I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run.

I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time.

Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.

The fact that the people running r/progamming don't know not to wait until April 2 to publish this tells me that they don't have real-world experience in shipping software in a business environment.

We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_, the trend line is never going to reverse. I don't understand the people digging in as zero LLM absolutists.

Give it 1-2 years, feature quantity will take precedence over feature quality

I think they were being sarcastic, and you might agree more than you realize.

Which makes the B2C ad stuff they shove into Windows all the more infuriating: it's a drop in the bucket relative to their other product verticals.

For a lot of games, it totally didn't matter (shoutout Ikaruga, 38 MBs! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2023/03/the-worlds-sm...)

But for games that took advantage of the extra 300 MBs, pirates had to use all these tricks to get the game down to a CD-R size. They'd compress assets, compress or sometimes rip out the FMVs...I think they might have even split some games across multiple CDs.

That's why DRM cracks me up, the pirates will always figure a way around it one way or the other. (Especially in today's day and age where the live service model is so effective. I'd weep for the AAA single-player game, but I can't remember the last one I played and enjoyed. They've been dead for a long time. Long live the indie single-player game.)

For straight up modding: definitely the Xbox. The 007 and Mechwarrior bugs blew everything wide open, and the fact that it was just a PC with real (upgradeable!) storage spawned projects like XBMC, now known as Kodi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)

And also piracy was rampant, but not the Swapmagic or Modchip kind. You could just upgrade the drive, _backup_ your games on there, and play 'em all of the drive.

The Wii and 3DS are also suuuuper open and hackable though. The homebrew scenes on both are incredibly impressive, not to mention the whole ecosystem of full blown launchers and shells and stuff. (Which, now that I think about it, was also a big deal on Xbox.)

But it does solve the offline issue that the blog author was experiencing.

But I'll gladly give this a shot with a sideload.

I fully spec'd out "On the Way" with a buddy of mine. Picking up beer close to your destination? Gas close to your departure point? The inverse? We would have you covered.

We had a path with Google Maps API, and I was convinced that monetization was at least possible enough to get Real Life VC funding.

In any case...this looks like a couple features. Sorry... :(

It was a feature. Google Maps had it implemented to 75% of what we'd spec'd within 9-12 months.

It's not like we'd actually tried, of course. We had full time jobs, for God's sake! But it became abundantly clear to me in that timeframe that FEATURE-sized ideas weren't gonna be viable. The Big Boy Ad Companies were gonna be burning those down for the next few months/years/forevers.

I should caveat: OpenBSD is INCREDIBLE, and we owe it the world (honestly, for OpenSSH alone, but the rest of it is an absolute gold standard too). And I know I could've gotten there.

BUT, FreeBSD just worked for me out of the box on both.

Haven't run NetBSD, but with the native Wireguard support in there now, I might have to throw a NetBSD gateway into my homelab.

Anyone have any good recs on prosumer routers / switches that run NetBSD well?

Got into the temps, realized that the CPU fan had been plugged into an AUX fan header instead of the CPU header.

Fan was spinning, wouldn't have thought to check if the EFI wasn't crashing.

I'm completely joking of course. I completely agree with you, I miss text-only mode. The modern Dell one stinks, the Asus one stinks...I have no data, but I'd be shocked if Gigabyte or ASRock were any good... :(

What if someone gave you a binary and the source code, but not a compiler? Maybe not even a language spec?

Or what if they gave you a binary and the source code and a fully documented language spec, and both of 'em all the way down to the compiler? BUT it only runs on special proprietary silicon? Or maybe even the silicon is fully documented, but producing that silicon is effectively out of reach to all but F100 companies?

It's turtles all the way down...

And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.

(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266

All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)

Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.

But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.

Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!

I have great respect for the iOS security model. Seriously a marvel and best-in-class accomplishment.

But this is flatly not true. If you really care, you have Graphene et al, and even without that stock Android has plenty of well-tested features that enable you to lock down the device further than at stock. And rooting as a pathway to undermine security is a well understood aspect of the threat model

Whether there's "Pegasus" attribution or not, the reality of the contemporary internet is: if you're targeted hard enough, you're probably screwed. (....but you're probably not actually targeted that hard, so practice good practices)

That being said, I agree with others that it's probably a good technical, PR, and long-term "marketability to regimes" approach for Apple to just double down and spend millions instead of thousands on competing with the black market to buy 0-days.

The important crux of the counterpoint to this article is "if you ship your database, it's now the API" and everything that comes along with that.

All the problems you _think_ you're sidestepping by not building an API, you're actually just compounding further down the line when you need to do things to do your database other than simply "adding columns to a table". :\

Edit: re-reading, the point I didn't make is that having your database be your API _is_ viable, so long as you actually treat it as an API instead of an internal data structure.

I've also taken plenty of steps backwards, but I'd like to hope that's part of the process...

Ironically, while I love my therapist still, my psych has been an absolute pill pusher. I've routinely told her that I'm not interested in _also_ being prescribed Xanax because I'm having some anxiety after a long, shitty breakup. That discomfort is part of the human experience. But she is SO eager to throw more Rx at me...it's been kind of eye opening how easy it could be to abuse prescription meds.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806988

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807050