nness

I'm starting to think the EU is loud but rather toothless when it comes to merges relating primarily to digital services and products.

They've certainly blocked their share of telecommunication, retail, and airline industry merges — but after allowing the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, I wonder if its all bark and no bite.

It's a fallacy to believe that all projects are just sold to the lowest bidder.

There are probably a dozen reasons why something like this might have occurred, and not giving the vendors a free pass, but assuming that a more expensive vendor would do a better job with security and reviews is just as likely to be a mistaken belief.

If a project is too expensive for a client to do well, they should not be doing that work in the first place.

I wonder of spammers are just mass-creating Gmail accounts, getting hit with their own spam and flagging it as "non-spam" to confuse the filters...

(If you are in a position to build spamming infrastructure, you are certainly capable of setting automating email accounts for the purpose of unflagging spam.)

I think we're starting to see the death-throes of Uber.

Largely, no. Community building is a slow and cumbersome process and Reddit already has critical mass of users and topics covered. You could clone it, offer more features/better support, but if the clone reached a similar scale it would simply encounter the same problems Reddit has.

Turns out community-building is really not a lucrative business, and beyond in-app/service purchases by some dedicated users, you are ultimately reliant on advertising as the largest and sole contributor to your customer lifetime value calculations.

It is very easy for an independent group to create adjacent apps on your service (i.e. Apollo) as they are separate from the economic realities of your business. i.e. Reddit needs to increase ad revenue, and may not priority the same features that Apollo does. Apollo delivered its service at someone's own personal expense (both time and money.) How can a company compete with something being done for free when they have to pay staff and other capital?

But this is the cycle of communities and, like Digg before it, and forums before that, there might be something new and engaging to sway a majority of users to leave. We're already seeing Reddit be aged-out with Discord... So if anything, people might just move there.

Really, its not a technology problem -- its a business problem.

Remarkably its cheaper in Australia ($3,368 post-tax, $3,060 pre-tax USD) — which is a shock as price-gouging by tech companies in the Australian market has always been a huge problem.

I would assume its a number of regulatory and supply-chain factors — but also — they'll charge what they think they can get in the market, and the more a product is considered a luxury purchase, the more they'll up-the-price.

For instance, I purchased a MBP in 2018 in the UK and it was considerably cheaper than the same product purchased in AU. I just had the keyboard customised to use the AU keyboard (wasn't a huge expense) instead of the default UK/EU keyboard layout.

Tough ask, but if you are in Poland, could you exchange to Euro and purchase the product in a neighbouring country?

UK professional services industry — lay-offs over the last year were light compared to what I think is coming in the next 6 months. Agencies were first to rapidly downsize just after COVID, and I suspect the larger professional service firms are a few months away from the same treatment.

I've always worked in the services industry, and starting to see the same patterns before the agency lay-offs begin in the most established firms.

I think any organisation whose either dependant on public sector — or conversely, trying to scale with an operating loss, is in for a shock by year's end.

Making Slack more expensive to an organisation is not a sensible tactic. (Had the disfortune of being part of a Slack evaluation on two occasions where it was later decided to switch to Teams, as cost was the biggest factor.)

I wish the reasoning here was a bit more established, as it sounds like there is a particular interpretation of the law as it exists in Japan which could have been eye-opening with more context.

From my own reading, it looks like Japan already had specific provisions which allowed "data mining" to occur without copyright violation, and that this interpretation just extends machine-learning to be a data-mining activity.

If so, that's an interesting moral argument as I wholly believe that "data mining" (and for that matter, scraping) should be an allowable activity to avoid copyright becoming an overly cumbersome or destructive tool, but at the same time, dislike AI being used to imitate a particular artist's works.

010editor's templating language looks very interesting (and something I had been trying to accomplish with my own mixed-bag of tools when reverse-engineering). I suppose as a hobbyist, the price is a hard one to get over...

"Mass psychology" is an odd way to interpret "people are having fun." I think the opposite is true — its easy to sell people on the importance of powerful hardware when the success and exclusivity of your games is a not a guarantee.

I think Nintendo is unique in that, when selling a console, your customers at least know they'll get a few good exclusive games out of it.

(But like most, I wish they did more with their IPs)

So, I know nothing of Illinois or State Attorney Kim Foxx, but I do have a litmus test where I search the author/person in focus and note the top results who are sharing the story — New York Post, Daily Mail, Fox News, etc.

Does such things invalidate the points made in the article? No. But it helps me judge the level of scrutiny I need to apply.

You've clearly used a throwaway just to be contrarian, but have you considered not posting at all if it adds no value to the discussion?

I think the larger challenge is competing with the broad business value that Shopify provides — Its not just payment processing, but also email marketing, theme and API services, a app marketplace, shipping integrations, etc.

Wix/Squarespace, at least last time I checked, treated e-commerce as an add-on to their core service (building websites.) Square is a payment processor which with an e-commerce add-on, but is heavily templated.

Shopify also bumped their prices 33% earlier in the year.

As a small-business Shopify merchant, I would appreciate more competition in the market.

They're likely speaking of their liability should a employee's laptop, containing sensitive information, ever be stolen or re-sold (or simply, left in the hands of an ex-employee with a grudge.)

It would be difficult for a IT department to guarantee, for sure without replacing the internals of the device, that the device doesn't contain sensitive information. Probably easier from an inventory and IT security perspective to just capture every device than try and coordinate with individuals to reformat, etc.

(for the same reason, some companies outright destroy old devices instead of reselling.)

Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI — https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23700629/dropbox-laying-o...

Independent film-maker Kirby Ferguson has a series called "This is not a Conspiracy Theory" which goes into great detail the human biological need to find patterns and connections where they do not exist. Its a great watch, and I think remastered around the time of the Q movement. An insightful series.

As long as there's no "session identifier," even if unique and completely unmarriable to the PII, it doesn't matter. Any session ID where an ID represents one person runs afoul. Makes meaningful telemetry really hard without consent.

Everyone just consents anyway...

I think AI will cause mass unemployment -- for whichever companies lay off staff after their AI pivot fails to materialise significant new revenue.

Which is not to say AI is going away, rather, every Silicon Valley tech company that is chasing this holy grail of miraculous untapped revenue are going to burn whatever cash/stock price they have left in the process...

(Dropbox and Meta feel particluarly at risk.)

If you damage your Android screen it is basically useless unless you have pre-emptively set up some kind of remote access process...

Twice I've had to spend hours manually resetting/renabling my 2FA after a phone was damaged, and sans buying a new screen just to get a backup of the phone, there aren't many other options.

(Similarly, this was the time I learnt that the UK gov does not issue backup codes for their 2FA and you just have to spend 45 mins on hold to have them reset it for you.)

linearmouse is a life-saver for my MX Master 3S, which feels awful on OSX compared to Windows.

AI regulation, or lack there of, will be a bi-product of the present semi-conductor cold-war with China. I can't imagine any government intentionally restricting AI research and use where the outcome is of strategic benefit, not only economic...

I agree, it feels like it was a reaction (no pun intended) for the CSS-in-JSS trend which started in React and complicated with Webpack pipelines. In my mind, Tailwind is just "Bootstrap for CSS-in-JSS."

Honestly, as much as I disliked the CSS-in-JSS trend, it did solve a reasonable problem with React — one which Vue and others had solved with their SPC.

It feels like ducktape on top of ducktape...

Yandex's image search is fantastic. I don't think its a capability thing, however. Google was and probably remains a big target for lawsuits — where as Yandex... whose really going to want to fight copyright violations in Russia.

It's not like scientists were sitting there folding proteins by hand until AI came along... It was always computational.

Nonsense — the cash-flow, risk, and needs of a Farmer's bank would be dramatically different than SVB's customers. This isn't about branding.

Whilst a bank specialising in agri-financing could still make the same mistakes that SVB did, any involvement by the government would be recognising the unique characteristics of the agricultural sector and the broader impact to the nation should farm's fail. People need to eat.

That said, I do think there's an anti-Silicon-Valley sentiment in pop-culture (but I'd be wise not to extend that sentiment to the Federal government.) The sense is that this is a "rightful comeuppance," but its also hard to argue that is not deserved given the way in which the organisation got itself in this issue in the first place.

My gut says that the purpose of the .org domain runs counter to a commercial business, and may confuse users.

.co is a suitable alternative, if that were available?

The poor timing of Covid will probably forever obscure just how much self-inflicted economic damage the UK did to itself, but seeing it unfold for the last 5 years, its obvious as layman that the UK's global stagnation has only really started.

This got a chuckle out of me!