paultopia

This seems like a really good idea to me. Or at least cap overages at a specified amount, like 2x the free level (a $55 surprise bill is a totally different universe from a $100,000 surprise bill, obviously).

Honestly, this terrifies me---I run a bunch of different sites off netlify, and I would have never imagined that a site could jump from 0 to six figures of bills a month without something hitting a tripwire somewhere and cutting it off or at least communicating with the account owner. At least users should have the capacity to self-impose bandwidth caps to prevent this sort of thing.

“ Many companies, particularly tech ones, are deliberately trading trust for short-term profits.”

This is a general level dynamic. Leaders of all kinds of organizations, from companies to governments, need to build methods of self-control to force themselves to prefer their long-term interests (trusted brands, etc,) over their short term interests. That’s basically what corporate governance is. It’s also basically what constitutional law is, see the scholarship of folks like Jon Elster and Mancur Olson. (Source: my being a guy with a polisci phd.)

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this dynamic as a major driver of platform governance challenges across social media as well as transactional platforms like Amazon in chapter 4 of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge University Press, August 2023). You can read an open access edition under a CC license for free at https://networked-leviathan.com/

Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” framework is also a great way of explaining how these problems get worse as companies acquire market power.

But also, how have we not figured out how to stop caller ID spoofing yet? What the fuck?

yes, that would be awesome. Also, I want a bioluminescent cat[1]

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-th...

given the eugenic flavor of all this, sort of feels less kk.org and more kkk.org

LOL, it's gonna be like:

USER: "hey siri [equivalent], please renew my CD for another twelve month term."

PHONE: "Did you say "transfer the contents of your entire bank account to the yakuza?"

USER: "fuck! no! cancel!"

PHONE: "Transaction confirmed. Current bank balance: zero."

Is there any reason to think that this would work for political party donation spam? Do the telecom carriers that provide services for all those horrific text messages about how the other party is going to install a dictator unless you donate to them right now actually care enough to punish those?

Actually, it may already be too late. I just searched amazon for brother printers, and it looks like they've rolled out an ink subscription.[1] This is clearly the harbinger of doom---remember when HP did theirs and immediately made their printers worthless?

[1] https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-reordering/refr...

If only there were companies with similar philosophies toward basically every other consumer product. Imagine, just imagine:

- TVs not stuffed with spyware and "smart" features that stop working randomly!

- Appliances, ditto

- Cars, ditto

Although now I feel like I'd better go buy like 10 Brother printers, because it's only a matter of time till some private equity firm decides the company is leaving money on the table by not requiring you to subscribe to the CEO's OnlyFans to get ink and buys it out to squeeze out some revenue from the brand before poisoning it.

OH MY GOD YES THANK YOU

Pasting is particularly hellish because of what essentially amounts to a zero-width tap target. Then add in poorly designed third party apps changing the interface (looking at you microsoft) and it's a nightmare.

Interesting! I would have thought that the ego depletion idea would be the only plausible bit from the entire school of research that the author (aptly) criticizes. (Who among us has not forced themselves to go to the gym and thereby been unable to resist the pizza?)

The street name thing is maddening with Apple Maps as well. I can never figure out how to find, for example, the name of the street before my intended turn.

FWIW, I love you, Netlify CEO. I've got a bunch of different static-ish websites hosted with you---my personal site, the sites for three different books, etc., etc. Everything is build using the CI, with a different frameworks and/or build processes (essentially whatever I felt like playing with at the time), and it makes it incredibly easy and cheap. So don't listen to the haters.

OTOH threads is kinda slow as shit right now

The implementation detail with the infinite document size is surprising! I remember the HTML chatrooms from that era on other sites, and IIRC a lot of them worked via a meta tag that just told the browser to refresh the page every so often.

I still have friends whom I met in chatrooms from around 1996ish using that technique.

Frankly, it's a crappy landscape:

1. The main competitor everyone knows about, 1Password, has its own problems. (I gave up on it a couple years ago after learning that you can't quit the goddamn MacOS application when it's logged out. It literally requires you to be logged in to make use of a super-secret-strong quit that doesn't leave some daemon on the system. Which is incredibly irritating when you're trying to just run a software update but instead you have to type your super long and secure password manager password.)

2. Transitioning passwords is hard even once you find a good alternative. One should change passwords after a breach, but there are basically three options: (a) use the automated password changing within the old password manager. But if you don't trust your password manager after a breach, it's probably a bad idea to use the automated password changing feature of said password manager and end up with your new passwords in the insecure service. (b) import everything to a new password manager and change from there. But if you have a lot of passwords, there's a good chance the new password manager won't be able to automatically change them all, and then you'll either have to carve out a huge amount of time to do it all at once, or have a mixture of secure and insecure passwords in the new password manager, which seems very problematic. (c) gradual transition: move the mission critical passwords first and change them on the spot, then as you use a less important service, change the password for that and move it to the new service as you go. Which makes sense, but means you'll still be using the shitty old one for a while.

the blame the user responses reported in this story are just hopeless. Also, as far as I can tell, untrue: I cancelled my lastpass subscription after the last horrific breach and migrated to a new password manager while changing my critical passwords, but every once in a while I have to use lastpass to dig up an old unimportant password for something that didn't make the list for immediate changes... and I've never seen any kind of message about resetting MFA.

Or just getting rid of marketing/sales/promotion/update/announcement emails. I regret not having used disposable emails (and phone numbers) for essentially everything ever touching anything involving politics, for example, as that would have kept tens of thousands of bullshit solicitations away from me over the years.

How could we stop them?

Now do gyms

It is mindblowing that anyone still uses that garbage platform. Much respect to Musk for figuring out a productive use of his money (making other people miserable out of spite).

This brings back memories. 20 years ago, I was managing a band in New Orleans (by an amazing coincidence I'm in New Orleans for a 2 day trip now), and I decided to make them a website. It being 2003, I did the website in flash, and with my zero coding skills at the time ... it still came out pretty awesome. Wish that still existed.

Just FYI, at least on the mobile version of the website there doesn't seem to be any way outside of signing up to tell what it actually does.

Ugh, bad time to read that as I’m about to go to an office lunch where Italian sandwiches are being served.

TBH, I don't really think that the author of this post screwed up. There's a lot of self-flagellation, but, ultimately, Chase offered accounts. The company used the services written on the tin. It's far from obvious that one needs to show up in person to close bank accounts. (I've certainly closed bank accounts without showing up in person, or, hah, at least I think I have.) It's far from obvious that a bank wouldn't be able to handle large amounts of money without confusedly celebrating and then condemning the poor fool who types the information into the computer. And ultimately, it all got fixed, and the only serious hitch to fixing it was the fact that for some weird-ass reason the bank had some rule that it couldn't issue a cashiers check unless there was a wad of cash that size in a particular branch, which is completely nutso given that 99.999999% of bank money is just bits anyway.

I would sell my soul for proper emacs on my iPad Pro

Forgot step 6, layoffs.

You'd think that they'd have a non-domain-based way to do it, like cryptographically signing their own damn emails with a key embedded in outlook or something.

Works for me. If some hacker with a few hours and an LLM can force employers to eliminate pointless and irrational pain points that only exist out of habit from their processes then we ought to give that person a medal

This is what large language models should be used for. Stupid busywork documents that serve no real function beyond demonstrating knowledge of some unspoken norms (i.e., class) or being fed directly into someone else’s AI.