- a2128Looking at the automatic first email and the network tab, this appears to be just wrapping around guerrillamail which is a classic disposable email website, and polling their API (doesn't seem to use websockets). Can you clarify what relationship you have with guerrillamail, if any, and whether or not the encryption and zero persistence claims extend to guerrillamail's service?
- If you read the parent comments we've already established that Amazon punishes sellers for pricing lower on other platforms than Amazon, and Amazon's margins affect item pricing everywhere. You could have zero margins, you could have negative margins, Amazon will see that Seller X's items are available on your Amazon competitor for $2 while it's $20 on Amazon and say that they're in violation of policy. Unless you make it worthwhile for Seller X to abandon Amazon you will not be able to compete.
- What is legitimately the expected use case for Copilot on a TV?
TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?
I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.
- Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.
- The market today is extremely different to what the market looked like at the time Amazon worked their strategy, it was dominated mainly by physical retailers that may have required a long drive, things were not always stocked, limited choice on what's stocked on shelves. And ordering over a phone from paper catalogs had long delivery times and limited information beyond just a picture and short description. Amazon disrupted the industry by changing all of this and becoming the first major online retailer.
You won't be able to just replicate their strategy, and they've spent ridiculous amounts of money on next-day/same-day delivery infrastructure that nobody's gonna be able to invest that much. But if you do have any ideas on how to disrupt Amazon and be more convenient than them in 2025 let me know :)
- It's certainly not the case that you can just buy something outside of Amazon and it'll magically be 40% cheaper. For a long time Amazon pursued aggressive strategies to drive out competition and physical stores, leaving Amazon the most convenient or sometimes the only option.
Having built an extremely strong position, they can now increase prices and fees, and leverage power over sellers to stop them from listing lower prices off-Amazon, if they want to also sell on Amazon. See page 42 of https://web.archive.org/oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/... for an example of this
- The sentence immediately after that would imply sarcasm
> Note: please help, because I'd like to preserve this website forever and there's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I'm an engineering manager with a computer science degree. Please please please help (sad emoji)
- EVs are not intrinsically complicated as some sibling commenters say, but the issue is that EVs are new and mostly made after the point when automakers started building cars as computers. And it's also a good excuse to put even more computers inside because an EV has to look modern with big screens and cool chimes right?
I think this genuinely hampers EV adoption and governments should take some sort of action if they want to transition the market to EVs. Not that the average consumer chooses cars based on how many computers are inside it, but this builds a general impression of fragility and creates such negative stories. We need simple, reliable, serviceable EVs, but the incumbents are not going to build it on their own. (Government excessive regulations for safety, backup cameras, speed limiters, etc arguably created this problem in the first place)
- This is a drastic misrepresentation of the situation. All Android apps already have code signing, you cannot install an app unless it has a signature, and any future updates are blocked unless the signature matches. This is how it's been practically since the start of Android, it's part of the security model to prevent something like a malicious Firefox APK stealing your cookies.
What's new is that they were gonna block installations outside of Google Play, unless the developer has signed up for Google Play Console and has gone through a verification process there, whitelisting their signing key fingerprint. However, they've walked back on this and said they'll create a new "advanced flow" for "advanced users" that's "designed to resist coercion" to bypass this restriction. Door in the face technique IMO, the existing 12-step process to installing an app was already complicated enough.
So effectively the result is that file based installations will be blocked unless Google has specifically whitelisted their key through the Google Play Console verification process, or the user goes through this "advanced flow" which we're yet to see any details of
- The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
- Who's to say it has to keep moving forward? The companies are buying up massive amounts of GPUs in this AI race, a move that's widely questioned because next year's GPUs might render the current ones outdated[0], so there will probably be plenty of GPUs to go around if the CEO demands it (prior to collapse). Operating datacenters would probably be out of the question with a collapsed society as the power grid might be unreliable, global networks might be down and securing many datacenters would probably be difficult, but there's at least one public record of a billionaire building his own underground bunker with off-grid power generation and enough room to have his own little datacenter inside[1]. "Ordinary" people will acquire 32GB GPUs or Mac Studios for local open-source LLM inference, so it seems likely billionaires would just do the next step up for their bunker and use their company's proprietary weights on decommissioned compute clusters.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-under...
- Not necessarily, the LLMs used today are far from just simple models of written information on the internet. They use in-house data they wrote themselves, and RLHF/DPO where it's effectively training on its own data to optimize for human preference. If sampling with high enough temperature for this, it could theoretically bring out entirely new unseen forms of speech as long as people express their preference for it via the user interface
- See this article by GitHub about how they removed cookie banners: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work. Common examples of such cookies are those used by third-party analytics, tracking, and advertising services. [...] we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. - If disk space was the only thing preventing a much better update system, it would seem very trivial to just reserve a few extra gigabytes and do what Android does with compressed deltas that get applied which emulates A/B but with much less disk space usage (similar to non-A/B)
> Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"?
Microsoft has become complacent with Windows and I think there's no denying that. You need to look no further than the new right-click context menu they thought is acceptable to ship to a billion users. It's lacking half the functionality such as extensions, so they just decided to keep the old one behind "Show more options"? Or maybe no software engineer in the world could solve the infamous context menu 2.0 problem...
No operating system has fully solved every problem with updates, but many of them have solved many problems that Windows still continues to have. Zero reboot updates are probably impossible to do reliably but there are other ways to improve that aren't zero reboot updates. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of Windows and exactly how to implement better updates, but they could surely do better than what they're currently doing.
- When you run apt upgrade or pacman -Syu that's exactly what you're doing. The files are replaced on your drive while everything else continues running. Generally it won't affect execution of existing software, because they're all already loaded into memory, but some software might crash or get weird behavior as they try to access their files on the drive and those files have been updated, and newly launched programs will use different library versions than other programs which may cause weirdness. You still need to reboot in the end to stop running old stuff that's still in memory such as kernel or existing programs but it's a normal reboot without any extra delay. Canonical does provide Livepatch for Ubuntu Pro for servers that want to update the kernel with security updates without rebooting.
Fedora decided this isn't super stable so they actually went and implemented something similar to Windows updates called Offline updates, where updates are performed after a reboot in a special mode where you can't do anything with your computer while it updates for like 10 minutes, but they give you an option to disable this and do instant updates like described above instead.
I think the most interesting innovation are immutable distros, which handle updates entirely differently. They will build an updated image while the system continues running and make it ready so that next reboot will just boot into the updated image. It avoids the partially-updated-system instability entirely and it also makes reverting a broken update instant and easy because you can just boot into the old image (there's usually at least two images). This exists in Fedora Silverblue (OSTree) and Vanilla OS (ABRoot) and AFAIK Android also followed this update pattern with A/B partitions (although they now iterated on this slightly to squeeze a few extra gigabytes out of storage).
I honestly don't know why Windows still sticks to their antiquated offline update system when better options exist and everyone always complains about the way they do updates and they have billions of dollars at their disposal, but I guess lack of any real competition to Windows in the PC operating system market has led to such stagnation
- It doesn't make sense in isolation, but the first party failed to do this work for the past 10 years and then wants to benefit from a third party who did do the work. Either the third party should get a seat at the table, or they should start fresh with an empty first party store
- The amount of money lost when millions of small restaurants and other retail shops suddenly become unable to accept customer payments for an unknown amount of time because Microsoft thinks Windows should force update during rush hour rather than allowing the computer owner to wait until closing time, would seem to be far greater than the amount of money lost with once-in-10-years WannaCry attacks
- Apple's self service repair is an absolute joke and its only purpose is to exist on paper while deterring everybody away. They will ship a pelican case of factory level equipment to your house, which you need to rent ($49/week) and pay a massive deposit for ($1200). Companies that actually want users to be able to repair their stuff will write at-home repair guides and sell minimal kits similar to what's on iFixit (e.g. tell the user to heat adhesive with their hair dryer rather than a $500 piece of commercial repair equipment)
- Roblox is playable thanks to the efforts of the VinegarHQ team who created the Sober wrapper
- I've always wanted an AI that can play my video games for me, so that I can spend my time doing more fun and fulfilling things, like cleaning the toilet, folding my laundry, washing my dishes, taking out the garbage. Now I will no longer have to worry about the annoying chores in life, like drawing art, writing poetry, or playing video games