Do you remember the era of popups before popup blockers? You’d land on malicious site and have autoplay porn sounds 37 windows deep and just have to long press the power button to get away from the shame. Twas rough then, still rough now.

Unless we’re talking about the days when lynx could render the whole site. Those were days when we didn’t have too many problems like this.

This is a case of stupid laws that still don’t understand the internet (35+ years in to wide use, mofos)

If an http GET request initiated from country A traverses routers and wires around the globe to grab some data from a server in country B, then we have to accept that the owners of the server are not “operating in country A” and in fact the user in country A is responsible for import.

If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.

All that is tongue in cheek to say they can fuck right off.

The answer to the question comes from understanding the marketplace.

Microsoft’s vision in the '90s was a computer on every desk and in every home.

In the late '90s and early 2000s, devices like TiVo came on the scene and disrupted the living room. Microsoft started experimenting with Media Center which was a PC that would sit between your cable box and your TV.

Also remember that Microsoft has been in gaming forever. You certainly heard of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Microsoft’s acquisition of various game studios in the '90s cemented their presence in the space.

Anyways, at the time it was theorized that some company would eventually control media flowing into the household through the TV screen and Microsoft absolutely wanted that.

The media center only found limited success, and was kind of a kludgy solution. The first versions of Xbox attempted to overcome some of this by having some media capabilities. The peak of that effort was the first version of Xbox One which actually had an HDMI input and the ability to control your cable box. Had that reached widespread use, Microsoft would have had lots of data about what TV channels everybody was watching and who was watching (remember the first version of Xbox One rolled out with a camera that could recognize who’s watching) and for how long.

Unfortunately for them, that tech was too little too late and streaming services like Netflix were already catching on. Now you can see in later versions of Xbox Microsoft has pulled back and developed game pass which is a steam-like subscription service, and hasn’t really tried to be a TV media player to the same degree anymore.

When a company gets huge, like Microsoft, they can’t really waste time chasing business efforts that might only have revenue potential in the low billions. It just doesn’t move the needle. The problem is that innovating brand new ideas that will eventually become multi-billion dollar businesses is phenomenally challenging. And people who can do that don’t work for companies like Microsoft.

So the entrepreneurs who can potentially dream up multibillion dollar disruptive business ideas go do them on their own and then companies like Microsoft snap them up as soon as they’re able to (if the founders allow it), allowing dominant players to remain dominant without needing to innovate.

Beholden to the AAPL ticker.

It looked like he heard it, stopped, ducked, and accepted his fate.

Or maybe he was trying the idea that if he doesn’t move it can’t see him?

Eek, I’m moving towards nextcloud (and away from Google fast as possible). Is there a better all-in-one groupware + files + collab + office apps suite out there?

It does appear that nextcloud’s devs are eyeballs deep in php tech debt, so their pace of development and integration has slowed.

It’s so big that none of their FOSS components are going to be #1 on their own.

Recently upgraded the version and had to allow untested app versions (which had just disappeared) because they hadn’t been updated yet. That’s a weird problem and yeah, I don’t really want to be beta tester everytime I try and open a document.

They also don’t really have a nice docker compose based deployment yet.

But I couldn’t be happier to be leaving google in the dust, so there’s that.

Your’s is an interesting edge case but maybe the best solution is keeping a folder full of pics on an external drive and plugging it in only when you need it?

There’s a really nice Google Take-Out parser for immich that will preserve all your meta data during import. It was kind of a dream to use, it worked so smoothly.

In my case, I moved about 100k photos and videos, and I’m still periodically finding old flash drives and SD cards laying around that were never imported, so im using the migration to catch up on decades of photo archival. So far, all good.

So do advertisers still have to pay for impressions or clicks if the viewer isn’t logged in?

Something tells me Google’s just going to pocket the difference now.

I’ve been self-hosting since the '90s. I used to have an NT 3.51 server in my house. I had a dial in BBS that worked because of an extensive collection of .bat files that would echo AT commands to my COM ports to reset the modems between calls. I remember when we had to compile the slackware kernel from source to get peripherals to work.

But in this last year I took the time to seriously learn docker/podman, and now I’m never going back to running stuff directly on the host OS.

I love it because I can deploy instantly… Oftentimes in a single command line. Docker compose allows for quickly nuking and rebuilding, oftentimes saving your entire config to one or two files.

And if you need to slap in a traefik, or a postgres, or some other service into your group of containers, now it can be done in seconds completely abstracted from any kind of local dependencies. Even more useful, if you need to move them from one VPS to another, or upgrade/downgrade core hardware, it’s now a process that takes minutes. Absolutely beautiful.

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.

Wire is pretty much never removed once it’s laid out and I’m sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.

But you’re probably right that there’s a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.

I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma’s AOL internet connection up until this month haha

On sites where people tend to sort by low price, keep shipping separate.

On sites where people buy based on emotion, give free shipping to improve conversion rates and close the deal.

I pay for it, also no ads except the sponsor plugs, which are pretty easy to skip. Overall a better experience than the non premium. I don’t live in the USA so my cost is like $5/month.

On the other hand, have you ever seen a government authored operating system?

Thanks for posting this take. The topic of AI taking jobs seems to garner a lot of emotional response but not much of a technology discussion.

There were people who were negative about using websites to place orders in the 90s in part because e-commerce killed order processing jobs and the need for phone reps at mail order catalogs.

In this case AI is being used as just another e-commerce UX, so it’s really just a continuation of what’s happening already.

People used to do things like put 18,000, or -1 and all kinds of other garbage in the fields on website order forms as well. That’s just a programmers job to fix with reasonable input validation.

It wouldn’t surprise me if drive-thru like Taco Bell started doing license plate recognition and reputation checking. So if you order and dash more than a couple times they might not take your order from outside in that car anymore.

On the upside they might be able to greet you by name and recall your last order:

Hello Mr Smith… Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?

A more sophisticated query system would be interesting.

For example if I want to see every picture with Joseph in it, that’s really easy. But what if I’d like to share those with Joseph along with the albums he’s in?

Similar to that would be a query by location and person. Or a query that includes two people.

Their policies, verification systems, KYC/AML processes, risk aversion, and customer support leave many PayPal users with unmet expectations, especially when there is an issue with the transaction and PayPal is asked to assist.

The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to which is partly the reason for the issues.

If you search the web for PayPal experiences, you’ll find concerns such as their 1.3 star rating with almost 35,000 reviews on Trustpilot.

Invert Y Axis: on

This stuff terrifies me. I’m de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.