smartician

I see. It sounds to me then this is a knee-jerk reaction due to the app having been vibe-coded, not so much due to how the app works.

What sort of "grief" did you catch specifically? What are people's concerns with your system? Privacy, resource usage, etc.? Like you said, of course your thing uses AI, just a different flavor than what's currently en vogue.

If they're a PaaS, isn't it insane for them to run their own infrastructure and the customer workloads under the same cloud account?

Multi-region failover?

Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the areas mentioned in the article. This is my personal opinion.

Regarding the Nest thing: I don't think those devices stop working completely if you don't enable location sharing for the "home and away" feature. It might be bad UI that made the user think that this is the case?

Regarding photo sharing: I think that permission is necessary to show a "photo picker" inside the app that allows the user to pick and choose which photos to upload. I'm not quite sure what the alternative would look like: "he can identify specific pictures in his library and grant access to just those" --> How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures? Also, does the author believe the app would then secretly analyze all pictures and send content back to the mothership without the user's consent? Again, this might be a communication/UX issue...

If the goal is to emulate human behavior, I'd say there is a case to be made to build for the same interface, and not rely on separate APIs that may or may not reflect the same information as a user sees.

Define "AI Agent"?

IIUC the EU basically had to force banks to implement this via a mandate. I don't see "business friendly" US lawmakers doing the same anytime soon. The joys of the Free market™!

They have three months to find new roles/teams. Their employment only ends if they can't.

My completely unfounded take: Culture.

In Europe, you have a millennia-long culture of classism, feudalism, aristocracy, guilds, etc., that's still somewhat ingrained in modern society. People are more content with being born into a certain class, not expecting or striving for upward mobility. You'll see people picking a profession after school and sticking with it until retirement, and it's out of the norm to switch or try to start a business.

Whereas in the US, a few hundred years ago settlers came in and had to start from scratch. It doesn't matter what you were in your previous life, everyone had an equal start (more or less), and they had to build whole cities from scratch.

I think this partly also explains the differences in salary between the US and Europe. There is a deeply ingrained sense of "ordinary workers shouldn't make more than $X, that doesn't make sense" creating a kind of tacit collusion between employers, which does not exist in this form in the US.

Did you previously search for that attraction either on Maps or Google Search?

I don't know who Matt is, but I now know that you lack even basic financial knowledge. According to your logic, if I can rent a house for $1, then I'm still losing $1 and my landlord is "gaining $1 in property value". Looks like it was a bad idea to insert myself into this conversation in the first place.

You're assuming that all landlords are rational. Many either see it as a leveraged investment where rent is just one factor to offset their cost, hoping that appreciation will make it profitable. Or the home had strong appreciation so that their cost relative to the current value is low. Or they have some sentimental attachment to the property and rather rent it out at a loss than sell it. In California especially, they might have locked in a low property tax rate which is a fraction of what you would pay when you buy the home today. For example, my in-laws pay $700/month in property tax. If I bought their house at market price today, my property tax bill would be $3,000/month.

For example I rent a home that's currently worth $1.3 million for $3,500/month. The landlord bought it in 2004 for $570,000. Would it make sense for the landlord to sell it instead of renting it out? Maybe, but based on their original investment they're getting a good return. If I were to buy that home off of them, my monthly payment would be more than double the rent. So this works for both of us I guess.