I don't think quality is really much of a concern for the majority of people, only enthusiasts. I suspect, analagous to 128 kbps opus (on youtube music), most people can't really tell the difference between a 1080p bitstarved stream and a 4k bluray rip.
The library for the music streaming platforms is much bigger than for films, of course (about 250 million for Spotify), but there's also a much lower barrier of entry. So perhaps the higher work needed to produce a film necessitates more profit, to a degree that only the fragmented streaming platforms can fulfill. After all, netflix started making originals to counter studios launching their own streaming platforms to raise profit margins, and pulling their content off netflix.
I disagree with your definition of what 'growing up' is about. There is something lost in the world where making silly but fun things is frowned upon. And yes, fun is subjective.
I don't share my kids excitement about most things, but I'm genuinely happy they enjoy themselves so much. Being able to use the same notion to all people, not just (your) kids is part of growing up in my books.
we run screen-driven agents against web forms in production and the failure mode that took us longest to find wasn't navigation, it was commits that don't commit. a react controlled select can render the right value after a click while the framework's internal state never updated, so every pixel says done and the submitted payload says null. vision-only verification passes because the screen genuinely looks correct.
curious how you handle that class without DOM access. screenshot-after-action catches missing UI feedback, but when the UI itself is lying about form state the only reliable tells we found were downstream: the confirmation page, an outbound request, an email arriving. do your verification events ever consume anything besides pixels, or do you lean on the human approval gates for the risky commits?
I don't think that one USAID website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.
If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.
You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.
Between Meta and Google? Oh sure, Meta collects info for sure. But Meta doesn't lie, abuse, and misuse the Google Play framework to collect data, it doesn't use the same via push notifications to collect enormous amounts of data, nor does Meta host endless fonts and libraries and DNS infra, solely for the purposes of tracking what hosts/users do.
Beyond that, whilst Meta and Google both work to embed stuff in webpages for additional tracking, Google sign-on is another massive tracking infra. And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities. And firebase?! Oh geez.
"Hi, I'm Google! I'm going to provide this neat thing called firebase, so every single high security application, banking to identity verification, will include our tracking software in it for device attestation and push notifications! But of course, we'll never use that to track anyone! Honest!"
Compared to Google's data collection infrastructure, Meta is a tiny, miniscule gnat in comparison. And yes, I know how bad Meta is. If anything, I think Meta is at least quite honest about much of what data is collected. Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
To use Google anything, is to feed the most powerful, wide spread, incredible data collection machine the world has ever seen. It dwarfs everyone and everything else, factorially. I bet if you took all the data that the NSA and every other single spy agency on the planet has on its citizenry, they'd all barely measure on what Google collects. I'm not exaggerating. It's honestly astonishing.
Anyhow.
In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
This is what I hear all the time when I hear "$x did $y" over and over. I just can't tell. I have no clue what's being reported, its veracity, validity, and so on.
So I just go by the tech stack before me, and things I can verify.
I can see all the nonsense Google is up to. OpenAI and Anthropic so far are so tiny and small in reality, compared to the mass that is Google, that they couldn't even attempt to "do evil" on the same scale, even if they wanted to.
They just don't have the capability. Of course, I suppose that doesn't really help rank them. Scope doesn't imply evil intent, only the outcome. I guess... well, from my rant above, you can tell I really, really think people wildly underestimate Google's mad, chicaneristic desire to know all. If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.
I managed to get a couple of good ones. While they're more like docking stations, Kingston's, now discontinued, Nucleum and UGreen's wares are all good.
If you go higher level, of course there's Thunderbolt docks, but you can't make them cheaply, so they're generally good.
From what I can tell, DuckDB is more focused on huge-scale data analysis than simple data persistence, so I’m not sure if it fits my use cases. Otherwise, it looks good.
6.6% of total government expenditure is significantly smaller than you tried to make it out to be. What are you trying to show with a per captia comparison its not paid as a % of the persons salary the person make 66k is probably paying less than $100 towards the military. It doesnt even make sense towards your original point as it gets paid out in times of peace.
You're trying to cherry pick this time in history before the US was a global superpower and compare it as if it supports your point. You have nothing to show that wars are being started for profit.
All the wars are clearly geopolitical in nature. In 2001 the defense budget didnt increase because politicians said we need to make more money in the defense industry and isreal needs more land. They said holy shit we just got attacked in New York we need to retaliate.
It's 1200 pages of bad writing where he can't get to the fucking point and sentences are page-long subclause mess. He is only on the list because commies put him there for ideological alignment and being long form. Seriously, fuck tolstoy.
I think it can be a general rule without being a concrete one, and is heavily context dependent.
I agree that dash cams are for the most part OK, because for the most part they're recording for safety reasons and evidence in case of accidents. But sitting in a coffee shop as a private citizen, recording everyone that comes in without any particular justification would not really be OK, covertly or overtly. Even though the owner might be doing the same thing for security.
So perhaps "covert recording of other people in public without an accepted, socially justifiable reason, is not OK"
> One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship.
I mean, you could add 50 gender-neutral names to try to balance it out...
There are infinite genders though, so it's not really fair to go beyond that.
>Being Russian does not make them retrospectively Putinist, does it?
Because Chekhov, Gogol, Ilf and Petrov, and Strugatsky brothers are better. And dostoevsky definitely is in the retroactively putinist camp, if you don't catch that you haven't been reading enough of him. For mental hygiene alone he should be off that list. Even Bulgakov is better, although not for modern sensibilities. And is a huge waste of time.
That being said, some authors which are definitely great, just shouldn't be on the mandatory reading list for 15 year olds for all kinds of reasons, including for the reason of being russian. The list is not infinite and there is an opportunity cost that is wasted on those two specifically.
I started on a new team once and I was integrating some CloudFlare services, I hooked a domain name and I was assigned a nameserver with my lastname and one with my new manager's lastname... nobody ever believed I did not picked those, people still joke about a love story that involves a manager, myself and CloudFlare.
I misunderstood your initial point about logging-in. On PayPal logging in requires my phone, even with hardware 2FA because sometimes it decides my new IP/Browser/luck isn't trusted enough so it needs to send me a SMS/WhatsApp message so it didn't even register with me that you would be talking about taking out your phone as an additional friction. I see that now, in which case: you're completely right. WeRo requires a phone and one that uses either Google Play Store or Apple App Store and worse, depending on your bank that requires strong Play Integrity.
In term of implementation, WeRo looks more like a response to mobile payments like WhatApp, WeChat, Alipay, ... than a response a provider like PayPal. However, I haven't seen anything that'd limit them from expending support if they wished to.
> and also giving numbers out as much as possible
In Person-to-Person, you don't have to share your number. You can use QRCode (Direct SEPA). I'm not entirely sure of the email implementation, but maybe these do not share the phone number either (Edit: seeing https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599201237..., it seems you may be able to do an email-only account). In Person-to-Merchant, I'm not sure what information are shared.
> Moreover payment systems that prioritize the needs of merchants usually are horrible for consumers
Supporting merchants flow to pay is different from prioritizing their needs so I'm unsure where you're going from there. It's also completely separated from Person-to-Person payments. PayPal supports Person-To-Merchant and I wouldn't say they are great for merchant.
