They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.

Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.

Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.

Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.

'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/what-does-the-labou... :

"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-s...

Sure. Nothing was said directly right now, but to just take Labour's word for it that they won't go further with these restrictions is really naive.

I'm required to wear clothes in public (Indecent exposure laws) and I need to have at least a pen or pencil to sign documents and do tax returns demanded by law. But I have a vast array of options when it comes to clothes and stationery, and most importantly I'm not required to agree to a foreign company's EULA to use them, unlike smartphones.

1) you buy a piece of hardware (printer, cctv cameras etc.) that can only be set up with a phone or you have to work harder to find the web interface.

2) Banks - banks really suck.

3) Companies I work for who use VPNs where you need a SMS or authenticator, however this is usually easy to get around with a web authenticator and some companies have let me use a YubiKey instead which is actually much less hassle.

4) Car parking meters where they discriminate - I tend to avoid these ones.

5) QR code restaurant menus - hate these but usually can get around it by just asking somebody for a paper menu.

6) Phasing out of 3G causing low reception - this is annoying because there are fewer good dumbphones that have 4G modems. Also I hate Android and Android based phones which come with facebook app and social media stuff installed so I'm a bit more limited in options. However, I managed to get an Alcatel flip phone which has 4G and it's a bit buggy but reception is now good.

I'm surprised that I'm able to get by, given the enormous pressure everyone is put under to use a smart phone, but it gives me hope that it hasn't worked and you can still get by in society without them. It would be pretty terrible if everyone HAD to agree to a google or Apple EULA just to be a functioning citizen.

But even if I did, there's a much more solid foundation of trust there, whereas these AI companies have been very shady with their 'better to ask for forgiveness, than permission' attitudes of late.

I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to use the agentic stuff but from what I've heard it's still too slow to run on a high end workstation with a single 4080.

Or have things got better lately, and crucially is there good VisualStudio integration for running local agents / LLMs?

To work around it, I handled the x near zero case by just forcing to 1.0.

if(Math.abs(x) > 1e-8 ){ Math.sin(x)/x } else { 1.0 }

When a bank gets less return on excess reserves, it will want to make more loans. For regulatory reasons they have to hold some treasury bonds as collateral which again puts upward pressure on treasury prices. Rising bond prices pushes down treasury bond yields. Low yields on treasury bonds makes it easier for the government to borrow and rack up even more debt.

Generally, more liquidity to bid up assets, including treasury bonds (which are still attractive while yields are relatively high), will push down yields everywhere.

The terms 'whiteness', 'white privilege', 'diversity', 'social justice', 'equity', 'equality' are poorly defined too, and mean different things depending on who you ask. Our language is full of these poorly defined umbrella terms. But I know what to expect when I hear somebody described as 'woke'. In fact you use 'conservative' this way in your comment, but conservatism encompasses a very broad range of thought too.

And with that last line are you implying you want his thoughts policed? ... to subdue his rebellious spirit? This will surely backfire.

As for 'the change from serfdom', if you're referring to the improved working conditions following the peasants revolt, remember it took the Black Death to wipe out 50% of the population in England, consumption went down, but the potential productivity of survivors would not have changed much, so landowners had to pay more for laborers to attract manpower for farming.

A decrease in productivity relative to consumption is not good, as it just causes low-supply driven inflation and makes everybody poorer. That being said, I believe the quality of productivity / consumption also need to be considered, not just aggregates. It's entirely possible a lot of productivity is just garbage products and irrational consumers are happy to consume or are tricked/bamboozled. ZIRP and excess monetary expansion facilitates these distortions, giving investors cheap money to stimulate production in dubious industries, and giving consumers cheaper credit to purchase products of dubious value.