While you’re not wrong at all in the concept of your post, I wouldn’t call AOL a particularly innovative company. They basically innovated once and then went straight into lazy rent-seeking for the rest of their existence.
I don’t know if I would put Cisco or Nortel in that category, either. They were like gold rush pickaxe companies. The pickaxes themselves weren’t particularly innovative in their case.
A lot of the innovative companies from the dot com era are still around.
I don't think that a dick measuring contest is in order here, but if you insist, just Google the username.
I've essentially created a whole niche of software from nothing. It is not an overstatement to say that the project has changed the world (to some degree, anyway).
Could've easily sold out with that but didn't. Make of that what you will.
But even if that all wasn't the case, none of my points would be invalid.
You started it my friend. You’re all over this thread hating this product for no reason calling it “imposterware.” I think that opens yourself up to deserving your own spoonful of criticism.
I am surprised that as an open source project maintainer that you would do that. Don’t you know first hand what it’s like to get lame comments about how your project is pointless? I’m surprised someone who maintains a notable project would be so willing to criticize others in this way.
“I don’t think a dick measuring contest is order here” is something that someone who lost the dick measuring contest would say. “I could have sold out.” I imagine Sequoia Capital was begging you to accept their term sheet for your third party robot vacuum firmware, but you were the better man and turned them down, gotta keep it real. Respect.
It’s common for commenters in online forums who have lost the argument to resort to ad hominem attacks — including references to their comment history and vague repulsion of the content of their character, despite they themselves possessing many of those same traits.
It’s not just that you — the person I am replying to — has no leg to stand on, it’s also a case of human stubbornness.
In the next phase after this reply, commenters in this situation will turn toward a melancholic assessment of their sadness and disappointment with the way the conversation went. They may bring up unrelated subjects — in this case, how corporate does not care about their opponent’s hustle culture mindset — further delivering an ad hominem attack disguised as charitable pity on their opponent’s constructed persona. The goal is not just to paint the opponent as wrong, it’s also to paint them as mentally unwell so that the content is further discredited despite its objective merit.
Typically, they will re-affirm the superior quality of their own character — this is a tactic used to maintain moral superiority and avoid discussing the issue at hand.
Their next move is simple — they will declare that they are done replying.
Critically, the commenter will never address the original criticism — in this case, never addressing their hypocrisy in willingness to deliver harsh and unwarranted criticism toward another commercially successful project — while refusing to accept similar criticism of their own project or admit that they would not enjoy the same surface-level aesthetic attacks against the merits of their own project.
Honestly I've liked it more before you've edited in the part after "Yes, I am an AI."
But anyway.
Look, man, I don't think that this is contributing to this platform.
I.. uh.. hope, that this is just an internet persona for you, because if not, then I'm worried for your soul. (Basing this on the rest I've read).
Corporate doesn't care about you. Neither does hustle culture.
That path clearly is not going to work out for you, so bad-faith attacking everything and anything that is against that is.. uh.. not really going to lead anywhere.
But you do you.
I for one am happy with my decisions and where I stand.
I hope you can say the same about yourself.
I think it’s an interesting theory but a bit too conspiracy theory-ish.
Nvidia just wants to sell stuff to everyone.
And I think for professionals doing local AI work, products like Strix Halo and Apple Silicon are a competitive threat.
A big part of maintaining the leading software ecosystem is ensuring you have competitive hardware for all your users.
I also think the RTX Spark product is relatively low effort for Nvidia. Grab a Mediatek CPU and slap an Nvidia GPU on the die. Sure, that’s oversimplifying it, but still.
The license is the most interesting part of this project. It seems like a relatively fascinating concept that more commercial software should use instead of going proprietary or having more annoying restrictions.
A browser in a memory unsafe language that looks like it's 20 years old, "written" by a sloperator and it doesn't render a bunch of stuff.
With the amount of modern security that depends on the browser, I can't see how one could recommend this.
I also would be a lot less critical of this project if it wasn't claiming to be at a 1.0.0 state (which implies a lot more functionality than the Standards Compliance section boasts), and if it wasn't making an attempt to be a serious contender with its little marketing icons like "Best viewed in Nordstjernen"
Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.
To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.
To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.
To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.
There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.
> an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?
Many many folks are the type that is willing to hard grind/suffer short-term to get through a hoop, but as soon as they are inside they turn that 'optimizer' mindset towards 'how can I do the minimum necessary to coast and collect my paycheck'.
And many many folks who are highly motivated to work hard every day at their job are not highly motivated to prepare for jumping through a hoop like a circus clown.
For your first paragraph, that’s just a risk of hiring employees that has nothing to do with the interview process. You can possibly surface some of that during behavioral interviews.
If you as a manager can’t detect your employees coasting that’s a you problem. Understanding how to motivate your current employees is not in the scope of the interview process.
For your second paragraph, we can use a cynical attitude calling this “jumping through a hoop like a circus clown” but do you really want to hire someone with such a cynical view of the minor inconvenience of interviewing?
A lot of candidates are very accepting of the fact that interviews will take some work to complete and don’t take a cynical attitude to it.
I don’t have any interest in hiring someone who thinks 2-3 hours of time for a short list candidate interview after the screening process is unreasonable.
If you have made it to my 2-3 hour interview process, you are only competing against 2-3 people for the job. This isn’t some kind of unreasonable waste of time, I’m offering salaries multiple times the median salary, sign-on bonus, equity, generous PTO and free healthcare plan, etc. Having a chance to get all that is definitely worth 3 hours of interviews.
I don’t really need to hire the person who has $10 million in their bank account and refuses to lift a finger to get a job. That person can enjoy their life and do something else.
'Hoop-jumping' is an indication that the rest of the organization is inept at moving fast and being decision-oriented. I believe capable organizations can make good decisions on limited information and their interview process should be reflective of that.
If the interview process takes more than 3 steps and 3h, I'm out.
My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.
If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.
“Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”
I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.
However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.
Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.
I don’t want to put my future coworker through six rounds of interviews. If it takes more than three rounds + a phone screen to figure out if someone is a good fit then the process is broken.
Whether it's reasonable depends on the distribution, not just the duration.
A 2 hour onsite with the candidate being rapid-fire interviewed by six different different teams and a 20 minute call every couple weeks for three months are very different (and select for very different types of candidates) despite having the same overall duration.
Well, let’s not pretend like Starlink is the same as previous satellite internet providers. No previous providers were anywhere near as fast or low latency. The use cases for Starlink are a lot wider than previous solutions and it can even compete directly for customers who have cable existing service.
I still agree that the company is disastrously overvalued. Even if we consider Starlink to be just as valuable as a telecom like Verizon, that’s only a $190 billion dollar company.
A transactional message is something like "Thank you for signing up" or "Your password was changed" once per transaction. Hence, transactional.
Regardless how much they and you want to spin it, this is a 14 day marketing campaign. A single transaction (ie. subscribing) should not result in 14 emails sent. And certainly not one a day. By that logic I can send you unlimited emails because you bought one thing from me once and somehow consider all of them "transactional".
No, my logic specifically said that the emails have a defined end and that makes them transactional. You can’t extend my logic beyond my specific boundaries.
I would say I’m not even trying to spin it. For all I know the emails say “here is the user manual for our app” or “thanks for signing up, please enable 2FA as soon as possible.” The author of the blog post never actually detailed the contents of the email.
You define them as marketing emails (without knowing the content) but the company is saying that they are a critical part of the service.
I am basically saying that they have a pretty reasonable legal argument that covers their ass in court because they stop sending them after 14 days and they are directly tied to the onboarding to the service.
How can it be marketing if you already bought the product and people who didn’t buy the product can’t possibly receive the same set of emails?
1. The emails are only sent to new paying customers.
2. They seem to describe how to use the functionality in the service (again, we don’t know exactly because the author won’t post contents, but that’s what the disclaimer message says)
Marketing emails are send to existing and new paying customers all the time, it's exceptionally strange that that is the line you decide to use to determine if something is marketing or not.
Once again, regardless how you want to try and spin it, nobody signs up for a 14 day marketing campaign willingly, and subscribing is in no way shape or form an indicator of said acceptance. Most people would bat multiple eyelashes at any service that claims that is a transactional email and some might even be so put off they don't decide to subscribe or, like the author, are so frustrated that they'll likely unsubscribe because of said marketing spam. That right there is already indicative of how helpful and necessary these emails are.
Not sure why this is the hill you're deciding to die on but this ain't it.
12 million subscribers don't seem to mind. But I guess that is "nobody" in your eyes.
I'm not dying on any hill, I'm just factually pointing out that emails that have a defined end date are by legal definition able to be categorized as transactional.
I must apparently point out again and again, the author of the article never posted the content of the messages so for all we know they are 0% marketing.
The CAN-SPAM Act only covers a specific type of marketing email with a specific set of rules. It doesn't cover emails that fall under the explanation that NYT provided.
The author of the blog just didn't accept the explanation.
This would be like if I just wrote a blog post and complained that every company sending me an email about updating the terms and conditions and I just called it "marketing" because I didn't know better.
Which, again, the author never disclosed the content of the email, only their opinion that they were marketing emails, when NYT's explicit description was spelling out the fact that they were one-time transactional emails that end in 14 days.
This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.
And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.
It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.
Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.
This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.
Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.
> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.
You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.
I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.
Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.
I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.
I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.
If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.
> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.
THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.
The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.
I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.
A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.
I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.
I don’t know if I would put Cisco or Nortel in that category, either. They were like gold rush pickaxe companies. The pickaxes themselves weren’t particularly innovative in their case.
A lot of the innovative companies from the dot com era are still around.
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