I think you said that people who do things like build a cluster of PS3s because they’re a lot of compute for the money are shitty, and that they’re abusing the fact that Sony priced them low in the hope that people who bought them would also buy games. I disagree with that position.

If you meant something else, perhaps we don’t disagree.

Buying things at their retail price and using them in a way the manufacturer didn’t intend is not shitty, nor abuse.

Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.

This was meant to be the same kind of distinction. Ordinary abuse leaves a “removed” placeholder and spam vanishes.

There was supposed to be a distinction, but it doesn’t look like Reddit is handling it very well anymore.

A ban or “permanent suspension” (an odd name) is for ordinary bad behavior. You’re meant to know you are banned, why you are banned, and how to appeal if you think you didn’t break the rules.

A shadowban is for spam or repeated ban evasion where an intentionally abusive account operator expects to get banned and will waste resources and make fewer successful posts if they can’t tell they’re banned.

Improved reliability is, ironically a major cause of this problem.

Buyers of brand new cars in the USA keep them for fewer than ten years on average. If most cars can go ten years without needing major repairs, the car manufacturer’s actual customer is not strongly motivated to consider repairability in buying decisions. The second or third owner likely cares a lot, but their preferences don’t matter very much to manufacturers.

You’re absolutely right!

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Good metrics are hard, but token leaderboards are obviously terrible metrics that will lead to bad business outcomes unless propped up by investor hype. Of course investor hype is a real factor, and it’s often driven by guesses about what other investors will do rather than real business outcomes.

It seems obvious to me that there’s a huge gap between a search result, which is a link and an excerpt where the operator of the linked site is clearly responsible for the content, and an AI overview, which mixes information from multiple sources with generated nonsense.

Google should absolutely be liable if it generates overviews containing defamatory lies.

They weren’t going to let people have it that cheap for very long. The plan was to offer it on subscription plans for a couple weeks, then move to usage-based billing, which is much more expensive for a usage pattern that comes anywhere near the subscription limits.

Keeping a single instance of Fable busy for a full day would probably cost a thousand dollars at standard API rates, and some agentic coding workflows run many agents in parallel. Companies have just recently started to figure out that rewarding employees for how many tokens they use may be a waste of money, but Anthropic is hoping to cash in before they all do.

If it’s true that young software developers are mostly not productive, then employing them hasn’t made sense for decades because staying at the same company for most of one’s career stopped being the default some time around 1980.

I kinda think that if MS tried Palladium today, they could succeed.

Windows does have most of the features of Palladium today, but it’s impact is modest because native desktop applications for consumers don’t have the importance they once did. The main place people encounter it is game anticheat.

A combination of secure boot, DRM, and remote attestation Microsoft proposed adding to Windows in the early 2000s. It was such an obvious corporate power grab that it got critical coverage from the New York Times.

Things like Google SafetyNet have been equally obvious corporate power grabs, but barely got negative coverage from the tech press, much less the mainstream media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base

That’s all kinds of fucked. Anybody who saw Microsoft Palladium and thought it was a good idea shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a computer.

The battery law is “so broad and so restrictive that it prevents the sale of this wonderful, jointly developed, U.S.-European product from being sold in the European Union…”

No. Meta chose to design e-waste.

I’m curious as to how people were actually using Google Glass in 2013. The only place I saw one then was at a programming meetup. I’m quite sure people weren’t regularly running the camera continuously because that drains the battery in a hurry and overheats it even faster.

Source: I bought a new old stock Glass XE-C this year. They’re $50 on Ebay. I’m working on a navigation app for it because I want heads-up cycling directions.

How to motivate right to repair advocacy in other regions in one easy step…

Given that new cars are very expensive, and you don’t want new-car features, you might be better off putting significant money into maintaining your old car.

People usually only do that with collectable cars they expect to increase in value or enthusiast cars they drive for fun, but you can spend quite a bit on maintenance before it’s as expensive as new-car depreciation.

If someone was going to reward me for burning a lot of tokens, I’d feed LLM output into the LLM input until they ran out of rewards.

I am surprised. I’ve run both KDE and Gnome on a Surface Go 2 (8100Y), which is either slower or barely faster depending on which CPU you have, and I’ve had no UI lag.

My solution in the same situation is to use Gnome. I strongly prefer KDE on a desktop/laptop, but Gnome is an outstanding tablet UI and KDE isn’t… except that Gnome’s onscreen keyboard is crap.

That means if Google’s verification system gets widely adopted, browsing the web could become a headache.

Using a phone to scan a QR code in order to access a website on my desktop is a headache even if it has no dependencies in particular.