I'm not surprised the iteration we're seeing now is perceived as failing: on the few remaining screens where ads are still present for me, they're between highly irrelevant to flat out repulsive. There are a few brands I will never touch with a long stick, purely as a result of their disturbing, disgusting ads -- again, charitably, a negative-sum game.

One disgusting CEO landing behind the bars over frivolous DMCA takedown would improve things dramatically, like for humanity (or a hefty chunk thereof that's browsing the web, anyway).

The irony of Chinese vendors providing a breath of fresh low-DRM air.

Before: customer pays fines for bad security, rolled into the price of the offering.

After: customer pays for actual good security, rolled into the price of the offering.

If the customer doesn't care, no change. If the customer cares (and let's low key assume PII is important) -- they see net gain from this change.

Furthermore, consider that the opinion-like discourse is clearly performative. We all know what the correct virtue signaling looks like, and we know that we need to ruin every person not doing the correct virtue signaling.

So it's less of a plurality-of-opinion situation, and more of a direct-democracy situation: a lynch mob.

(Not saying it's good or bad btw -- not my circus, not my monkeys. Just dishonest to say we love some sort of plurality while doing this I think.)

Such a bad place we're in: people say they value "freedom", but then you can't choose you own political representation without being witch-hunted to death by the same "freedom" group.

(I honestly think that the perfect response in this case would be to support the cofounder, if anything, to make their own choices, and refuse to hate on the person's political leaning. But alas, the chains of freedom are super heavy.)

I strongly believe we should distinguish the price of doing the operation (aka rent) and the price of doing crime (ideally, jail).

Surely for this specific example of managerial stupidity it just is, but I mean more generally, it's a beautiful posting.

I aspire to have this much misplaced belief in any humans at all, let alone CEOs.

Every time I open my editor, there's another colorful popup about some AI feature or other, and it's never what I want. Product people don't seem to understand that nobody wants ads in their editor, no matter how animated and HDR.

And I use all of the AI, to be clear, and surely it's a brilliant tool. But the fatigue is also real.

Which is why I want every big AI player to catastrophically fail -- not out of spite or anything, but because it will holistically improve on my current state of being. And the product people will need to learn some profession so probably will stop with the ads, too.

I want to think it's not an anti-AI stance really, but pro-user, in some real sense.

And I'm just afraid this is what cognitive decline feels like from inside the deteriorating mind.

US regulates over-the-table political bribes. Corporate political influence is functionally bribe-like, a reciprocal influence economy.