I think there's a categorical difference between paying for long term maintenance voluntarily vs paying for something to exist. The latter works much better as the value prop is clear and you can scratch an itch. Kickstarter is similar.
People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.
You can actually look this information up! For example, Instagram makes approx $2-50 ad revenue per user per year, depending on the region. Apparently it’s highest in North America.
So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product. If they redesigned the app around what’s best for users vs advertisers, it actually seems like a great deal, considering many people spend multiple hours per day on apps like these.
Of course this would get pretty expensive for all the services we use. But I personally would happily throw $100-$250 per year at my most used apps to stop being advertised to.
I think we are missing another angle of getting the data. Information is also power. Power to influence people (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). So paying will not stop the data collection. Actually I doubt anything will, unless people really push the regulators to do their job.
I’m pretty confident that at least 95% of HN users use adblocking so clearly the users are not worth much to the ad companies. Today I have absolutely zero ads on my devices.
I've never paid Google for anything. I usually get a check from them. What does Google sell? Office clone, ads, map api credits, search api credits, ad free youtube, ai credits sometimes phones and speakers that get bricked?
Considering cancelling mine because they've introduced ads to it in the form of undismissable "purchase the product being discussed here" affiliate popups.
I don’t watch enough YouTube to warrant that. My elderly father on the other hand, who watches several hours of YouTube per day on his television, finally got YouTube premium and has found it to be life changing. The TV YouTube app regularly shows 2+ minutes of unskipable adds per video.
It's without a doubt one of the best value for money subscription available, except for electricity, water, a library subscription.
There's an endless amount of the highest quality videos available on YouTube. But you need to let the algorithm understand what you like by using the conveniently named "Like" and "Dislike" buttons.
Fantastic, the family plan is probably one of the best subscriptions I've ever purchased. If one reads the comments in this thread you'd be left to assume YouTube Premium would have had to be $100/month/person though and not something Google could ever have considered offering.
That was a great deal when it came bundled with YouTube music. When they bizarrely tried to merge the two products so that when I was interested in watching videos, all I got was music video recommendations, it lost its lustre.
Now I would rather just pay for a couple Patreons. I heard there's some new pay to use YouTube thing out there that creators are pushing, I can't remember the name but I hopped on it and didn't see any extra content beyond what's offered on YouTube so I don't see the point.
Oh and before I got grayjay so I could have ad free casting of videos, premium was nice for when watching on the tv.
>> So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product.
This is only true if everyone does it; Why would they stop advertising for a tiny market, especially if they can get both? Why decrease the value of the tracking on a smaller userbase? Sales conversion says you'd have to charge $50 or $500 a month and you'd have a much smaller base; does social media like this even work with a fraction of the people?
most-all of the algorithm-served content (not from my friends list) is ad content, even if it's not a meta-served ad.
all content (even those who make legitimate content, if they intend on making a living on content) is just ads packaged in fancy UGC. we've reached a point of no return for ads and user targeting
This is true. But they would at least design the app around maximizing user satisfaction with the service (to keep you paying), vs maximizing time spent on the app (i.e. through making it addictive) in order to increase ad revenue. The current incentives are perverse.
That's a nice idea, but then there are all of the times we've started paying for services to have an ad-free experience, only to then have them toss ads back into the mix.
So it seems to go in capitalism sadly. If we could maintain healthy competition and avoid collusion, maybe we would be allowed to vote with our wallets. But right now that seems like a distant fantasy.
You've missed the point of the comment that you've replied to. There's a well known adverse selection effect because the people who would pay for no ads are exactly the people who you most want to be able to serve ads to: people with lots of disposable income, and people who are power users who see the most ads.
As a result the actual amount that they would need to charge for an ad-free version is higher than the average revenue per user, possibly significantly so.
edit: you can look at YouTube premium for an example of this in practice. It's $16/mo for no ads. That's around 2-3x or more what their revenue per user is.
The amount of money you spend doesn’t affect your disposable income, just your savings (beyond calculating interest). Unless we have different definitions of income or disposable.
Why would you include the money required to pay shareholders, pay the humongous parts of the company doing ad tech, the lobbying money, the fine money, etc. What is the cost of running a social media site?
I have previously calculated that Mastodon costs including development are on the order of 1 EUR/person/year [1]. Even if you 10x it, it's nothing. Facebook does nothing more technically complicated than the forums of the 90s. It's just smarter design.
I am not. I am explicitly saying to offset revenue from ads. That's a different question. Best of luck getting Facebook-level distribution in your 1 EUR Mastodon.
There are no technical reasons preventing the Mastodon federated network from scaling to billions of users. An individual server might not be able to scale to even 10 million users, but that is by design. There should be thousands or better tens of thousands of servers each supporting a small number of users, with moderation handled at the server level.
Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.
In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.
Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%.
And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.
The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.
If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it.
The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.
Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil.
Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed).
Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc.
On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.
You're ignoring costs. If your microwave costs $100, then you're saying it's often ten cents to fix it. It is entirely possible that the bad component costs ten cents. But the cost of the repair is only ten cents if your time and travel is completely free. Let's say you have a well designed microwave that's easy to repair and a ten-cent component goes bad. How much do you think a repair shop in a wealthy country would have to charge for such a repair to keep the lights on? A 100% margin on that 10 cents won't even pay for the time the worker takes to say "hello" as you enter the shop. What's your optimistic estimate of how long it would take to replace such a component on a well designed unit? 10 minutes? Plus administrative overhead like collecting payment, probably storing the unit for a while until the customer picks it up, and dealing with "it was working fine until you touched it" idiots. And 10 minutes is extremely optimistic for something that's likely soldered (even highly repairable units are going to solder small stuff). How much does the repair person earn? Auto mechanics make maybe $25-30/hour in the US. Pad that significantly for their fully loaded cost to the business. If we assume it takes 20 minutes total, accounting for everything, you're looking at maybe $20 in actual costs for the business, not counting rent and equipment and such. You've already hit an appreciable portion of the cost of a new unit and that's with a lot of very generous assumptions.
Appliance repair might be a dying art but car repair is common. You can look there to see what simple tasks might actually cost. Something like installing new tires is probably comparable. It's not outrageously expensive but it's also not anything like ten cents.
This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are:
1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.
2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.
> repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product
It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.
this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"
If anything the causality is exactly the opposite. The labor cost will go up (empirically provable) in such "shithole countries" once work is outsourced to them, improving their livelihood.
Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.
Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?
What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?
Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.
Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.
You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.
When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.
Has any of this changed?
Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.
I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.
If you actually start writing big stuff in assembly, esp a macro-assembler, you'd quickly realize it is more verbose, but not fundamentally that different from higher level programming. You basically need to get a hang of how to build abstractions with procedures and macros and you'd be good to go. Reading assembly effectively is often much harder than writing it.
Yeah, that's what I realized during this, too. You need to be much more explicit, but the way any given function works isn't fundamentally different. "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly, or whatever other language. I think it can feel almost more straightforward than other languages, since you're laying out exactly what the CPU needs to do, in what exact order.
> "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly
Not all languages use NULL terminated strings. I think Rust actually stores the string length alongside a pointer to the start of the string data. You can do the same in C, but you'd have to do it manually using a struct. In assembly you could do the same thing since you get to decide basically everything.
Pascal stores the length of the string next to the string, but the other thing of note is with the advent of Unicode, strlen is strlen, but often not actually the number you need/want.
Arguably a POSIX assembly programmer would also naturally keep strings along with their size, either explicitly or known implicitly, more similar to Pascal, not null-terminated, as that's how syscalls expect it. Null-terminated would chiefly be a libc-ism.
I argue that strlen is actually still quite often the number you need+want, because possibly the main use case for it is determining how many bytes long a string is.
It is, it just isn't always any more. When printing the string to the screen, the multibyte sequences need to be accounted for, like an emoji that's 2 bytes but only renders as one character too the screen.
Agreed. And super cool project. After seeing Matt Godbolts Advent of Compiler Optimisations in December I decided to do AoC in assembly. Was the most fun I had in years even though I didn't finish all days!
And super educational. Since then I've been pondering which problems require dropping down to the assembly level. E.g. implementing a JIT compiler, a coroutine runtime, etc.
Law does not run on a CPU with certainty. There is risk analysis going on: there are many jurisdictions at play. When you are big enough, something that has fundamentally viral characteristics by design can have catastrophic impact even if reading of the license as linked would be almost certainly accepted as correct and likely. Therefore, especially for a company like Google that has a unified codebase, that treatment is justified. So goes for other big companies who would be at least wary of just taking AGPL.
Part of the reason those tactics are so effective, even today, is there are leftist elements in the west who are eager to eat it up to substantiate their own agendas and echo it as truth. You can see it live on Hacker News people constantly spewing FUD and propaganda that the Islamic regime likes and is obviously false to actual Iranian people who are vaccinated and won't believe it once they have passed grade school.
For all LLM flaws, if it kills the whole Agile/SCRUM/whatever grift, it will have been worth it. The damage these guys have done to software industry at large is unfathomable.
Hot take, but the bureaucracy of Scrum, the Figmafication of design and the disdain of PMs for iterative deliveries generates more work and waste than AIs are able to save.
And even then they can change their mind.
Does not hurt to backstop with an explicit license.
reply