rrwo

I think the cost of paying for a dedicated email service is worth it. (There are plenty of smaller, privacy-oriented services such as Proton Mail or Fast Mail.)

They're better at it than I am, and it means I don't have to fill up my free time maintaining another server.

One solution is to use a unique email address for every website, and change the address if the site gets compromised (with the old address getting added to a spam filter).

The last thing anyone wants a smart home assistant for is to purchase stuff.

Controlling lights, heating and cooling, play music, find information, yes. But shopping is unexciting and low on the list.

Depends on how much you're willing to pay and how long you're willing to wait for them to be available.

The best carpenters will be making custom furniture and wood panels for mansions, and have multi-year waiting lists.

There are tradespeople who are excellent and available to mere mortals, though. But there's often a waiting list, and you may pay more. (I've had the best luck with auto-mechanics.)

The problem with OpenAI isn't about the license or where it's hosted.

The problem is that it's not intelligent. It's a word salad generator.

This reminds me of a story that I heard from a tree surgeon. A customer complained about the cost of removing a tree as it was "unskilled" labour, and he asked them if they knew how to remove a 30-metre high tree without it falling on his house or car, or if he even owned the right tools, or if he was able and willing to climb up to the top of that tree and remove branches.

Thanks for posting that.

People tend to overlook that the technologies we use today have a much older history.

A tool like that won't replace auditing dependencies.

The total age of dependencies tell you nothing useful.

Why are you in a worse position?

That depends on the changes to the library since, and how and where the library is used.

Suppose I regularly generate a CSV file, all ASCII, where all the rows are integers or fixed precision numbers. I have a ten year old CSV library that processes that file, and has worked without any problem for ten years.

I have no interest in updating the library. Updates can introduce downtime, but provide no improvement. In fact, they introduce a slight performance hit because of new features and that I don't need. There is also the risk that the updates will introduce bugs, and then I'll have to spend time diagnosing the bug, and coming up with a fix.

Now let me reverse this: suppose there are two libraries to do the same task, A and B. They don't have the same features, but for your use case, they are both easy to use and do exactly what you need.

A was first released in the 1980s and was last updated five years ago. It's still maintained and is available in most Linux distributions.

B was first released three years ago and has had 20 updates since, 18 of which included fixes for security issues that don't affect A. (The website for A is regularly updated to indicate that it has been tested and these issues do not affect t.)

Are you better off using A or B?

Stack Overflow has been less useful for several years before OpenAI.

I find for web technologies it's less useful because the technologies keep change, and what was a good answer in 2010 is not now. To answer questions I find it more useful to consult a primary source, such as the documentation on a some software's website, or a forum dedicated to that software.

On SO I often get no replies, or unhelpful and often toxic comments along the lines of "Technology X is bad, use Y instead".

Or I often get people who answer the question as if they show applying for a job at Google. No, I just need help with some software to process a few thousand rows and send a summary once a month by email. I'm not trying to process petabytes of data with a response time of <1ms.

I suspect that enforcement of licences will be based on who owns the licence.

A large corporation? Of course. You're not even aloud to talk about the product without paying a fee.

A small creator? Oh no, it's fair use.

Yes, it means that the plastic is going to start entering the good chain there. Plastiglomerate rocks mean that there are bits of plastic in the soil, and this will be consumed by plants and worms, which will be consumed by animals that eat them.

Sometimes a feature request is considered a bug by customers: this product would be easier to use if we could do X, and the competing product lets us to that.