Netcob

To me that's semantics.

If I had an app, I'd have to pay Apple whatever they want to charge in order to get access to one part of all mobile phone users and Google whatever they want to charge in order to get access to the other.

Maybe calling that a monopoly wouldn't be good enough in an economics paper, but I don't see much of a practical difference. I get to accept the price or not do business.

And to set off some more bots: We desperately need regulation in this space.

It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.

Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.

Am I glad I blocked my CX from 2020 very early from accessing the internet!

Looked into rooting - my old firmware would be ideal, but other than a native ambient lighting tap I don't really see anything worth my time. That model probably doesn't have a wide field mic yet to use for home automation.

Depends on your habits. I don't re-watch most of the movie I see.

Depends on what those $12 "buy" me. In Sony's case, "buying" meant "renting until Sony's license expires", which they could have displayed on the product page.

I very rarely re-watch movies within a few months. So if I buy one, I want to know that I can watch it again in one, 10 or 30 years (if the format can still be played). Which is not guaranteed even with blu-rays mostly thanks to DRM. But what I'd be buying is not having to think about any deadlines.

If I'm okay with a deadline, I might as well rent the movie for a weekend, in which case I expect it to be less than $12.

Are there any cases of people upregulating too much in response to those agonists?

Do you mean "hypo-sensitization" aka "allergen immunotherapy"? I tried that too but couldn't really tell whether it worked either.

My experience was about antihistamines, which are definitely effective.

Because usually you can't study long-term effects before releasing a drug, and even then it can take a long time for them to surface.

I took antihistamines basically throughout my 20s. My allergy specialist said there's no reason not to. I developed some other issues and wanted to stop taking antihistamines to see if that would help (or get a hint whether they were causing it) - but that got me into itching hell for weeks.

In some online forums people reported the same and shared ways to get out of that "addiction" without going insane from itching.

My doctor didn't want to believe it and there was no research on it. That only appeared a few years later in the form of a paper called "Unbearable Pruritus After Withdrawal of (Levo)cetirizine" (2016). In the US, the FDA issued a warning in 2025, which is also the time when I heard about it. None of the doctors I went to back then reported this to anyone, so I'm surprised it got discovered at all.

As for my other issues I have no way of knowing whether they had anything to do with long-term antihistamine use. I'm a sample size of one, and none of the other stuff is quite as clear-cut as "unbearable itching".

I've had other issues with prescription drugs that didn't make the official list of side-effects and sometimes those side-effects don't just go away once I stop taking the drug.

That's why I'm very cautious when trying drugs I never had before, and even more so when it comes to taking them long-term.

Especially as someone outside the US, building a startup on AI sounds like a bad idea. Some AI company fails to pay their bribes on time, or your country doesn't cede territory to the US president, the AI gets yoinked and you are left with Mistral or Qwen.

(Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)

My current solution to this is to write more text. I guess I'm more in product design now. Instead of code I write documents with significantly less structure. I write something, ask the AI to find angles / decisions I missed and frame them as a long list of questions, and then I answer those questions. I iterate that until the AI can't find any more design decisions I need to make and starts generating. At that point I can turn to a different feature or project.

It's pretty exhausting to be honest. In the past I didn't have to know how the entire app was supposed to work. I would plan a bit, then code for a long time, test, plan some more. Sometimes I would get lost in some (enjoyable) architecture nonsense.

Now I just read and write regular text. Instead of exceptions I'm avoiding misunderstandings. It can almost feel like a flow state, so I have some hope that it'll turn into that once I get more used to it.

From what I read it's mostly a credit score and blacklist system. In the 2010s there was a project to use it to reward and punish people for some everyday stuff based on whether it did or didn't align with the party's morals, but it got scrapped. That's the part everyone thinks is going on over there.

I agree it's dystopian, but I live in Germany and we have a similar thing called "Schufa". For most people it mostly means that if they default on a credit, they'll be less likely to find an apartment. It differs from the US one in the sense that banks don't require you to get into debt before they trust you, that whole "build your credit score" nonsense.

That pot&kettle contest between the US and China is really heating up!

You might want to switch from "social credit" (which was a failed local project from over a decade ago) to "blacklist", or just criticize the overall surveillance system, which is pretty invasive.

I'm getting a bit tired of people posting on social media websites and then pretending they are not a part of them. "Reddit" did this, "HN" did that... let's just admit that we're all chronically online people who get irritated whenever we stumble out of our bubble and more than one person dares to disagree with us.

I have a theory that the modern world would not exist without it.

Also, is it "paying for the brand" or "paying for the training"?

I think it's a use case that identity/authorization/permission models are simply not made for.

Sure, we can ban users and we can revoke tokens, but those assume that:

1. Something potentially malicious got access to our credentials 2. Banning that malicious entity will solve our problem 3. Once we did that, repaired the damage and improved our security, we don't expect the same thing to happen again

None of these apply with LLMs in the loop!

They aren't malicious, just incompetent in a way that hiring someone else won't fix. The solution to this is way more extensive than most people seem to grasp at the moment.

What we need is less like a sturdy door with a fancy lock, and more like that special spoon for people with parkinson's. Unlimited undo history.