275 karma · joined July 22, 2025
On top of all of this, there are the attempts at binary decompilation using LLMs and other new tools that have been discussed on this site recently.
If google has no obligation to provide the service tier, then they should stop providing it instead of providing it under false terms.
This is like if everyone in a city decided to take baths instead of showers, so the municpal water supply decided to ban baths instead of properly segmenting their service based on usage.
Service providers don't have the right to discriminate what their service is used for.
I have actually written up some ideas for a system based on something like this that I called "chaumian coupons", but I would have to go through my notes to find it.
With minipayments, you could still lose a dollar or something. It's like a vending machine. If I put in a dollar and don't get a cookie, I will be pissed. You can run a buisness of setting up fraudulent vending machines that scam customers on the first purchase and dont put out cookies.
I don't really care if I put a tenth of a cent in and don't get my crumb out. I just won't buy the rest of the cookie. The margin on selling me the whole cookie is greater than scamming me out of a fraction of a cent. So it's not feasible to scam.
So the distinction matters. It's a difference in kind because in one model there is enough risk to sustain a buisness model off of scamming, which requires all this extra infrastructure for fraud prevention.
The benefit of micropayments is you don't need all this overhead for for fraud. Anyone can set up a vending machine pretty much anywhere and sell to anyone else.
Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.
That way you dont have to hope and pray that the middleman doesn't decide to track you censor, and charge increasing fees, which current middlemen like patreon currently do.
Not unlike generic laptops that are made by OEMs in taiwan and resold by dell, and whatever small company.
"Solving" the problem of signing up clients and vendors at the same time is a different problem for the companies. They benefit from the vendor lock-in. The "solution" is to establish a monopoly
If you try to start your own paypal, no vendors will sign up because you have no clients. No clients will sign up because you have no vendors.
My university forced everyone to use duo mobile for years, with no other option for OTP. That's what this reminds me of. Sure, there is a sense in which the university can choose to use a different 2fa service, but there is nothing forcing them and the consequences are on the user side.
My only bad experience is duo mobile, but I expect it is equally bad on iOS
The LLMs are trained on the code of existing browsers. This is essentially a massive process of turning code you don't understand into code you don't understand.
The code details are pretty much all of the details, other than the protocols and standards.
If you understood the codebase of existing browsers (or at least could be confident in making arbitrary changes to existing browsers, perhaps with AI assistance?) then the triopoly wouldn't be threatening because you could just patch out manifestv3 whenever you want.
There is also the problem of people not testing their websites to be compatible with your custom browser. But I would say this is a problem on the protocol level.