convalescindrey

Unfortunately he did a lot of BS along the way which made it easy to dismiss everything he said.

And they definitely don't need to join it with data about my phone location history and my search history. Or evaluate which video I have watched for how long. Subscriptions, fine. Recent history, fine. Until I delete those, then I want them gone, not just some "delete" flag turned on.

It wasn't such a reference, no.

And I believe it's hard to do this kind of thing as an afterthought. If your whole engineering culture is built around having a QA dept then just firing that dept is obviously going to have disastrous consequences.

That can hardly be an argument to rule something new as "unconstitutional".

I'm going to need to assume that this is an oversimplifying summary then?

> This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.

I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.

> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits

Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.

It's easier to criticize the baiter than the baitee, but that may be barking up the wrong tree. Tech companies are acting within the economic and regulatory framework. Criticizing them for doing so is not helpful. Ironically, I'd guess that the majority of the HN crowd is actually making their living directly or indirectly off that.

I don't follow. I don't have integrity because I'm consistent in my replies?

I also don't see how turning this discussion into ad hominem against myself is meaningful. Attacking that I'm using a throwaway? Seriously?

Yes, my comments may be dark. It's because my view on society is dark. It just does not help to blame big tech for the laziness of people to not want to pay and watch ads instead.

I agree! I'm very disappointed with my fellow humans too! But what do you want to do? If you reduce how much the general population can impact their life then you are doing democracy a disservice. As sad as that is.

There are competitors, but they also use ads.

Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.

What were the Supreme Courts reasons for deeming this unconstitutional?

You want an economic system that provides you cat videos for free?

I'm quite ok with markets and capitalism. Should be regulated, but if you get your wish then there will be 300+ Americans who also want a wish. I rather have people pay for their wishes.

> It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud.

Sorry, this is just not true. If you let yourself get baited, then it's your responsibility. Don't lift the responsibility from the general populace of mostly mature adults. If they like to see ads then it's their problem.

> B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under.

If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

> never underestimate the ingenuity of a good QA person. "app freezes while triple-clicking About button while changing wifi network when storage is 89% full and screen reader is enabled"

If such feature interactions matter then your application has bigger problems than a QA department.

> it's the same with good security folk. sure you can pretend you'll catch 100% of issues, but it's a delusion, good security or quality testing is a totally different mode of thought

Oh I'm not saying that good QA isn't a valuable skill! Of course it is, it doesn't just happen on its own. What I'm claiming is that it's a skill that should be employed as close as possible to the creation of the thing that it's assuring the quality of. So, ideally within the developer themselves.

Same thing with security. You will have a terrible security in your product if you first design and implement it and then put security in there as an afterthought by a dedicated security team. Ideally it's been at the table from day 1. So, a good security team works on educating your devs to do things right from day 1. Just like QA.

Anual revenue is in the ballpark of about $1bn-$5bn.

I agree! So, stop using the service then.

Apparently most people don't care though. So, whom are you criticizing? Youtube for providing a service that's populare despite their way of financing which you personally don't like, but others don't have a problem with? Or the other viewers for not joining your boycott?

I'm not even talking about those producing content. It's their choice to upload things.

But the platform itself needs to be paid for as well. You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.

And what they do to circumvent what you are doing to avoid seeing the ads is also their choice.

The alternatives are stop watching the content or pay for it. If you chose the ad-supported version then that's on you.

Yeah, my 9-year-old grandson could not upload his hillarious videos about dinosaurs anymore. Please explain to him that he can open some Patreon to support his Youtube fees instead.

Sadly, a Youtube Premium subscription only removes the ads. They still collect all the data about you.

Remember that you are not just paying with ad eyeballs, but also with your data. When what where how much you watch. That's nobodies business. I'd pay for not having this be in somebodys DB, ready to be exploited (and/or leaked).

> In my late 30s, I went serious about getting ads out of my life.

Have you also cut everything out of your life that's financed through ads? So I'm expecting you to not use any Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube or other modern web content.

I agree that ads are manipulative. That's their very essence. But they exist for a reason. Not to enrich people, but the uphold one side of a bargin. You can't expect everything to be for free.

> I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are.

I hate ads as much as the next guy. But that's the economic model most of the web is built on. Anybody without a youtube premium subscription who rants about youtube ads is just hypocritical. How should this be financed? Either you give your money or your eyeballs. Nobody is going to work for free so you can watch cat videos.

Please don't come with morals here. Expecting things for free is just as morally problematic.

Then your developer should learn that "done" means more than "works on their machine".

The difference between devs and dedicated QA people is that devs know the dark corners of the implementation. They know the edge cases and scenarios that they struggled with getting right. That's where most testing focus has to be. QA doesn't know any of that. They can play through some scenarios that are the expected ones from the spec, perhaps have some hunch of what could be the tricky cases, but they don't actually know.

I love seeing all those downvotes for my GP comment. That's all the people working at companies where stuff that devs feel is below them is dumped on QA people, which is the main reason my company is well-known for shipping top quality (without having a QA dept) while our competitors struggle with quality (despite having a QA dept). That's all the evidence I need to back up my claim.

Great project!

A comment I'd have is that it's quite hard to find out who authored this fine piece of software.

A changelog is supposed to tell you what has changed.

A general greeting/landing page is supposed to tell you what the thing is.

Trouble is if a link to a changelog is submitted to HN. Most people who don't know what the thing is click on it, have no clue what they are looking it, close it again and then downvote the submission.

Submissions for not-widely-known stuff should be a landing page, not a changelog page.

(In other words, this hurl page is kind of a mix between these two which is odd and arguably misusing what a changlog / news announcement page should be.)

If devs have to do QA themselves, many issues magically disappear.

Every apartment and house I've bought up to this day in my life (and I've moved quite a lot over the decades) would have been almost an impossible sale by the owners themselves. Their realtor was able to present the place, reply with empathy (that is, understood where I was coming from and what my interests are) and get back to me with important info about the property and district that the owners themselves usually had little clue about. The owners themselves where often awkward, hard to talk to and overall pretty clueless.

So, all those folks definitely got something out of hiring a realtor. Nothing to do with "legal stuff". Most people are just terrible at presenting and selling things. And that's fine. Claiming otherwise is closing your eyes for what's out there in the real world.

> It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.

Well, let's say, you have a really competent investigator. Is that the person you want to be promoted into a position where they are not doing any investigating anymore? In that light it's good to have the incompetent higher up so that the people doing the real work are those that are competent. :)

> are so good at marketing

Yes, that's their job and primary purpose. Yes it's hard. Most people have anxiety to even talk to their neighbors without sweating.

Sure there are lots of idiots out there, like in every profession. But those who are not idiots are providing a valuable service. Try selling your house yourself and then let's chat again about how it's not a hard job that you could just do yourself.