The play that finally sunk my old job (headed by a serial entrepeneur) was literally selling a $49 product with a $80-per-transaction commission.
We were supposed to make it all up on being able to hard-sell the user on addons and multi-pack buys.
3,064 karma · joined June 18, 2018
We were supposed to make it all up on being able to hard-sell the user on addons and multi-pack buys.
They've convinced every company in the country, including in previously security or compliance-centric environments (finance, medical, government), to hand them hyper-sensitive data.
We've already seen the leakage scenario, with the academics who found the labs scooping them on the research they were using the LLMs to assist. What's to say they-- or someone who infiltrated their infrastructure-- won't do the same thing with your propriatery business details?
I'm not sure open LLMs are a great play for commodity vendors. A lot of "lowest bidder commodity services" work because they can wildly oversell. That VPS hosting a small-biz website or 1000-messages-a-week internal email can run on a Raspberry Pi 1B, so you can pretty easily sublet a $1000 server to 50 customers at $10 per month each. Current LLM hardware plays tend to need more expensive gear and seem to be running at higher utilization rates, so the price that actually fits the underlying business might not look as appealing.
If you can cap individual wealth to eight or maybe nine figures, you take options like "bankroll major state/national elections on a whim" and "buy up major media and communications brands" off the table. As far as I'm concerned, these are things we can do without and probably have a healthier society as a result.
California's attempt might be well-intentioned, but it seems so weaksauce that it won't reach to the behaviour-modifying level.
The "why bother investing" mentality that's used to argue against Georgist land-taxes might be interesting applied to a high wealth tax too. If your stock portfolio is already approaching the cutoff line, will you press as aggressively for that last short-term bubble with long-term expenses?
Since cheap modern MCUs have programmable ADCs, you can wiggle an output pin and experiment with different sounds. I've tried something a bit more "tinkle" like than a flat "beep" and it has its charms, but it could go a whole new place like different tones for special keys (simulating the clunk of a shift or space bar) or even keys that you could subtly differentiate by sound to tell if you're off alignment.
We've had a long trend of software vendors infantilizing and limiting their users, normally in the service of some goal of making the product nonintimidating to nontechnical customers (mobile-first design with hidden or nonexistent poweruser functions), or to simplify their own job (Electron instead of native)
But on any system people use frequently, users eventually want to refine and streamline their workflows, to maximize productivity and limit frustration.
I suspect the slopamatron will be the 2026 answer. 20 years ago, you might have non-developers scraping together just enough VBA, TCL/Tk, AppleScript, or even macro-recorder tools to file off their rough edges. Today, those users will ask the bot for help to wrestle back control, particular when a lot of the old hardpoints for automation don't exist in newer designs.
Most of these tools never end up on an App Store-- at best they'd be shared internally within a single organization, or a user-group if those still exist, but they're delivering way more value than the a random App Store game with 7 downloads and a bunch of legally distinct knockoff assets.
Maybe if vendors see that large numbers of their customers are enlisting AI to work around bad design decisions, they'll reconsider those decisions, or at least surface first-class automation tooling, which could be consumed by chatbots and human programmers.
You built the killbots that prevent anyone from ever reallocating your wealth and holed up in your compound. But will your daughter and granddaughter be able to keep them operational and aligned to their interests?
A car battery that lasted 300km new but now only 200km is still entirely adequate for a commuter with a 25km typical commute, and occasional 75km days out.
Had CXMT hit a normal functioning market, they would be a much harder sell-- existing vendors could spread FUD about performance and quality to hold them back for a few years. But now you have an audience that is desperate to the verge of soldering up banks of 74LS74 flip-flops to make their own RAM.
It's not even like they're offering a reasonable "there's a domestic product but it's marginally more expensive" alternative. And it's all their fault. I sort of wonder if someone was actually saying "we'd better keep some supply around just to avoid burning our bridges with Dell/HP/Apple/etc." when the deals went down.
The US might try to go protectionist/China-baiting to keep CXMT products off their market, but I expect they'll sell just fine everywhere else.
You can get back different match levels (matched the house number only, the zip code only, or both) which provide some insight into potentially sketchy transactions. Some payment gateways allow you to auto-decline based on the results, or the merchant can choose to follow up depending on their scale and risk tolerance.
Plenty of petrol stations ask for the zip code on the unattended keypad when making a purchase for the same reason.
Charities are anything but interchangeable. You might not want to sponsor one on ideological grounds, or concerns about how effectively they use the money, or just because you were seeking to support a specific cause. If you deposited money in a box that said "we're buying medicine for sick people in Somaliland" and they sent it to the RSPCA instead, wouldn't you be pissed?
There's a galaxy of potential AI markets that are local-only for compliance/privacy/deployment environment reasons, and an equally large and overlapping set of use cases where you won't be able to bolt a rack of thousand-watt GPUs on the side of the device.
What if the next "DeepSeek shock" is something we can run for non-toy use cases on our box of old Android phones? The GPU data centres could be expensive albatrosses very quickly.
There's probably a case that right now, the bigger-is-better paradigm protects incumbents-- a smaller model will always have a FOMO factor unless it can be proven competitive, so that leaves the playing field to those who can afford to train and deploy a new Fable or Sol every few months.
For the "smart TV" the argument to the consumer is either 1) to access OTT services if you don't have a device for it already or 2) that the data harvest subsidizes the product.
Neither of these arguments make sense for a straight monitor.
People generally don't buy monitors if they don't have a PC, game console, or some other video source to plug them into. So "it runs Netflix or Zoom standalone" isn't gonna move the needle.
The subsidy argument is also pretty hard to make. It works for TVs because you can advertise "60 inches with malware for the same price as 32 inches without". But monitors have fairly low upper limits on desired size when you're using them at a desk. Many would find a 60" screen overwhelming, but 27" is reasonable. You can buy a new 27" 1080p IPS monitor for $95 today. Can ads and data theft subsidize it down to $80? Maybe. But again, will that make much of a difference for consumers?
This is also only from a consumer perspective. I can imagine IT department having a fit about these products. At the best, it's support tickets when someone accidentally engages with an unexpected feature or plugs their Ethernet cord into the monitor. At worst, it's a fun new source of compliance obligations and patch processes.
The worst-case angle I can see is eventually media entities will see it as a way to close one more loophole. Someone will launch a service that can't be streamed on the host PC, only on blessed smart devices themselves, to eliminate the risk someone plugged the DisplayPort cable into some sort of DRM-stripping device. But that would alienate a hell of a lot of potential customers.
Some people respond to moral arguments directly.
But even if you're all about extractive imperialism, you can make a case for "starting fires in your own backyard is going to be costly for you, especially in the long term."
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
The new bet is on surveiliance and security tech, the more autonomous the better. The owner class no longer needs to provide bread and circuses when they can constantly monitor for any sign of dissent and deploy enforcers without empathy or morals.
Property rights might not end up as sacrosanct as they hope. There's a series of slow-motion emergencies unfolding, and emergencies are often a place where all rights-- not just property rights-- get curtailed. If they keep up the "Let them eat cake" act, it's going to make them an easy target for a gritty reboot of 1917.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
You might have different proportions due to different weight distribution or use cases (maybe the legs are made less flexible if the workspace has fewer obstables, for example.
Maybe "bipedal" is a better descriptor, since wheels are a proven way to go faster than Usain Bolt, but walking-style strides are new.
X11 made the right choice in putting graphics drivers in the "stable infrastructure" stuff and display toolkits and window managers in the "specialize and compete" section.
I'm sort of pleased about that we're finally trying to replicate this division with the River ecosystem, building a standard compositor that we can plug in different actual window management logic into it, but that makes River itself a huge single point of failure-- if it has a bum release or fails to keep up with trends and extensions, it takes down a lot of the ecosystem, but perhaps not enough to be a five-alarm fire the way Xorg or XF86 back in the day would have been.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Conversely, there are a lot more variations within other MCU lineups. Just looking at the WCH CH32v30x datasheet-- a single relatively low-popularity range from a single vendor, the datasheet shows 9 basic models with five different physical form factors, and there are theoretically different SKUs for different temperature ranges, etc.
I'm a fan of that phrasing because it used to have real punch if you delivered it with the right timing.
"It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Death Wish" comes to mind.
The verbosity makes me think of two things in particular:
- The classic essay written by someone who has 125 words worth of actual content but a 1500 word minimum. Those three paragraphs could be bullet points and convey the meaning just as well. The screen-filling chart of every test case you ran that came back green manages to be less actionable than a direct "one test out of 54 failed." I fully expect to see Claude tell us that "Support Ticket 8257 is a Land Of Contrasts" at some point.
- The sitcom trope of the person caught in a lie who figures if they can keep adding more and more detail he'll be believed and can escape the awkward conversation. Stop. Just stop. You're proposing a fix on a CODEBASE THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT EVEN USE. Cue laugh track, cut to commercial.
They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. You've got a huge ready market in hobbyist/educational products as well as the commercial products that have used it as a convenient choice.
There's that whole non-profit/educational heritage around them that likely selects for a different set of defaults and features than, say, a MCU designed specifically to be the controller for a SATA SSD or a $19 Roku clone.
They also have a small product range, as compared to the broad product matrix a lot of the more "commercial brand" MCUs come in. I know even the CH32v30x chips come in several variations multiplied by several package options (which vary enough to impact the features you can realistically use on them).
Part of the value of a migration would be the opportunity to to unwind some of the details that are contradictory, mis- or non-documented, or wrong-but-unfixable.
https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch37x-bios is the actual code.
Post 394 shows a picture of the card I used, which at the time was sold in like 500 AliExpress storefronts for about USD25. The magic word is "CH375" or "CH376" (two chips, overlapping functionality, different enough to be annoying to support in software)
As mentioned in the thread, it tends to fit a weird niche.
For 8086/8088 machines, the other main option is XT-IDE cards, which are like $40+ and they're sort of finicky with some drives.
For a 286+, usually installing a standard IDE drive (or a more modern CF->IDE or SD->IDE adapter) is the easy mode with wide software support.
Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.
You could argue that a RTX5090 needs less power than a 1996 3Dfx Voodoo 1 to render GLQuake at 320x200/60fps, but it's rarely being used for that.