angiolillo

> 33~ percent more

I haven't eaten MacD's in decades, but why does it matter as a percentage? How much you're willing to pay should be dependent on how much it costs you to acquire the items yourself. For example, if the store is a 10 minute round trip and you value your free time at at least $30/hr then paying $5 for delivery is rational, regardless of the item's initial cost. Better than rational even, when considering fuel and vehicle wear-and-tear.

(Of course if you have a kitchen, equipment, and time then buying bulk ingredients and making your own meals is sometimes more efficient, but thats an argument against buying prepared food in the first place, not against getting it delivered.)

> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.

What makes the comparison wild? The Amish are thoughtful and deliberate about what technologies they reject, adopt, and accept with constraints. Many of the people I know who have concerns about relying on LLMs are similarly thoughtful and deliberate.

> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.

That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.

> the amount of exercise needed to maintain basic physical capability is roughly the same for everyone (barring injuries or chronic issues)

Is this true?

This is only anecdotal but my experience has been that the amount of exercise people need to maintain basic physical capability seems to vary with age, gender, diet, genetics, and other factors.

Personally, I find that as I get older I have to be more diligent about exercise to maintain basic physical capability, and I have older relatives who spend time exercising just to maintain sufficient VO2 max to be able to do things like walking up stairs.

And it's not just age. I have friends who can take a break from rock climbing for half a year or more and when they come back they're climbing routes at roughly the same difficulty as before they left, whereas others take a couple weeks off and have to work their way back up from easier routes when they return.

> The same isn't true for socializing more than you require.

That seems very much like exercising, no? You need a certain level of exercise to maintain basic physical capability but past that point there are diminishing returns. So if you truly detest exercising (or socializing) then you can stop there and still lead a healthy, functional life.

I agree that everyone should make an effort to exercise and socialize (as well as other difficult but rewarding tasks). But it's undeniable that different people respond to these things differently. Some people feel energized after difficult exercise, others feel drained. Some people find socialization exhilarating, others find it exhausting.

Encouraging someone to push past their comfort zone is helpful. But it seems less helpful to imply that you know more about the bounds of their comfort zones than they do, or that their comfort zone must simply be a cultural construct because it doesn't match yours.

> finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy

It's worth pointing out that the original Document Foundation blog post (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/03/yes-no-a...) seems to be doing exactly this:

> The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.

Good questions!

First, leaking a device's content filtering settings is not the same as leaking a user's age bracket. For example, if the server identifies a web browser that isn't loading tags annotated with "sexual-content" that might indicate that the user is a child but could equally well indicate that they're a corporate office worker, religious, or anyone else who prefers not to see such content at the moment.

Second, if the standard defined multiple semantic tags or levels (e.g. violence, extreme violence, substance use, unknown, etc) then this gives more granular control to device administrators who may care more about some types of content than others.

Third, web browsers wouldn't even have to leak the content filtering settings. For example, perhaps an administrator could configure the web browser to render content overlaid with a semi-opaque blur, in which case the server would not know.

Fourth, and this is more philosophical, asking websites to provide more information to the device so that an admin can do their own filtering leaves the choices to them. Whereas if the only way a device admin can filter content is to submit the age of the device's user to a third party so the third party can decide how to pre-filter the content it sends back, that gives an uncomfortable amount of control to platforms and regulators.

> If you show this on the front page and it's 18+, it'll lock children out of the front page

I don't understand why you think this is true when I specifically described a label that is applied to "an individual section" of the page.

To be more explicit: Today, each post on the Reddit front page appears in its own container element. If an 18+ post's container element could have some kind of "adult-content" attribute set then some web browsers could render the whole front page normally with the exception of that individual element. Perhaps they could black it out, collapse it, display it with a pixelated overlay and a "Request Access" button, whatever the browser supports and the device administrator prefers.

> The solution is obvious: you show it on the front page if the user is 18+. However, your proposal deliberately forbids this and says the front page must be the same for everyone.

Why do you think that my proposal requires that the front page must be the same for everyone? Providing different views to different users is the entire point of every child safety law and rating scheme I've ever seen. I'm merely saying that my preferred approach would be to mandate that potentially objectionable content is semantically annotated in the HTML somehow, so that each user's browser can apply whatever view restrictions (if any) the device's owner wishes. I think this is better than mandating that web browsers send personal information to every web site they visit and also mandating that sites pre-filter the content they send back.

Why must an age rating apply to an entire website?

As one example, the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) (and to a lesser extent the prior Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi)) had a rating scheme that allowed sites to provide a default rating label that was then overridden for individual pages and resources using <meta> tags and RDF-based labels. For example, Tumblr could set a family-friendly default rating and append a different rating on specific user pages, images, or ads.

An even more granular scheme could be applied via HTML attributes which would allow an individual section, image, link, or text snippet to be marked e.g. as "sexual", "violent", "substance use", "spoiler", or even "unknown" for unreviewed user-provided content. Then leave it up to web browsers to choose whether and how to render elements with these attributes. (Hidden entirely? With censor bars? Pixelated?)

There would be substantial logistical and regulatory challenges to get websites to comply, but it doesn't seem substantially harder than the current age verification schemes.

Neat!

It might be useful to be able to configure the map viewing angle at the top and bottom of the frame, perhaps even the degree of curvature between them.

I say this because I wonder if a shallower gradient (slightly more top-down at the bottom and slightly more angled at the top) would be more understandable and familiar while providing almost as much information. Not as cool-looking, but potentially more useful as a real navigation aid.

> I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.

I can imagine raising issues with a specific datacenter in a specific water-constrained location, but I agree that being vocally concerned about the teaspoons of water consumed to produce an AI response while being unconcerned with the thousands of gallons used to produce a cheeseburger seems like innumerate virtue signaling.

Too bad they didn't just require manufacturers to publish a rolling resistance efficiency score for tires, like the EU does, rather than a mandate with so many unintended consequences and loopholes. (That would be especially effective at influencing consumer behavior if paired with higher carbon fees.)

Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt.

With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.

> IOW: I predict we'll see a resurgence of reputation systems, to some extent

I think you're right that reputation systems are the best solution to a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Consumers (and the agents under their control) will increasingly prioritize content and other products with reliable attestation that they come from a trustworthy publisher, organization, brand, or individual.

> have just accepted that business people have neither the ability nor desire to ever be honest about anything

Another plausible explanation is survivorship bias: if businesses that are publicly honest when things are going poorly are less likely to survive then eventually surviving businesses are more likely to be dishonest irrespective of the "abilities" or "desires" of individual business people.

That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.

Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.

It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.

Doesn't that depend on the form of government the state has?

(For example, state ownership under an absolute monarchy doesn't seem like a proxy for public ownership.)

The video goes into slightly more depth, and at about 1:30 into the video they acknowledge that the participants were not representative and that they would like to conduct further research.

> Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

For very narrow studies it is possible to get representative data with fewer than a dozen interviews, but in this case it is explicitly not representative. In the video they mention that most of the participants have used Thunderbird for over a decade and follow release notes, development, and various forums closely, which to me suggests that they were recruited opportunistically rather than a random statistical sampling.

They do mention that they have plans to engage a larger audience in the future but that can be incredibly expensive. Even large organizations typically have to augment a small number of representative interviews with a large number of surveys and a very large set of user telemetry to properly weight interview feedback.

To be honest it's also a little bit of rose-colored glasses. In the 2000s I probably spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars purchasing one-time commercial software licenses and I appreciate not having to save up for that any more.

As evidenced by Rent-a-Center, automobile leases, and rental properties there are plenty of non-software businesses that cater to customers who prefer a subscription to a larger one-time transaction.

> Why is software development any different?

I think it's a combination of price-sensitivity and desire for internet-connected features. For example, MS Office 2010 Home was $150 in 2010 (which is ~$230 today due to inflation) and it looks like you can buy subscription-less MS Office 2024 Home for $180. But despite the price coming down in real terms, many people opt for the Microsoft 365 subscription for ~$10/month.

At least in my case, when I lament the fact that everything is becoming a subscription I'm not judging independent developers who charge a subscription for their mobile or web apps. They need to stay abreast of an endless treadmill of bugs, security issues, and API changes and may have servers to maintain as well, and all of that costs money.

But I do pine for the days when I could buy all the software I needed in a box like any other product and use it for decades with no updates or UI changes whatsoever. It's not the fault of independent app developers that I don't live in that world anymore.

I once worked at a startup that did just that. Developed a system that was significantly better and cheaper than an existing legacy solution. One of the generals who saw the DARPA demonstration overrode the whole bureaucracy and brought it with him into theater.

Five years later the startup had been bought by a major military contractor, budgets ballooned, a number of the original people (including me) left, our software was on its way to becoming the legacy solution, and the cycle continued.

After seeing how US military contracting works up close, I no longer find it surprising that military tech costs orders of magnitude more than commercial or consumer tech. It's also not surprising why so few organizations are able to do both government and consumer/commercial technology -- optimizing for one makes you ill-suited to compete in the other.

> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions

Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.

> Every one-time price is a gamble

True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.

> What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited... Can the same not be found for many software products?

Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.

Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.

A majority of the parents I know are extremely concerned about the internet and social media and want tech companies to provide them with better parental controls. True, no one I know has lobbied for age verification specifically, but given how much politicians and tech companies want it, it's unsurprising that they're working hard redirect this parental concern towards their preferred solutions.

Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.

But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.

> It’s not for the kids. That’s just the excuse.

Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.

But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.

> Have apps and websites declare the objectionable content they have, and let the device decide if it will show it or not according to parental controls.

That would have been nice. The RSAC (Recreational Software Advisory Council) had a slightly more granular rating system that rated violence, sex, and language on a scale from 0 to 4 which unfortunately it lost out to the ESRB/IARC age-based classifications, and the internet appears to be going towards age-based classifications as well. Personally I like Common Sense Media's ratings which extend the standard violence, sex, and language flags by adding scales for "Products & Purchases" and "Drinking, Drugs, & Smoking".

From a semantic web standpoint it would have been useful if the web had codified these sorts of content flags so content producers could apply them to apps, websites, page sections, images, or even individual HTML tags. Then a device administrator could tell the operating system or browser to restrict certain content, either based on age-appropriate presets or based on custom levels for each type of content.