Depends on the personal situation. An extension with 2 million users can generate a very meaningful revenue. My extension has only 300k users, but offers that I received over years [0] would have been significant in some lower-income country.
For over 10 years that I maintain a reasonably popular cross-browser extension, I've been collecting various monetization offers. They simply don't stop coming: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670
Synthetic data. Like AlphaZero playing randomized games against itself, a future coding LLM would come up with new projects, or feature requests for existing projects, or common maintenance tasks for itself to execute. Its value function might include ease of maintainability, and it could run e2e project simulations to make sure it actually works.
Not necessarily. Roblox does not directly receive money from users - nobody sends them a paper check or bank wire from Russia. Technically they get money from payment providers, who are supposedly compliant with all sanctions. I'm pretty sure that any provider that can support Roblox scale is big enough to worry about risks of being non-compliant.
That depends on what you mean by "operating". This very website, Hacker News, is not blocked in Russia - does that mean Y Combinator is "operating" there?
> We pass through the pricing of the underlying providers; there is no markup on inference pricing (however we do charge a fee when purchasing credits).
[0] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670