sbarre

Also even small businesses can reach a global (or at least national) audience, and you can't do that with billboards and flyers in your town.

Digital ads, like it or not, are one of the only ways to reach your total/potential market.

But wait, where's the iPad in all this? /s

Make it 2x then. For most companies, doubling their output (either with more features or half the time for existing ones) is still a massive win.

Yep, this. I've seen it coined as "the age of personal software" and I totally agree.

I've built easily a dozen personal apps in the last few months that I have no plans on releasing or sharing, run locally, and solve very specific productivity (or one-off) issues for me.

I would never have spent the time building these apps in the pre-LLM days because the effort wouldn't have been worth the gains.

But now? Sure Claude, build me a MacOS app in Swift that does this exact thing I need. Less than an hour later, it's done.

Small static websites are effectively free (Cloudflare, GCP free tier, etc)..

I mean, your productivity gains are relative to your starting point in some way.

If you are already an advanced company filled with skilled people, you may not see the gains that a mid-tier company filled with mediocre seat warmers would see when their "best and brightest" start adopting AI to replace said seat warmers.

I have no doubt that every commpany that has a "prevent decompilation" term in their license is terrified of that ever being tested in court.

I've been exploring Chatto as a self-hosted chat UI in my homelab for interfacing with durable agents and it works pretty well so far, although the API is (by the author's own admission) not fully stable yet.

What site were you looking at? All those things are on the page.

My 2016 Kindle has been in airplane mode since 2018 and I don't plan on ever changing that.

I would argue it happens even inside marketplaces. We've seen the authors of popular Chrome extensions take payouts and sell their extensions to new owners who have bad intentions for the userbase.

Certainly but often there's a company or well-known entity behind popular software, so that brings some accountability to the table.

In this case, these ArtCraft apps are one person I think?

Sure but the idea here is that so many people are doing it, it will be a game of whack-a-mole for rightsholders to go after every single person who is trying this, or forking repos, etc..

And if you get a letter from lawyers, then you tell your agents to write the spec at that point, and you produce the spec..

I'm not saying this is correct or legal, but I've noticed that everyone doing LLM-powered RE these days is stating "clean-room implementation" and my gut tells me that most of them are not actually doing it.

As a Lightroom user, I've tried _many_ times to use Darktable, and I've given up every time.

Like so many open source GUI projects, it's clear they have solid technical developers who are building good underlying tech, but they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like.

That's not my point at all.

If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?

I think the idea here is that all these reverse-engineering projects are _saying_ they're doing clean room implementations for quasi-legal protection.

So they are claiming to follow the legally protected "decompile -> write spec -> new code from spec only" process but they're likely skipping the "write spec" step, and hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.

Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true?

They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper.

I hope I'm wrong!

I was also going to post "this sounds like usability/user research".

But I guess we all re-discover things when we need to.

The biggest issue I've seen with tech docs is often expert users of a given tool or product are enlisted to write the docs, because of their expertise.

But then ironically they end up writing those docs for an audience that shares their level of expertise, rather than for the intended audience.

So you end up with lots of assumptions or leaps of logic in the docs that the intended audience can't follow.

Here's the thing, I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for Adobe tools who are in fact only using "the most obvious subset of functionality" and would love to have a replacement that suits their needs without the hefty subscription price.

So even if these tools never reach 100% parity with Adobe, if they offer the basics, and they're free and open source, it will be a win.

Yeah I tend to make my diagrams either as I go, as exploration, or after I'm done figuring things out as a summarizing artifact (and agents are great at using Mermaid to do that second one).

I've done this in Google Earth VR, and it's very fun. You can get down to basically street view, but everything is very blocky and blurry..

Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.

If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..

For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.

All of the above arguments rely on very unlikely hypotheticals and unrealistic assumptions, sorry.

10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.

As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).

The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.

You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.

> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"

You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.

I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.

That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.

Swapping RAM chips on a board is something a tiny minority of customers would want to do.

Giving that tiny minority that freedom, at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems, is a dumb choice to make (IMO), which is why they didn't make it.

On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want, rather than expecting every product to cater to your needs, regardless of whether it makes sense for it to do so or not.

Did you actually read the linked discussion before jumping in to argue?

Your questions have already been answered.

> > You'd be ok with that trade?

> Umm, yes...?

Ok, and so that trade then means Raspberry Pis don't exist, because the conditions are such that the company doesn't have the incentive to produce the device in a way that makes sense to them.

Congrats, you now live in a world where you are theoretically free to swamp the RAM on a device that never got made.

Also tone down the freedom sob story: if you don't like the limitations of this device, buy a different one. Your "freedoms" are not at risk just because this small company trying to put out an affordable device is making trade-offs to protect the vast majority of their customers (who will never swap the RAM chips on their board) at the expense of a small minority who wants to do a thing their product is not intended for.

> You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.

Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..

Rules for me, not for thee..

I find their explanation to be completely reasonable.

As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.

You'd be ok with that trade?

Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.

I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.

Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.

If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?

YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.

I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.

What's the cost (broadly speaking, not in your specific case) of doing the same work an LLM would have done without the LLM though?