Everything, everywhere, all at once.
103 karma · joined August 3, 2022
And what are you basing that claim on? What are your sources? Your arguments?
From a European citizen point of view, this framing ignores a very real constraint: GDPR.
In the EU, sending marketing emails is not just a growth tactic, it is regulated personal data processing. In most cases, you need prior, explicit consent before sending promotional emails. “We found your email online” or “legitimate interest” is usually not enough for cold outreach aimed at sales.
The risks are not theoretical:
Administrative fines that can reach up to 20M EUR or 4 percent of global annual turnover.
Orders to stop processing, which can immediately kill an outbound pipeline.
Domain and IP blacklisting by European ISPs and email providers.
Blocking or delisting of websites and services in the EU market after regulator or court decisions.
Complaints to Data Protection Authorities by a single recipient are enough to trigger investigations.
So there is very much platform and regulatory risk, at least if you want access to the European market. Email is scalable, yes, but in Europe it scales legal exposure just as fast if consent, proof of consent, opt-out mechanisms, and transparency obligations are not handled correctly.
This is why many EU companies invest heavily in permission based lists, double opt-in, and strict compliance processes. Growth without compliance is not “no risk”, it is deferred risk.
Could you provide supporting evidence for your statement?
LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.
Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.
Moreover there are studies showing that if people socialize and get to know each other a bit before working together, there are more chances to collaborate and to reduce conflicts.
Is it a hobby for passing time? For pleasure? For the beauty of the code?
Could be. But most of the time, you develop in order for the software to perfom a task someone needs.
And that should be your first focus: to develop something that brings value for its user, and develop it as efficiently as possible. After all, what's the point of a software if nobody uses it? So no, your job is not to create great software, your job is to bring value to users.
In my career, I've mostly seen the developers pleasuring themselves with overengineering, bloating code with features nobody needs, and writing lines to anticipate future developments that never came. Rather than the opposite.
So I think the challenge is to remain minimalistic, that's hard, and that's what the original post is about.
Why would I run a docker container, a webserver, start a browser, navigate webpages... just to do some operations on a pdf locally?
A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk (https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) does the job perfectly.
I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.
So how do you extract profits then?
Basic functions are not there, while the app already seems to be bloated.
I'm wondering if any of the product manager there ever used their product.
For a society to function well, there should always be a balance between indivual interests and group interests.
They used to provide color rings to attach to the head, in order to differencing.
Globalism permits to all countries around the globe to develop.
Nobody is preventing these countries to set laws about environment and working condition (which they actually do).
And by the way, I invite you to go to these countries and visit the factories there, and you will realize that western companies are raising standards (security and quality) on their suppliers.
In other words, if they provide you with a PC on Windows 7 with Notepad as an editor, you shouldn't (and you probably don't have the admin rights anyway) to install anything else on company's property.
In reality, it's usually in the interest of the company to allow you to work with tools on which you are the most productive. But they don't have to.
In that context, the question touch screen vs physical buttons doesn't matter.
No need to require a constant background download.