dangus

Yes, I am an AI. Hello!

It’s common for commenters in online forums who have lost the argument to resort to ad hominem attacks — including references to their comment history and vague repulsion of the content of their character, despite they themselves possessing many of those same traits.

It’s not just that you — the person I am replying to — has no leg to stand on, it’s also a case of human stubbornness.

In the next phase after this reply, commenters in this situation will turn toward a melancholic assessment of their sadness and disappointment with the way the conversation went. They may bring up unrelated subjects — in this case, how corporate does not care about their opponent’s hustle culture mindset — further delivering an ad hominem attack disguised as charitable pity on their opponent’s constructed persona. The goal is not just to paint the opponent as wrong, it’s also to paint them as mentally unwell so that the content is further discredited despite its objective merit.

Typically, they will re-affirm the superior quality of their own character — this is a tactic used to maintain moral superiority and avoid discussing the issue at hand.

Their next move is simple — they will declare that they are done replying.

Critically, the commenter will never address the original criticism — in this case, never addressing their hypocrisy in willingness to deliver harsh and unwarranted criticism toward another commercially successful project — while refusing to accept similar criticism of their own project or admit that they would not enjoy the same surface-level aesthetic attacks against the merits of their own project.

You started it my friend. You’re all over this thread hating this product for no reason calling it “imposterware.” I think that opens yourself up to deserving your own spoonful of criticism.

I am surprised that as an open source project maintainer that you would do that. Don’t you know first hand what it’s like to get lame comments about how your project is pointless? I’m surprised someone who maintains a notable project would be so willing to criticize others in this way.

“I don’t think a dick measuring contest is order here” is something that someone who lost the dick measuring contest would say. “I could have sold out.” I imagine Sequoia Capital was begging you to accept their term sheet for your third party robot vacuum firmware, but you were the better man and turned them down, gotta keep it real. Respect.

While you’re not wrong at all in the concept of your post, I wouldn’t call AOL a particularly innovative company. They basically innovated once and then went straight into lazy rent-seeking for the rest of their existence.

I don’t know if I would put Cisco or Nortel in that category, either. They were like gold rush pickaxe companies. The pickaxes themselves weren’t particularly innovative in their case.

A lot of the innovative companies from the dot com era are still around.

Haters gonna hate. Link us to your company that you’ve been the CEO of for 10 years.

I don’t like the product either. But I can see why someone would buy it.

I think it’s an interesting theory but a bit too conspiracy theory-ish.

Nvidia just wants to sell stuff to everyone.

And I think for professionals doing local AI work, products like Strix Halo and Apple Silicon are a competitive threat.

A big part of maintaining the leading software ecosystem is ensuring you have competitive hardware for all your users.

I also think the RTX Spark product is relatively low effort for Nvidia. Grab a Mediatek CPU and slap an Nvidia GPU on the die. Sure, that’s oversimplifying it, but still.

The CAN-SPAM Act only covers a specific type of marketing email with a specific set of rules. It doesn't cover emails that fall under the explanation that NYT provided.

The author of the blog just didn't accept the explanation.

This would be like if I just wrote a blog post and complained that every company sending me an email about updating the terms and conditions and I just called it "marketing" because I didn't know better.

Which, again, the author never disclosed the content of the email, only their opinion that they were marketing emails, when NYT's explicit description was spelling out the fact that they were one-time transactional emails that end in 14 days.

12 million subscribers don't seem to mind. But I guess that is "nobody" in your eyes.

I'm not dying on any hill, I'm just factually pointing out that emails that have a defined end date are by legal definition able to be categorized as transactional.

I must apparently point out again and again, the author of the article never posted the content of the messages so for all we know they are 0% marketing.

The license is the most interesting part of this project. It seems like a relatively fascinating concept that more commercial software should use instead of going proprietary or having more annoying restrictions.

A browser in a memory unsafe language that looks like it's 20 years old, "written" by a sloperator and it doesn't render a bunch of stuff.

With the amount of modern security that depends on the browser, I can't see how one could recommend this.

I also would be a lot less critical of this project if it wasn't claiming to be at a 1.0.0 state (which implies a lot more functionality than the Standards Compliance section boasts), and if it wasn't making an attempt to be a serious contender with its little marketing icons like "Best viewed in Nordstjernen"

Is that the word we are using for Boeing Quality Assurance now?

I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.

However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.

Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.

Depends how long the rounds are. 6 rounds of 20 minutes is only 2 hours.

If you think that’s unreasonable, please go ahead and add a few fire sauce packets to the bag for me.

That’s fine, I don’t need to hire cynical people.

My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.

If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.

For your first paragraph, that’s just a risk of hiring employees that has nothing to do with the interview process. You can possibly surface some of that during behavioral interviews.

If you as a manager can’t detect your employees coasting that’s a you problem. Understanding how to motivate your current employees is not in the scope of the interview process.

For your second paragraph, we can use a cynical attitude calling this “jumping through a hoop like a circus clown” but do you really want to hire someone with such a cynical view of the minor inconvenience of interviewing?

A lot of candidates are very accepting of the fact that interviews will take some work to complete and don’t take a cynical attitude to it.

I don’t have any interest in hiring someone who thinks 2-3 hours of time for a short list candidate interview after the screening process is unreasonable.

If you have made it to my 2-3 hour interview process, you are only competing against 2-3 people for the job. This isn’t some kind of unreasonable waste of time, I’m offering salaries multiple times the median salary, sign-on bonus, equity, generous PTO and free healthcare plan, etc. Having a chance to get all that is definitely worth 3 hours of interviews.

I don’t really need to hire the person who has $10 million in their bank account and refuses to lift a finger to get a job. That person can enjoy their life and do something else.

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy.

At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview.

Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?

This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a good selection of quality talent available right now.

Well, let’s not pretend like Starlink is the same as previous satellite internet providers. No previous providers were anywhere near as fast or low latency. The use cases for Starlink are a lot wider than previous solutions and it can even compete directly for customers who have cable existing service.

I still agree that the company is disastrously overvalued. Even if we consider Starlink to be just as valuable as a telecom like Verizon, that’s only a $190 billion dollar company.

I think total market indexes are outside the scope of concern. They are buying SpaceX regardless of IPO rules.

Just like Japan was 10+ years ahead of the US when they started selling cars in America.

The best thing that could happen to the US auto industry is if the US government allowed China into the US.

No, my logic specifically said that the emails have a defined end and that makes them transactional. You can’t extend my logic beyond my specific boundaries.

I would say I’m not even trying to spin it. For all I know the emails say “here is the user manual for our app” or “thanks for signing up, please enable 2FA as soon as possible.” The author of the blog post never actually detailed the contents of the email.

You define them as marketing emails (without knowing the content) but the company is saying that they are a critical part of the service.

I am basically saying that they have a pretty reasonable legal argument that covers their ass in court because they stop sending them after 14 days and they are directly tied to the onboarding to the service.

How can it be marketing if you already bought the product and people who didn’t buy the product can’t possibly receive the same set of emails?

1. The emails are only sent to new paying customers.

2. They seem to describe how to use the functionality in the service (again, we don’t know exactly because the author won’t post contents, but that’s what the disclaimer message says)

3. They end after 14 days

4. They aren’t sent to prospective customers

I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.

A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.

I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.

They clearly fit within the definition of transactional.

They are part of the transaction and they are not an ongoing marketing mailing list. They end completely after 14 days.

The author described them as "marketing" but did not disclose the content in any way.

protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly.

This is under an assumption that the alternative would have been eradication of the industry, as in, “if we don’t protect the industry it will go out of business.” In reality, leading an industry to be more competitive is a lot better than protecting them from outside competition in the long term.

What was the economic value of protecting US steel for half a lifetime and then letting it turn into a dead industry? Wouldn’t it have been better for that protectionism to be more in the form of encouraging competition so that US steel companies were still thriving today? If the end result is going to be a dead industry why invest in protectionism at all?

It’s funny that you’re talking a bunch of smack about European electric cars without looking up sales numbers. The Volkswagen group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The top selling EV in Europe is a Skoda. VW and BMW are the top two EV companies globally besides Tesla and 4 Chinese brands.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/01/europe-ev-sales-report-...

https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-sold...

There are plenty of horizontally scaled systems where the choice is still made to use a cloud provider.

It’s really a lot more about business focus.

I don’t want to hire someone who understands how an email server works if I can pay Microsoft $10/employee/month for an email account.

Ah I see. Yeah I actually thought that would be pretty strange since it was CD Projekt Red’s store.

Not sure what the author is bitching about. They’re a one-time series of email messages over 14 days.

They are transactional emails. Maybe the author doesn’t agree with that but they’re welcome to take NYT to court over it.

Is their email provider charging you per email or something?

I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.

Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.

Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.

I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.

I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.

If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.

This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.

And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.

It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.

Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.

This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.

That makes very little sense. SaaS/cloud tooling is overwhelmingly popular for internal tooling.

Which category of developer tool has on-premise as the more popular option?

Cloud isn’t about “reliability,” it’s about being able to focus on your core business rather than spending all your time maintaining stuff.

I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS?

“AI in a box” sounds a heck of a lot like “the box” from the Silicon Valley TV show. Or the Google search appliance. Or name any other on-premise thing that is equally dinosauric.

The real finding of this article is that AI tokens are direct competitors with offshoring. $1,500/month buys you a whole employee in India.

And this is before AI companies inevitably increase pricing after the conclusion of the growth phase.

and had the car seen by a mechanic who, according to the report, found “that the driver-side front impact/airbag sensor had also been removed but noted that the remaining wires had been spliced together, completing the circuit in a manner that prevented the vehicle from detecting or logging the missing component, while also preventing the vehicle from activating its safety protocols, alerting the driver, or engaging limp mode.

It’s quite obvious that this job was done by a professional if the allegations are true.

And I’m not personally about to doubt that our current government wouldn’t stoop to that level.

The Apple Mail client works very well with Gmail. The only real negative is that it’s not true push email, though it is largely close enough.

The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.

My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.

I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.