Here for all the curious folks I can chat with about the latest news! I love programming, manage software teams by day, and stay close to the tech by night because that's what I love.
This is true, but there are choices you can make in life to really minimize the impact. I've been using TiddlyWiki for more than 20 years and it always Just Works. I picked it precisely because I value endurance in the software I choose. I know that's not a fad right now, but folks just don't have to subject themselves to this standard of treatment.
That aside, my objection is the use of shady tactics to achieve that goal (constant nags and popups, massive price increases for reduced service, rejection of previously "lifetime" memberships, etc.), at the expense of the customer. Swaddling that in a blanket of "it's sustainable" makes me feel only a tiny bit better about it. To make an extreme comparison: fraud is also sustainable; I guess I'm saying sustainability is not an inherent good. If (hypothetically) every Evernote customer would be better off if they were using Joplin, keeping Evernote around would be a bug, not a feature. I don't think this is actually true, might it might be close.
People are framing this like they're creating sustainable businesses, but if you look into the details, what they're consistently doing is stagnating on any kind of feature development, making the apps and sites more difficult to use and have more nags, and they're increasing prices, sometimes by 10x or 100x. When I look for a company that I think I would admire, I'm looking for customers that are satisfied and recommend the product to their friends.
Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.
This article is like an advertisement. Here's how they spin it:
> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
Brave has integrated uBO directly into their core logic. Visit brave://settings/extensions/v2 and you can download it, even with no MV2 support. I'm not aware of any other browser adopting this approach.
The hype is a function of people trying things because no one knows quite where we're going to land. But this is two orders of magnitude more impactful then NFTs and crypto. There will always be grifters, but it's patently obvious AI is going to quietly (or maybe not-so-quietly) infiltrate everything.
No, I think the car companies will have telemetry from the sensor aggregated and sent back to them. The number of times it alerts, where the driver was, the nature of the alert, the speed of the vehicle at the time of the alert. There is a huge market from insurance companies to buy data like this so they can adjust premiums accordingly. I've worked at companies that wrote apps that had code in phones that would use the phone's accelerometer to assess driver ability and update risk models accordingly. I worked for a car company at one point, the the amount of financial pressure they were under (unit economics) was enormous, to the point where they were reevaluating the stitching in their seats to see if they could save money. They have access to the data, they need money, and there is a market to sell that data. When incentives line up that way, laws like the GDPR don't carry much weight.
I get the EU passed a law. A lot like Australia passed a law about banning under-16s from social media. Just like GDPR, enforcement is minimal. Passing laws divorced from reality does little.
It's like we live in different worlds. The entire arc of technology over the past 30 years has been to centralize, collect, and then monetize. There are tons of systems that shouldn't be doing that, but they all evolve to end up doing that. We need a new version of Zawinski's Law: every company will attempt to monetize until they're selling user data.
This gets repeated a lot, but is not my experience after having worked with both in-house and contracted lawyers to understand how functional cookies are handled. We end up wanting something more durable than session cookies to track user preferences so we can set them next time they visit. This is super standard light/dark mode, region, language type of stuff. But that's considered “tracking" in many of these discussions, which never made sense to me.
The result matters, which is why regulations should be considered carefully. The whole cookie fiasco is exactly that: they created a whole industry of shitty compliance and the rules are complex enough that every engineering team is like "just use the off-the-shelf shitty thing". And here we are.
I've done the A/B test. Costco saves my family 25% across just food, ignoring other stuff I get there (batteries, shirts, jackets, shoes, underwear, deodorant, etc.)
You're pointing out that you need to plan properly to bulk shop, since you're necessarily modeling future consumption over days/weeks across multiple people, but that's different than over-consumption. It means you have to be analytical and plan, but that's exactly how we do it.
I despise the city living lifestyle, where folks jam themselves in tiny grocery stores to buy 2oz containers of jam and mustard because they don't have enough room to actually fit the food they want. My sister and dad live this way in NYC, and it's annoying as hell every single time I visit them. Wanna throw a meal together? First step: leave the apartment.
Over-consumption? That doesn't follow. I sustain my family on Costco, going once a month or so, but have to feed four people, including two teenagers that consume way more than 2000 calories a day. You keep using the word "oversized", but that assumes the SUV, the fridge, the trolley are not suited for purpose. But they are!
I think what you're really critiquing is people who don't shop frequently, and therefore buy in bulk.
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