They saw Facebook doing this shit with their perfectly working mobile version of messenger and then saying “why not”. My solution is that then I completely stopped using messenger

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

Btw purchasing a transit ticket in Naples is optional, only 2 out of 5 people pay for it

But at that point is paranoia. If you’re worried about tracking via IP address, then there are no websites that you can visit. You can count on a single hand the websites that do no logging whatsoever. Even if you reject cookies, the IP address is always visible server side. Better to sell all your devices and go back living completely offline like in the 80s.

I don’t see what’s the issue.

They want to get paid in some way and they offer the reader the option: pay with your privacy or pay with your money?

Or feel free to close the tab if both options are unacceptable. There are a lot of spamblogs written by chatgpt that allow to read the regurgitated content without accepting cookies, for example.

Maybe it’s infuriating because if you really want to read the content you’re forced to waste 1 second to right click => open in incognito window or waste 1 minute to sign up for a subscription, but I don’t think it’s asshole design, because they have to pay bills. You don’t want sponsored news pieces and fake reviews in that website either, no?

Now if it was like Facebook where the option is “pay with your privacy or pay with your privacy AND with your money”, that would be asshole design

Archive.is and their mirrors use a secret sauce of premium accounts and/or content filter to remove the paywall code before archiving

Blocked in my country because some asshole archived some csam

On the top right. Maybe it’s some a/b testing to see which one “converts” (=annoys) more. I don’t have the “just take me to the download” link like in the other image, just the X to close the login popup

Unacceptable IMHO, I just want to give my clients an easy link to download the huge files I’m sending them without ads or tricks. With this wall many users will get confused and create a new account

Both on mobile and desktop there’s a “login wall” but it can be dismissed by pressing on the X.

Still, it’s a dark pattern that I don’t like, tomorrow at work we will discuss alternatives as we subscribed (one single account shared between everyone) just for sending attachments with filelink using thunderbird - and with a “login wall” it no longer fits the purpose

Shared from a paid account or from a free account?

If shared from paid account, then tomorrow I’m going to cancel our company account as this is unacceptable, we use that for sharing files in emails (we tried to use a self hosted nextcloud but customers are too dumb to figure out how to press the download button)

Free usage is still limited to 2gb unless you got a lot of referrals. It was a lot in 2008, but it’s difficult to daily use that in 2024

Not victim blaming nor defending Adobe because fuck them, but… It’s not a cancellation fee and they’re actually nice to let you cancel earlier.

I explain: when you sign up, you can choose between monthly commitment or yearly commitment. Yearly commitment has a much lower monthly fee because they want to discourage occasional usage, but many individuals wouldn’t like to pay the huge yearly sum in a single payment, and in this case they offer a yearly plan with monthly installments. (For a big company instead is the opposite, they prefer paying the huge sum and get a single invoice instead of 12 invoices - less work for the accounting dept). Yearly plan with monthly installments isn’t the same of a monthly plan.

So, technically, the user agreed to a 1-year contract and they’re even nice to let you go out earlier by just paying back the discount that you got in the meantime, like if you subscribed monthly. If you think about it, it’s almost unheard. With most yearly contracts, there’s no possibility of early cancellation. Even Amazon, that label themselves “the most consumer friendly company” doesn’t easily give partial refunds to unused Prime subscriptions.

Regarding the chargeback, in my country all the banks except American express would reject it as you got the service as stated in the contract

Now that I almost defended Adobe, fuck them and always try to find an alternative to their products before giving a single penny to them

For a professional, what Acrobat pro can do is not available in any other program and (don’t tell Adobe!) only 50 cents a day is an incredible deal

For example you can scan a sheet of paper, it does OCR on it and creates a font that matches exactly the one on page, then you can change words and sentences without changing the look of it.

Trim pages, remove elements, edit embedded images and vectors with other programs (doesn’t need to be made by Adobe but it works better if it is). Change margins, fonts, colors, flow text differently, change the line spacing. Have a preview how color will change when printed, see if spot colors are used and change them in different ways. Edit transparencies, use plugins for extended repetitive work. Convert the fonts to outlines if the font has some kind of DRM and doesn’t allow embedding, resulting in visual difference between other computers.

The nerfed standard edition at 10 euro per month instead isn’t worth anything

Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

1. It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

2. It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

3. It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

4. For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.

I hate those

Pay per view ads are only for walled gardens with a monopoly.

Nobody clicks on ads = the site owner makes lots of money from ads, but advertisers spend a lot of money for low conversions.

No advertiser would ever choose a pay per view model when there’s the possibility of pay per click

For example when I was a reddit users I ran a campaign on Reddit and nobody was clicking the link. After all, you’re doomscrolling, why would you click on an ad? Maybe accidentally, or if it has a deceiving or click bait title. Instead on a normal website, once you’re done with the news or got the info you were searching for, you’re more likely to click somewhere. It’s the reason most Facebook ads are downright scams, because otherwise nobody would click them and also they filter only the gullible people thinking that yes, that Alibaba resell tech masterpiece for $99 discounted from $390 is a very good deal.

Ads on website pay on a “pay for each click” basis. So for each click I waste 5 cents of their budget and hopefully end the campaign a bit earlier than expected

I always click on annoying ads just to fuck with their ad budget, this appeared after clicking on a fake download button.

But knowing Cisco, the router would be unsupported and with some unpatched zero day vulnerability when the RTC battery dies…

somehow, the “dark reader clone” that’s in samsung browser it’s so much accurate. Main disadvantage is that you have to use samsung browser (ugh)…