The author mentions a site they are paying for that still exhibits this behaviour:
> Here’s one from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I pay $20/month to subscribe, asking me to sign up for SMS text messages about the Jersey shore, while I’m logged into their cursed website, before they’ll let me see the article I came to read.
I would consider $20/mo "paying [...] to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover".
I can provide a real-world example: Low-latency code completion.
The JetBrains suite includes a few LLM models on the order of a hundred megabytes. These models are able to provide "obvious" line completion, like filling in variable names, as well as some basic predictions, like realising that the `if let` statement I'm typing out is going to look something like `if let Some(response) = client_i_just_created.foobar().await`.
If that was running in The Cloud, it would have latency issues, rate limits, and it wouldn't work offline. Sure, there's a pretty big gap between these local IDE LLMs and what OpenAI is offering here, but if my single-line autocomplete could be a little smarter, I sure wouldn't complain.
> a product that mostly doesn't do anything except for occasionally break the internet
I wouldn't say that. The postmortem you referred to links to another CloudFlare blog post - one about a pretty serious RCE vuln in Microsoft SharePoint that was blocked by their WAF: https://blog.cloudflare.com/stopping-cve-2019-0604/
> Here’s one from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I pay $20/month to subscribe, asking me to sign up for SMS text messages about the Jersey shore, while I’m logged into their cursed website, before they’ll let me see the article I came to read.
I would consider $20/mo "paying [...] to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover".