This has to be done in person, where they can't be, uh, accidentally disconnected, but I've found the rate-of-return on that time hard to beat. They discover all sorts of "mistakes" when you're taking up their billing specialists' time.

It is a bit like haggling over your car price after you already bought it; the main thing to get over is the social discomfort of being a pain in the ass, so they can't use that against you.

Speaking in very general terms, let's just say that we've had to maintain an extremely locked down machine running a version of sshd from about a decade ago hosted in its own DMZ, all for one particular partner. It is monitored for everything we can think of, and I still find myself stressing about possible ways someone could escape from that machine - I'm mostly surprised we haven't been attacked through them yet.

Their problem is they bought proprietary software that's no longer supported, and look at it as a one-time purchase rather than a forward commitment. Our problem is the nontechnical relationship is important and we can't cut them off.

Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.

It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.

And now there's the bots:

https://www.threads.net/search?q=Twitter&serp_type=tags&tag_...

> Top of the list: train drivers.

I rather suspect front-line in Trust and Safety at any major social media outfit is up there, too.

Also, don't confuse empathy and sympathy - you need to extinguish the latter, but the former is incredibly important to your ability to play suckers.

https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

You seem to entirely miss the possibility that this has nothing to do with "punishing" anyone, and that people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight.

You can call it irrational if you like, that feeling of superiority and a few bucks will get you a snack. The brain worm is there, I know I'll be thinking about it next time I book tickets.

We know the range estimates used to (?) be gamed[1], I don't see why this part wouldn't be, too.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.

Much like Uber, self-enshitification was obviously the "???" part of the underpants gnomes' plans.

But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk.

> If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%

How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.

> Of course, it's still safer to look them up if you don't actually know the person in question and want to use he or she.

Physician, heal thyself.

Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos, DECs, SGIs...

Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was kind of unix-ish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

Like I said, let me know when your utopia has eliminated assortive signaling about sports, tools, accents, clothes, art, food, housing, hairstyles, schools, employers, sex, shoes, religion, cars, text-messaging background colors, music, politics... all of which is far more pervasive, and some of which has historically escalated into literal wars.

[1] I also personally agree that it is boring. I couldn't care less what editor people use unless they've configured it wrong in a way that messes up a repo I have to use, and even then only to the extent that I probably have to explain to them how to fix it.

You're more or less just telling people they should socialize less.

Get back to me once you've convinced people to stop arguing Ford vs. Chevy or Dodgers vs. Giants or Makita vs. Dewalt or....

Briefly, something like:

1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why.

2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide.

3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.

It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."

There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.