But with the advent and advances of several decades, aren't you supposed to be able to get better quality for cheaper today?

These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.

Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".

So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.

Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".

It's $120/year/account for multi-user setup, and $60/year/account for single-user.

Which is still dirt cheap if you use social media professionally. E.g. what would $360 buy you if you try to do self-hosting? Maybe a day of work from a devops engineer to get this deployed for you?

E.g. Buffer charges around $50 per year per social media account, which gives you an unlimited number of collaborating user accounts. And their single user plans are even cheaper.

I don't see how self-hosting would be a worthy investment of your time/effort in this case, unless you are in some grossly mismanaged organization where you have several devops engineers paid for doing literally nothing.

This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system.

I seriously doubt such clauses still exist today. The entrenchment of the MIC in the US political structure is so deep and stretches for so long, that they have probably managed to avoid having such clauses by now. After all, that's their obligation to their shareholders.

Also, the more high-tech the weapon, the more complex and fragile are its supply chain logistcs. So, scaling up the production of high-tech weapons is much harder, especially in wartime.

Also not an expert, but I get the feeling that "cluster munitions" is pretty much an umbrella term.

Because of the CCM [1], we tend to associate the term with the "ligther" variants, which are used as anti-personnel weapons. These variants probably wouldn't be much more destructive than a few grenades.

But what Iran is currently using, appears to be missiles with 500-1000kg payload. This puts each submunition in the 50-100kg range. This should deliver a lot more of a punch than a grenade. Also, because of their weight, they probably wouldn't be covered by CCM, had Iran ratified it.

And, yes, it is unsettling geeking out on this stuff, that may actually be killing people as we write our comment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munition...

A colleague has been using Claude for this exact purpose for the past 2-3 months. Left alone, Claude just kept spewing spammy, formulaic, uninteresting summaries. E.g. phrases like "updated migrations" or "updated admin" were frequent occurrences for changes in our Django project. On the other hand, important implementation choices were left undocumented.

Basically, my conclusion was that, for the time being, Claude's summaries aren't worthy for inclusion in our git log. They missed most things that would make the log message useful, and included mostly stuff that Claude could generate on demand at any time. I.e. spam.

I guess that's what you get for electing an American as the Pope. /s

It is not the proverbial gift horse. You are paying fresh $ for it. So, it is only reasonable to have some baseline expectations on redeeming value from it.

Also, an important point of the MacBook Neo criticism is that because of its cut-down features, a Neo may never graduate to a "hand-me-down computer", but instead head straight to the e-waste pile.

> not actively developed anymore

With no regulations in place, companies would rather innovate in profit extraction rather improving technology. And if they have enough market capture, they may actually prefer to not innovate, if that would hurt profits.

Also, while computers may not be used much for cosmic rays to be a risk factor, but they're still susceptible to rowhammer-style attacks, which ECC memory makes much harder.

Finally, if you account for the current performance loss due to rowhammer counter-measures, the extra cost of ECC memory is partially offset.

E.g. EU enforced mandatory USB-C charging from 2025, and pushes for ending production of combustion engine cars by 2035. Why not just make ECC RAM mandatory in new computers starting e.g. from 2030?

AMD is already one step away from being compliant. So, it's not an outlandish requirement. And regulating will also force Intel to cut their BS, or risk losing the market.