It's a great product that you can just ignore and not buy and the subscription model is told to you up-front, so there are no surprises.

I think it's a great use of 2025 technology.

No, I think he should just not have built this product. However, this is my personal feeling and it seems there is some kind of market for it, so what do I know.

It's the same reason open source reduces head count (something I predicted in the early 2000s and did see this come true years later).

I keep finding that it's surprisingly possible to fix the various bugs I encounter, once I decide to actually dig in. Even in languages I'm not an expert in. Available source + build system is worth so much.

Often the biggest hurdle is the mental one, to actually try.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen that done over the past 25 years, excluding myself. I can also count on one hand the number of times I've seen people build their deployed artifacts from source. These are actually related issues: if you've never built what you've deployed then you're going to be reluctant to make changes, build, and deploy. In theory open source can be much better than what it is, but in practice it's not much different than binary "blob + support contracts", and that's a shame.

Just looking at what they've been doing and Nintendo's history in court, the mod will lose and owe money for a long time.

It works well when you have lots of capital to expand and fight lawsuits.

- Uber is an end-run around existing taxi monopolies (imo a good thing), plus I believe taking advantage of people’s inability to think longer term about depreciation on their vehicle when calculating earnings.

- crypto is an end-run around securities regulations. It’s not a payment system it’s an investment scam that would be illegal if used with other financial instruments

- a vast swath of big tech is profitable on the back of not providing customer service or recourse of any kind and just automating business without regard for edge cases (not necessarily regulation but formerly a requirement for a business to participate in society)

Identifying industries where people begrudgingly accept the status quo because they need the service but hate everything about how it's provided is your opportunity.

"A principle for taking advantage of thresholds has to include a test to ensure the game is worth playing. Here's one that does: if you come across something that's mediocre yet still popular, it could be a good idea to replace it. For example, if a company makes a product that people dislike yet still buy, then presumably they'd buy a better alternative if you made one."

Was this the case though?

Airbnb and hotels.com and the likes have been pushing the hotels towards a race to the bottom but actual hotels are not bad in my experience. Small quasi-hotels with ordinary flats that run like a estate get rich quick scheme are though.

Hotels/Booking.com are more of a fuck you to travel agents and/or opaque or fragmented hotel pricing, since they don't provide an alternative to the hotel itself.

If an airbnb and a hotel choose to race to the bottom, perhaps they deserve each other and the rest of us deserve a way to avoid them? (Or use them if it came to that...)

I think Airbnb and hotels.com do not push people to the bottom - they offer a minimal bar or set of features to look for quality / price ratio. Are they perfect? No. But they make discovery much easier.

Other than mandatory fees not displayed in the advertised daily rate, I have never heard of people hating hotels.

Airbnb listings also have mandatory fees not displayed in their advertised daily rate.

My understanding is that Airbnb took off because it was cheaper than hotels (however in general, that may not be the case anymore).

I think *people hate costs more than they hate services* (which is how airlines like Spirit and Ryanair have managed to do business).

It was always possible for individuals to offer rooms. And they did. And it was hard to find them.

Many in the US don't have the stomach to achieve what is required (which what's happening in China right now):

1. Slave labor 2. No labor unions 3. Working many more hours for less pay (many employees sleep where they work) 4. Not caring about intellectual property, including your own work that might get sucked up into AI models 5. No workplace regulations

This doesn't even include the fact that China has a massive surveillance network keeping everything in order.

We have 1/100 of this in the US and people already act like they are persecuted prisoners.

> Not caring about intellectual property, including your own work that might get sucked up into AI models

But this is particularly funny. Which American AI company has respected anyones IP when it comes to AI? Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave seeing OpenAI.

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-83...

yes companies like Samsung and Apple are listed. No, it's not the predominant industry sector.

I don't want to descend into whataboutery, but it's entirely legal to use prisoners for slave labour in the US, and is routinely discussed in US legal reddit and the like: It's normalised in the states which depend on this kind of labour to get some things like road construction/maintenance done. Historically it was field work as well. I am unsure if this continues.

You would not at this point say the VC funded AI push in the west had very much concern for IPR. This is why IPR holders are in court. And yes, courts do exist in China, even if you stand very little chance of a just outcome as a foreigner.

You're not wrong about the surveillance.

While it is used in some US industries, it's not nearly as pervasive as it is in China. I also think it's a much different situation in the US. In the US, it might be someone in prison for life getting a lower wage to pick up garbage on the road (as opposed to being locked in a cage all day).

In China, it's the way of life for many people in many provinces. The article you linked to is a good example of this.

I wasn't just talking about slave labor, though. It's regular labor with no regulations and long hours, which leads to children working and other horrific conditions.

It's pretty easy to get ahead, when you don't have to follow the same rules as the countries you are competing against. The irony also isn't lost on me that Republicans have wanted to get rid of regulations for years and many in the tech industry support China without hesitation.

"even if you stand very little chance of a just outcome as a foreigner."

This was my point.

I remember him doing some interviews in the 90s, and he would put his coat over the camera, if it wasn't using FOSS. This sort of zealot mindset will always be on the fringes of society and eventually abandoned for something more liberal (which is what we've seen in the last decade or so).

The rest usually become abandonware because maintainers don't have the time or energy to continue with it for years at a time, especially if they can't make money from it.

Literally nobody (sane) in the security community would ever say that. On the contrary, they'll tell you that running your own email server for any reason is a whole can of worms that nobody wants to mess with, and if you give them twenty minutes of your time to listen intently, they'll list you a whole laundry-list of reasons why.

It seems like lots of high level officials are being irresponsible in handling condfidential information.

Either the rules are counter-intuitive, or difficult to follow, or officials are highly incentivized not to follow them.

But for some reason, lots of them aren't.

It makes public accountability very difficult.

Note that this is actually quite different from the Mar-a-Lago case where Trump was asked to return documents, he said he did, then said he didn't have them, then asked people "what if we just said we didn't have them", then he was asked to return them again, and he said he didn't know anything about it.

How exactly are you supposed to respond to the republican weaponization of the investigatory process for partisan political gain?

In the grand scheme of things, it really actually was not a "big deal".