remus

> They are built to know who you are: your name, your date of birth, your document number, your face. This is not age verification at all. It is forced identity tracking.

This doesn't have to be the case. https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ seems a sensible system where you can have a single identity provider (hopefully someone you trust) who can then verify things like "is this person over 18?" without givin away any excessive information to a third party. Hopefully it gains some traction.

It is typically hard to directly attribute churn though, whereas some massive EC2 instance costing you $30/day is a clear line item where cost savings can be measured easily.

> I find this incredibly amusing, and at a different point in my life I'd already be gone.

How so? Bad actors buying existing extensions with large user bases then publishing a new version which does bad stuff is a pretty common pattern. It certainy seems like a reasonable concern for a corp IT department.

Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.

> I think regulation would be useful here.

Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!

It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.

> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.

And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies

> Tell me which company in your opinion would be in the LOUD headlines, Apple or the random 3rd party?

The world I want to live in is not the one where apple claims responsibility for every byte of my data which passes through their products.

I think web browsers are a nice comparison here. Chrome added some nice security features (e.g. safe browsing) which are broadly a good thing for reducing harm from websites, but at the same time if you go to a dodgy website and they harvest all your personal details no one blames chrome for that.

No doubt AIs are an interesting use case because of the sheer volume of personal data involved, but if I want to trust some other AI app like gemini or chatGPT with my data then why should I be restricted from doing that?

I totally agree cookie banners are awful, but you could equally lay the blame at the foot of website owners who are so keen to track your movements across the web that they'll layer this awful UX on their users. No tracking cookies => no cookie banners.

The whole point is to try and avoid ending up in situations like this, where apple were able to extort 30% of app store revenue because they dictate how people are allowed to use their devices.

I am not very sympathetic to apple here, but I think the legislation in question is more to do with competition than data privacy.

Surely that depends on the reason for the ban? Say it is banned in the EU because of concerns about secondary environmental impact, a different country with a different ecology could reasonably decide to keep using it.

> Starlink has a hard limit on how much it can grow. If you are within the reach of wired Internet, you aren't going to pay more for starlink.

I think you may be underestimating a little here. Even in places with reasonable wired availability, the convenience of being able to slap a dish on top of your house and get pretty good internet ~anywhere for ~not too much is pretty valuable.

> Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat.

Completely. As if "We dominate the space launch and satellite internet markets" isn't enough, they're trying to tack on all this hypothetical stuff to inflate the valuation. Maybe some of it will come true in 50-100 years, but I'd bet a lot of it won't (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...) because telling the future is hard.

It'll be a real shame if the core, cool engineering that's happening at spaceX gets compromised by all the shenanigans going on elsewhere.

Not at >100x revenue, presumably.

> What even is the point of blocking scapers if Google consumes your content anyway and serves it as an AI answer?

Google bot is generally fairly well behaved, but this is not the case for all scrapers and it can cause significant traffic (and expense).

> Just because API pricing would've been $2180.16 doesn't mean that's the value of those tokens.

You seem to be suggesting the price of tokens is entirely disconnected to the cost of providing the service? I don't see much basis for that assumption.

That's a real shame. I am involved with some history-related projects and the number of websites which go offline is huge, and the wayback machine is incredibly helpful for unearthing these dead sites.

It is not hard to imagine a future in 50 years time where a huge percentage of this content is lost forever, or at best incredibly hard to find.

I think this is overly reductive. For sure the models are behemoths and consume a lot of resources, but the harness can have a big impact on how much the model is used. For example, having a strong set of tools available in the harness means the model can work much more efficiently.

I think it is hard to generalise like this. There's a lot of people in the world and we each only know a very small slice of them. I happen to know several people who love AI, I don't feel like have a good grasp of the where the overall sentiment is.

Both

I feel like I must be using a different gogole workspace. I've used it every day for the last 10 years and just don't seem to have these issues? Stuff just seems to work for the most part? It's all way more stable and low-admin than any other desktop software I've used at least!

> splitting the status page like they do, to the point where it is only a bit of humourous exaggeration to say that they track broken `git push` and `git pull` separately, is a sleight of hand / accounting / SLA-fudging that we should not excuse

This is a pretty ungenerous take. You could look at it the other way: if I don't use actions then it's useful for me to know that only actions are broken, and I can continue in my normal usage. If you bundle everything up then the status page is reporting an unhelpful false positive for me.

For all the negatives about github I agree. They offer a lot of free stuff, and LLMs seem likely to put massively increase their costs with no guarantee they'll be making money off it. I can't think of many (any?) large businesses which could scale up to meet so much new demand without some significant growing pains along the way.

Unless everything else stays the same (underlying traffic etc.) then you can't really compare. Could be that you hit some fundamental scaling limit with the old design and it completely falls over after a certain scale.

I think this is overly harsh. After the guy has been working on the project for such a long period a handover would inevitably be a long process, not least to ensure whoever took over didn't abuse the existing user-base. Completely fair if the existing maintainer doesn't want to take on this work, and arguably a fork forces consumers to properly consider that someone else is in charge now.

I don't think the parent mentioned military secrets in particular? But the insider trading is already well documented e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge0grppe3po

The dark pattern is how it was presented. It wasn't "your total is X, split it in 12 monthly payments" it was a yearly contract disguised as a monthly contract.

I think this is a pretty interesting comment because it gets to the heart of differing views on what quality means.

For you, non-buggy software is important. You could also reasonably take a more business centered approach, where having some number of paying customers is an indicator of quality (you've built something people are willing to pay for!) Personally I lean towards the second camp, the bugs are annoying but there is a good sprinkling of magic in the product which overall makes it something I really enjoy using.

All that is to say, I don't think there is a straightforward definition of quality that everyone is going to agree on.

> But if you take the point of view of a customer, it might not matter as much 'which' part is broken. To use a bad analogy, if my car is in the shop 10% of the time, it's not much comfort if each individual component is only broken 0.1% of the time.

Not to go too out of my way to defend GH's uptime because it's obviously pretty patchy, but I think this is a bad analogy. Most customers won't have a hard reliability on every user-facing gh feature. Or to put it another way there's only going to be a tiny fraction of users who actually experienced something like the 90% uptime reported by the site. Most people are in practice are probably experienceing something like 97-98%.