> Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.
Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.
Wireguard is _really_ simple in that sense though. If you're not doing anything complicated it's very easy to set up & maintain, and basically just works.
You can also buy quite a few routers now that have it built in, so you literally just tick a checkbox, then scan a QR code/copy a file to each client device, done.
My ISP-provided router (Free, in France) has WG built-in. But other than performance being abysmal, its main pain point is not supporting subnet routing.
So if all you want is to connect your phone / laptop while away to the local home network, it's fine. If you want to run a tunnel between two locations with multiple IPs on the remote side, you're SoL.
This makes no sense. A lifetime license is convenient conceptually, but it completely detaches your goals (working software) from a company's incentives (provide absolutely zero after initial delivery - everything afterwards is cost without upside). Lifetime licenses are bad for users (cf this post, as just one example).
Subscriptions are incentives for companies to keep doing what you want, along with direct consequences (everybody will cancel) to penalise them for ignoring their core user base.
Don't let the awkwardness of the system (fully agree modern banking is shit at letting you manage recurring bills) distract from the underlying user-beneficial dynamics.
Edit: let me give you an example. How much do you pay Valve for a Steam subscription? Zero, because they don't offer one, because that isn't what their customers want. This is Valve, who offers perpetual licenses exclusively, offers steep discounts often, and is worth 10s of billions of dollars. The excuses for why it doesn't work are bullshit peddled by middlemen mouthpieces for suits who believe in nothing. They are redundant leeches. Ignore them and make it work.
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
well they're not comparable to hetzner anymore, both in terms of features and price. only their dedibox brand could compare, as it's the classic hosting approach vs cloud.
for the hobby crowd it's a shame, for a corporation it's still cheaper than aws with the extra bonus of not having any tie to the us.
My impression is that Grok is very rarely used in practice outside of a niche of die-hard users, partly because of very different tuning to other models, and partly the related public reputation around it.
https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots... suggests 0.6% of chat use cases, well below the other big names, and I suspect those stats for chat are higher than other scenarios like business usage. Given all that, I can see how Gemini might not be focused on competing with them.
well, there are 3 kind of usages for grok:
- using grok inside X/Twitter: most people interacts with Grok this way.
- using grok on its website: this is really annoying, as you get delayed by cloudflare everytime you access the site. As grok does not provide serious advantage over other services, why bother
- you can also use the app, but it is not as convenient as other services.
I don’t know anyone who uses Grok, but in my peer group everyone uses 1-2 paid services like Gemini or Clause or ChatGPT. They’re probably not as “extremely online” as I am, so I can’t generalize this thought, but anecdotally my impression has been that Grok is just very “right wing influencer” coded.
The contrast between the steadily shrinking freedoms in Apple-land and the open computing approach underlying all today's the Valve announcements is fascinating.
I switched from Linux to macOS with osx 10.2.8 because it was a much better unix desktop experience. Lately, more and more I've been feeling a lot like linux is a better desktop experience.
Yeah yeah, I'm sure there's a whole line of people who'd like to mock this entire decision, but I assure you that back then, a lot of us would rather use our desktop OS than fix our desktop OSes broken 802.11b, audio, graphics, etc.. And back then, osx shipped x11, and you could `ssh -Y` and `xnest` and all that fun stuff. Plus linux (and other unixes) never left my side for headless work.
Top this off with all the Android lockdown, and I feel like linux and FLOSS has maybe never been as important as it is now.
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.
You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.
You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Neither the hypothetical ice cream parlor nor Goodnotes is accused of doing that, though.
I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.
This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.
Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries
When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later).
P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.
The way to make this work for real is with a smooth migration path, which means a way to keep running Android apps on your new system.
If you want to sponsor Waydroid to help make that happen, you can do so right now: https://opencollective.com/Waydroid (I'm not affiliated, just a fan, and it's the only realistic route to this I see).
Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.