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rbera

89 karma · joined July 10, 2022

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rbera··on Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
You’re right, my bad on the terminology. A year is definitely optimistic, I just hope that’s the first draft pending appeals. the longer it stretches on, the greater chance there is of directives being changed, lobbyists influencing politicians, etc.
rbera··on Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
At the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.
rbera··on An update on Twitch in Korea
Basically, ISPs in Korea charge services extra fees based on the amount of traffic they generate.

The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.

Of course while Netflix can raise prices to cover those fees, Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.

I can see both sides of the argument here, but it is strange to me that the cost does not fall on consumers instead of the producers—the U.S. has had bandwidth caps for users for a several years.

rbera··on No "malfeasance" behind Sam Altman's firing, OpenAI memo says
Good. Considering they’re already getting millions in comp, I’d rather have people working on AGI that aren’t in it solely for the money. And it’s not like Cohere or Sam’s next company won’t be trying to poach researchers anyway, but at least one company (OpenAI) isn’t going for profit for sure now.
rbera··on SUSE to go private
SUSE was private just a few years ago, owned by the same firm that IPOed them and is now taking them private again. If there were any truth to your statement, it would’ve happened a while ago.
rbera··on Ross Ulbricht Threatens LowEndBox. It's Weird
Very apt that they used Midjourney to create an uncopyrightable image of him. I wonder how legal that is, but I guess he qualifies as a public figure?
rbera··on Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs
That explains it, I was very confused by what I assumed was self-censoring, since the comment didn’t actually clarify anything. I wish there was an accepted way to disambiguate asterisks from server side filters.
rbera··on Google is selling all my personal information in Google Domains to Squarespace?
The weird part to me at least is that they don’t ask for affirmative consent prior to transferring all your data, billing details, etc., to Squarespace. This isn’t some 1:1 acquisition, the Google Domains UI won’t even exist anymore. Even stranger considering the Google workspace subscriptions are moving as well, no idea how Squarespace is handling that. At least transfers aren’t frozen so you can get away from Squarespace’s terrible product prior to the deal closing.

(I know Google has the legal right to do this, but that’s not the issue here.)

rbera··on Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts
It’s not 100 queries per user, it’s per client id where the client id refers to the app as a whole. Effectively they changed this from the old limits where it was per user. See https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/_/jnk7rfg/?...
rbera··on Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency
I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing. When I say I don’t care about privacy, I mean that I don’t use VPNs, I don’t use ProtonMail, I don’t disable cookies or JS, I don’t use cash—all because I value convenience. Is this short-sighted? Maybe, but I am in a position where I (generally speaking) trust the government. That’s not true of everyone of course.
rbera··on Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency
I suppose ideally your money can’t be stolen? E.g., if someone hacks you or something similar, the government can invalidate that currency. Plus reduced money laundering, since it’s tracked, which theoretically reduces crime and makes it easier to track.

Personally I only see physical currency being deprecated over the next several decades, considering most people don’t really care about privacy anymore (including me, to be fair).

rbera··on Launch HN: MagnaPlay (YC W23) – Indie gaming subscription service for PC
I’m curious as to how your company focuses on user retention in the longer term. Obviously, Spotify or Game Pass have the perks of having superstars and AAA studios already onboarded, so customers sign on and stick around for new releases by larger creators. But with indie games, there’s usually not that same loyalty to a creator (I can think of only a few famous ones off the top of my head). Games are also not as replayable as music, especially smaller ones—they’re more like video streaming in that regard. Is your eventual goal just to onboard enough new games every year that users continue subscribing, or is there another angle to it?

Similarly, how do you plan to retain devs, especially once they become established and choose to sell directly instead? I think your most “similar” competitor, Apple Arcade, gave out contracts to larger studios to build games, which isn’t really sustainable in the longer term as far as I can tell, especially when they can simply sell their games instead. Is this more of an alternative revenue stream for studios? One of the main draws of a subscription for customers is exclusivity, which would kind of contradict that.

In general though, I really like this concept; it can solve a lot of issues with getting indie game dev going in a sustainable manner, which is a market neither Game Pass nor Apple Arcade really address. Best of luck!

rbera··on Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.
rbera··on GTA VI Leak [video]
It depends on your company’s retention policy for historical messages. Otherwise, you’re basically signed in as that user, so you can see whatever they see… which can be a lot depending on the company’s transparency.