paintings that don’t require any new items at all. Even completely new items are tried to have as many uses as possible from the start: wind charges have tons of different applications. I think Mojang has been paying attention to this trend for longer than most of us have, and we’re finally starting to see it shift how they approach update design.

Indie studios do in fact exist. I haven’t bought a game from a major publisher since… uhh… well, I guess I bought Portal for $1 last year, does Valve still count as a major publisher?

I thought, “1.4 billion pounds of cheese can’t be a real number, right?” Turns out, it kinda is. 1.4 billion pounds (actually generally 1.45-1.5 billion) is the amount of cheese the USDA stores in cold storage warehouses across the US. And indeed, much of that seems to be in caves in Missouri. But any particular cave probably only stores a few million pounds, although getting specific numbers is rather difficult.

On the other hand, spontaneous generation was very much still a thing at this point, so a lot of the basic rules of the world around us were really not worked out yet

Because it’s fake, it’s a joke about that GitHub troll a couple weeks ago

JPEG XL has gone through waxing and waning support from each of the major browsers, but Safari is the only one to support it by default.

SVN, and whatever that thing Microsoft was doing once

No, it might help to add a “the” before “perception”.

Is everyone running their own open source project?

Essentially, I suppose. I put most of my personal projects on GitHub because a) I believe in the open-source philosophy generally and b) sometimes they are helpful to others! For example, because I put SmilApple on GitHub, someone was able to adapt it to make this. And besides, it’s a great way to distribute programs that you want other people to use, like my current project Chokistream, or when I made a fan-translation of a game. None of these are “serious” projects like a new framework or something, and all of them have very limited audiences, but if I’m coding them, I might as well publish them where someone else might be able to benefit from them. I also don’t feel like they’re important for my career, but they’re important for their own sake and I would care if I lost them.

Make their birthday a magic number