well, maybe we can spend some of the money we save not subsidizing the third world on better border security

oh so that's what my elementary school classmate had

I had a classmate like that too. You could genuinely smell him the moment he entered the room.

I used to think it was lack of hygiene, but I'm now quite sad to hear it was this condition.

That must be hell, knowing there's nothing you can do

Does the algorithm "decide" to show something, or is it operating mechanically, driven by the inputs of the user?

If it is operating mechanically, then it is following a process chosen by the developers who wrote the code. They work for the company, so the consequences are still the company's responsibility.

The car is following a process chosen by Mercedes' engineers (to go forward when the user presses the accelerator.) The newsfeed is likewise following a mechanistic process driven by user input (they wouldn't be showing misinformation if users weren't uploading and sharing them.)

people can do things for more than one reason

Shouldn't all sites have some kind of bandwidth / cost limiting in place? Not to say that AI crawlers shouldn't be more careful, but there are always malicious actors on the internet, seems foolish not to have some kind of defense in place

The big three cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure) have collectively decided that you don't want to set a spending limit actually, so they simply don't let you.

The big three cloud providers are the most expensive by a factor of 10-100x, and shouldn't be used under any circumstances unless you really, really need specific features from them.

Isn't running a webserver on those kind of a silly idea for that reason?

It's harder to do right then you think. The first dynamic bandwidth (and concurrent connection) limiter that I wrote was to protect a site against Google in part!

They say this:

> We have IP-based rate limiting in place for many of our endpoints, however these crawlers are coming from a large number of IP addresses, so our rate limiting is not effective.

Do you have something else in mind? Just shut down the whole site after a certain limit?

whether it is smart or not depends on the likelihood of it. do you have numbers?

even if it were 10%, we shouldn't expect 90% of consumers to subsidize the other 10%

I'm not sure how to separate this mindset from one that would have commercial buildings not be required to include elevators and wheelchair ramps. Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired? (Not implying any judgement either way, just curious if this is a consistent viewpoint).

I think one difference is that there isn't a great alternative option in the case of commercial buildings -- if you have a job in a given building that doesn't accommodate your disability, you can't just go find a different building. But insofar as food is concerned, you could pay more for more carefully-manufactured food, or just cook for yourself

But then you are putting that burden on those people. You don’t have to work in that commercial building either you can find another job for example

> Do you also think that's an unfair burden to put on the roughly-90% of people who are not mobility-impaired?

Not op, but I share his view and don't think commercial buildings should be forced to accommodate people who are mobility-impaired.

Then you should hope to never become mobility impaired :)

Remember, we are all just temporarily abled and one accident away from needing accomodation from society.

I doubt it would change my opinion though. It's a matter of principle for me.

Exactly. It's like insurance, even if you have no sympathy, you're probably ok paying a little for other people's accidents because you could just as easily have one. Allergens are different, though.

This sort of thought implies not believing in insurance of any kind. Why should people pay into a common fund when only a small percentage of them will ever use it.

People generally don't develop allergies randomly in life. There's no insurance value here.

People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with. There's also ongoing studies trying to desensitise people's allergies so that they can deal with foods more easily. So a person's allergy status can and does change during their lifetime.

But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.

> People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with.

Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people

> But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.

No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.

Insurance only works if the majority pay but only the minority get paid. Anything else and you risk not getting paid if the event occurs.

Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.

Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.

You have an insurer which insures you against an even that happens 1% of the time, but you are its one and only customer. The event happens to you, so the insurer has to pay you out. Since it doesn't have any more money than what you paid into it, it goes bankrupt and you do not get paid.

For insurance to work more people have to pay into the system than people who receive payment, otherwise the insurer will go bankrupt.

Yes? If the government can find a better way to help people with disabilities, great. But small business being sued because a booth is 6 inches too small, or universities having to take down lectures because they lacked close captioning seems to clearly go to far to me. People seem to have a terrible time understanding diffused societal costs and opportunity costs.

I don’t think either of those things is in the spirit of the ADA. ADA requires reasonable accommodation. So if it would be unreasonable, the law says the accommodation isn’t necessary. What I see in those two instances is judicial overreach and a college not wanting to appear insensitive.

Some day if you find yourself with limited mobility you will be thankful the ADA requires the things it does, because you would find it challenging to live in society without it. The market of “disabled people wanting to shop in a store” is vanishingly small and totally unserved without at least some regulation. I’m sure it offends your free market principles, but the free market isn’t the best thing for all of us.

unironically. would love to have those berkeley lectures back online

You won't like how popular such a repeal would be. Americans really hate the less fortunate of their society.

oh please, there are plenty of first world countries without as many retarded regulations

seems like crackers could just patch the app code that detects this, no?

For sure, it’s just a bit more effort to reverse the app binary and find that part of the code. Enough effort to deter most crackers apparently.

The macOS cracking scene is also much much weaker. It's

1. Mildly harder on a OS level

2. Less popular in countries that produce the most cracks

3. Less popular in general

4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software

5. Has less strong reverse engineering software. Hopper was awful.

Also, I just wanted to say I love your work. I've learned a lot from your blog, your free trial strategies are interesting, and quite effective: https://shottr.cc/s/1vQa/SCR-20240423-re6.png

> 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software

The flip side of this is that I've noticed software written solely for macOS/iOS is often more polished than many of the most popular FOSS projects written for Linux.

Obviously I don't have any expectation of software provided for free, but as someone who makes a living developing software I do find it funny how much reticence there is among other developers to pay for high quality software.

I have an aversion for paying for artificially scarce things. I am happy to "pay for software" if that software doesn't exist yet, and what I'm actually paying for is the labor to make it.

Quite convenient that you’d only pay software if developers contacted you years in advance, and none of them were clever enough to do so

My mechanic doesn't speculatively contact me about work I should do on my car. If I want new software that I can't write myself, I should reach out to developers, not the other way around.

Does this extend to books? movies? games?

I would extend it to the words in a book, but not the book itself. That is a physical object and therefore has real scarcity. Similarly for movies and games.

Though I'm actually not against paying for access to stream media. I am however against telling people what they can do with the media once they stream it (ie saving it to their own drive for future playback).

So if you're not against paying for access to media, why are you against paying for access to software? If you're against DRM, that's an argument I can support more

I guess I'm not against paying for access to software, it's just that the consequence of being against restricting what people can do with it once they have it (such as redistribute it) makes paying for access seem unrealistic.

Paying for access to a media repository makes slightly more sense than paying for access a to software repository also, just given the sheer amount of data that media tends to take up vs how much data software tends to use. GNU software repositories are fairly easily hosted by hobbyists; multi-billion dollar companies often burn money trying to monetize media storage and distribution (particularly video). In that sense, there is some scarcity in media distribution. Software distribution trends to be next to nothing though.

I am also certainly against DRM, as I am any malware :P

I am a developer who likes to be paid for my work. I was also a diehard FOSS fan. I've also switched to macOS, and after I did so I spent probably $200 on software. What was interesting to me is that even in my Linux phase, some proprietary software was acceptable — notably steam. Why was this the case?

I think, as a developer, I value the ability to fix things I don't like. I've done it quite a lot in open source software. Just plant my fix and move on. Steam always felt complete. macOS software often feels closer to completion, though sometimes I do wish I could modify it still. Also, another class is software I trust that I could not do a better job on, like Affinity.

Anyway, I think that's the root of the developer aversion to paying for software.... Well, for me anyway. I wish we had better culture around donating to free software as well.

ida pro has a Mac release

As does Ghidra or Binary Ninja.

Increased precision typically costs more economically, so I think it's a pretty good analogy... precise physical measurements require specialized equipment, precise floating-point calculations require more computational power, etc