All it takes is one incident, and all your company's internal data will start showing up in public users' chats. You can rely on a contract to prevent this, or you can guarantee it by using a locally hosted model you fully control.

When combined with the cost savings and good enough performance mentioned in the article, this can become a huge selling point.

Even as a free iOS app, there is the $99/year Apple Developer fee, on top of any server costs.

Meanwhile, a web app can be used by anyone on any device, and if designed properly, can be hosted for free on a number of platforms.

If the goal is to make money from casual users, an indie iOS app is the move.

... But that would not fly for what I presume to be a very large fraction of the HN audience that lives and breathes code. What could have been an interesting and tweakable open source project built in a weekend, sold as a closed untweakable app at a $20/year subscription, only for iPhones? That would certainly be quite a bold sell.

The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]

From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.

If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.

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[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-f...

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...

ESS is a paid, fully managed service by the Element team for ease of use.

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[0] https://github.com/element-hq/

This can foster more community than if MIT code were to be taken and locked behind closed doors, for profit and to no benefit for the devs that made it possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics

The death blow is the tones. For the Anglo-centric, not only are you unable to "read out" the characters like you can Latin-based scripts (let alone the "cursive script"), but if the tones are off, you'll accidentally call your mother (妈 mā) a horse (马 mǎ). Japanese is a lot more straightforward in this regard.

On its own, each challenge is surmountable. English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]).

But when the whole language is like that, it becomes a lot harder.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/221b2t/read...

It's also been used in the Google Translate logo as well.

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[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%87

[1] Not only because of Simplified/Traditional/Japanese renderings (文 is mostly the same across all three), but more strokes for a small icon is a bad idea regardless

Even if you were handed opportunities on a silver platter (ie. rich parents), you still had to put in your own effort somewhere along the chain to get the ball rolling.

If you never start, no matter how lucky or good your circumstances are, you will still be at 0%. Therefore, there's no success without effort.