My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month.
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
That's fair but your experience at the job is also part of the compensation.
If my employer said, "Hey, you're going to keep making software, but also once a day, we have to slap you in the face." I might choose to keep the job, but they'd probably have to pay me more. They're making the work experience worse and that lowers my total compensation package.
Shepherding an army of artificial minions might be cheaper for the corporation, but it sounds like an absolutely miserable work experience so if they were offering me that job, they'd have to pay me more to take.
I remember one time going into a Books-A-Million and being flabbergasted when I asked someone at the Information desk to look and see if they had anything by T.S. Elliot in stock, and she said, "What does the T. stand for?"
The counterpoint is that by locking people into carrier relationships allows T-Mobile and AT&T to offer loans on consumer electronics at much more consumer-friendly rates than others in the same business, e.g. Rent-A-Center. As I note downthread, `The total cost to buy a PS5 Slim is $500, the total cost to get a PS5 Slim through my nearest Rent-A-Center is $1,349.50.` You could introduce this pricing for iPhones for poor people too! This might even incentivize more people to use low-end Android hardware! But let's not act like this is 100% a good thing for everybody.
> The counterpoint is that by locking people into carrier relationships allows T-Mobile and AT&T to offer loans on consumer electronics at much more consumer-friendly rates than others in the same business
How does it do that? Its a lock to force people to stick with a provider, and pay through the nose in other ways. Phone plan rates in the US are terrible, restricting peoples ability to change provider through artificial means doesn't provide better rates.
Because it greatly lowers the risk that AT&T will need to write off the debt for your phone and sell it to a collections agency for pennies on the dollar.
It’s the same difference as a home mortgage vs unsecured credit card debt: When the threat exists that the lender can repossess your home if you don’t pay… they don’t have to worry as much about you not paying your mortgage, so they can offer a much lower rate.
You buy a phone for $1k, but you do it through your carrier, along with a $50/month plan. Because you’re on this plan, the carrier offers $600 off the phone price, paid in account credit over 24 months ($25/month), so your total monthly bill becomes $67/month for 2 years, then $50/month at the end of 2 years.
If, 3 months in, you find yourself unhappy with your carrier, you can still pay the remainder of your phone cost ($875) to own your phone outright and walk away. In that time, you’ve saved $75 off the full price of the phone.
Arguing that US carrier prices are exorbitant is not relevant to whether carrier locks and phone discount credits are worthwhile or cost effective.
I'm not sure what that has to do with locking your phone.
If you have a line of credit for the cost of a phone, then you have a line of credit for the cost of a phone. If you have a contract for service, them you have a contract for service.
If you try and terminate either then they will reclaim based upon your contract with them.
And the lock is collateral against a small, high-demand object that can easily be fenced. The phone lock is essentially the same as a hold against a car title until it’s paid off.
This would only be a real problem if there were no options to buy phones direct/outright without the lock. Instead, we’re likely to end up in some situation where carriers work with phone manufacturers to implement a sort of higher-level device lock feature that stipulates the device “belongs” to the carrier and can be functionally locked (a la the stolen device lock features that currently exist) if they ever go unpaid.
In the pre-paid market niche, you have people who really struggle to put together the money for an iPhone 12 all in one go, and T-Mobile has essentially worked to create a razors/blade model with some obfuscation. It's possible that disaggregating phone plans from installment pricing would benefit consumers in the long run, but let's not act like everybody would be prepared to transition to that world immediately. (I don't think T-Mobile is exactly concerned for their customers, but this subsidy regime exists for a reason.)
That actually makes some sense and (I assume) you can let the service lapse and keep the phone if you don't have the money right now?
It seems in both cases T-Mobile is making a bet that you'll continue to use their service in one form or another. Is there a reason if it was unlocked you would immediately switch?
Yeah, you can let the service lapse and resume it, you just can't take the phone elsewhere. T-Mobile is taking on some risk there, to be sure.
As far as why you would immediately switch -- T-Mobile is not losing money on these phone subsidies in the aggregate (they are in some cases, to be sure). They're pricing the subsidies into their carrier rates. If this went through, they'd likely have to cut the subsidies and engage in pure competition on pre-paid mobile rates. I know some HN readers read that last line and go, "good," but the fact of the matter is that people who are buying subsidized phones on pre-paid plans are generally poor credit risks generally and phones lose a huge amount of their value the second you open the shrink-wrap so they're not very worthwhile as security for a secured loan, so by unbundling these two, T-Mobile starts to compete with everybody else on rates for service and somebody else steps in to handle the leases on phones, and if you look at that market segment, the answer in the US as to who is most prepared to take over that business, the answer is _Rent-A-Center_. The total cost to buy a PS5 Slim is $500, the total cost to get a PS5 Slim through my nearest Rent-A-Center is $1,349.50. Again, I am sure that T-Mobile is not advocating for this out of charity, but I'm not as convinced as some around here that this form of unbundling would be an unmitigated good thing.
EDIT: And to your point of, well wouldn't pre-paid operators all switch to a contract model, I don't think "you can't get phone service without a contract" is what people who are advocating for this reform want, and the primary customer for a pre-paid plan is someone who is too large a credit risk to get a 12-month contract through someone else. I said primary customer, if you want to tell me you're a great credit risk but you're on prepaid as an ideological stance, just pretend I already know that about you.
I buy prepaid specifically so that I can own my own unlocked phone and be able to do what I want with it without thinking about the carrier. Price isn't the issue, ownership is.
There's hundreds of us! I pay $15/month (+tax) for my service which has more than enough for my use most of the time. I don't get all the cross-promotional stuff, and I don't get a phone subsidy, but I think the lowest advertised price for all that stuff us $40/month. Saving $300/year gives me plenty of phone allowance, and I can buy my own tacos or whatever.
I don't have to pay for 'activation' when I move the sim from my phone into a new phone either, even though I hear about that happening still.
I don't have to try to get all my family lines on the same carrier either, so if the three of us are in a car stuck on the side of the road, we have a better chance of one of our phones working to get assistance.
A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
What this ends up being in practice is "give away everything that I am better at than AWS for free, and charge for the things that AWS is better at than me." It shouldn't be surprising that AWS comes in and eats your lunch on this arrangement.
I actually don't disagree, but for certain software tools, the world would be a better place with their usage maximized. This matters because it improves the standard for everyone. The goal here is first to maximize tool usage, and then to worry about putting a dollar in my wallet. I understand, however, if investors can require a more business-friendly license than LGPL.
kitty is a product of a single open-source project, Sixel is a product of DEC with multiple independent implementations. DEC is out of business and there's very little risk of anyone coming out with a new version of VT333/VT340 reference manual, so Windows Terminal/conhost can have its own implementation of Sixel and ensure interoperability with other implementations as it sees fit, as opposed to committing to either chase compatibility with the Kitty project or committing to shipping someone else's code in perpetuity.
Kitty's standard is described for other people to implement both emulators and clients for. Since this relationship already exists, there's enough friction between emulators implementing new features, and clients actually using them (in a backwards-incompatible way), that I believe one can be relatively sure their emulator will support clients well into the future.
Either way, I agree that kitty's protocol should become a versioned standard, but I also don't think that people will be very quick to change it at this point.
You're right, it would be better if there was fair competition and we could let the market decide things. But that's not the status quo. The status quo is one party (China) has extremely protectionist policies and encourages IP theft from other countries. Because of this, companies in other countries are at a disadvantage competing in the Chinese market and against Chinese companies. So then you have to decide: is letting Chinese companies win the competition via unfair practices better or worse than engaging in tit-for-tat and levelling the playing field a bit?
Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product. If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.
> Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.
In times of good economies, open borders, and peace, it might. But it also incurs significant risk if there are disruptions.
> If domestic companies require patronage from the state in order to remain in business, they should not exist, no matter the conditions in some other jurisdiction.
DJI and similar Chinese tech companies are benefiting from very significant protectionism, themselves. Should they not exist?
"Patronage from state" is a sensationalist way of putting us trying to avoid being overly dependent on a hostile dictatorship. Yes, the consumer will pay more but in this case it's worth it. It's like paying more for something because of insurance costs.
`Protectionism hurts the ultimate consumer of the product.`
So do lots of other things, and you need to balance competing sources of harm against each other. Allowing foreign companies benefitting from protectionist policies drive domestic industries out of business leaves consumers vulnerable to several other harms. You can't just do everything in a vacuum without considering the context because it's the "right thing to do" and expect the best outcomes.
Why are you framing this in such a way that treats one party as having agency and the other party as being immovable? The US is not banning TikTok, they are posing stipulations towards its use and you believe the CCP when they say they won't comply with those stipulations. But why is that a ban, versus "the CCP refuses to let TikTok comply with US law?"
Do you consider Google banned in China? The CCP had stipulations for Google's continued business in China. It was unable/unwilling to follow them, so Google left (voluntarily, infact).
I've never seen anyone argue that Google isn't technically banned in China. It's clearly a ban when China does it.
Yes. Is this even a contentious point? Despite the fact EU hasn't bothered to null-route an application that doesn't comply, they will impose onerous fines.
And what do companies do that don't want to comply to GDPR? They ban EU users. You can use the search bar here to find countless people talking about being banned. There's no ambiguity - there's only ambiguity when it comes to TikTok.
If I purchase a car with low gas mileage, and then the EPA requires cars to have minimum gas milage, that "bans" my car. Even though technically, I could figure out some way to rebuild it to comply.
Are we reading the same articles? The Forbes story is just suggesting that there's a possible interpretation of their statements as lying and your link is saying that China wants TikTok to remain owned by a Chinese firm -- and of course they do, for the same reason the US would resist huge chunks of our own hugely profitable companies being sold off. There's no actual evidence of anything.
Like I'm ready to get out the pitchforks but this is just weird FUD.
> Forbes story is just suggesting that maybe they lied
Yes, lying under oath is called perjury.
> your link is saying that China wants TikTok to remain owned by a Chinese firm
Say a foreign country were considering banning Lockheed Martin. And the U.S. ambassador picked up the phone--not to fellow diplomats, but individual legislators--to argue against it. Do you not see how the fact that this rose to the level of state-level mediation concedes there are non-economic factors at play?
> US would resist huge chunks of our own hugely profitable companies being sold off
It's been happening in Russia for the past two years. The cases where it rises to diplomatic incident are not strongly correlated with value as much as strategic worth.
> Do you not see how the fact that this rose to the level of state-level mediation concedes there are non-economic factors at play?
Ambassadors and diplomatic missions routinely intervene (including contacting legislators) to protect the perceived economic interests of their country’s large corporations and strategic industries.
I’m absolutely certain that if an important market for an important firm (eg: Lockheed) were to threaten to stop buying, top State Department staff would absolutely “pick up the phone” to legislators at a bare minimum.
> rose to the level of state-level mediation concedes there are non-economic factors at play
You mean the exact thing that happened with Facebook during the transatlantic data sharing agreement dispute because of the CLOUD act? Do you assume it's because the US is secretly manipulating EU citizens with pro-America propaganda? Even worse it was because Facebook said it was technically impossible for them to not store some data on EU citizens in the US.
> It's been happening in Russia for the past two years
Yes, because of the US imposed sanctions on Russia. It's not at all the same thing when we chose to force our own businesses to pull out or sell. Do we not remember the time when Github (along with every other company) couldn't do business in Iran?
> Do you assume it's because the US is secretly manipulating EU citizens with pro-America propaganda?
No, but there absolutely were IC concerns, as well as trade-integration ones between allies. Non-economic, politically-relevant factors. In that case, not necessarily all adversarial.
> because of the US imposed sanctions on Russia
We sanctioned certain Russian entities. Russia responded by seizing American and European assets. There were no U.S. sanctions on e.g. Danish beer made in Russia [1].
Who hasn't lied to Congress at this point? Facebook did it, Amazon did it, the oil industry did it, Betsy DeVos did it, the director of the CIA did it, EPA Chief Scott Pruitt did it, Big Tobacco did it. How many of them faced any real consequences?
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
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