I bought a domain that was previously used for hentai in the 90s and 00s. It was blacklisted from search because Symantec site review and other similar site review services marked it as adult content. I emailed each of them directly and within 48-72 hours, all had manually changed it. This is the only path that I know of.
My two cents, I believe there is an nuance worth deliniating, specifically differentiating between being elite "in status" vs being elite "in nature." Painting broad strokes here for the sake of this post (so take with a grain of salt)...
Many people born into or groomed for an elite status (via inherited wealth, rich families, strong support systems, etc) are rationally self preservationists. They were born on third base and know it. Many subconsciously know they do not belong there and cannot live up to the level of performance, intellectualism and hard work that laid the foundation for their current state or that others had to endure. Thus, they need support from the system to preserve their current state.
People who became elite in nature, are far more likely to value meritocracy. They lacked support, didnt know there was a "system" to be leveraged (eg getting unlimited time for an SAT score with a doctors note), had a chip on their shoulder, grinded their way to be top of their class, were the most productive, knocked on more doors, took risks others would consider irrational, etc.
At every level they've had to fight for what they have in a world where the criteria is often opaque. Being genuinely competent, they don't have an innate imposter syndrome, and thus, they value a system that has a clear and objective criteria for them and others, because they are confident they will operate fine within it.
EDIT 1: to add: With the above in mind, the more useful analysis in my opinion would be to assess the extent to which ethical frameworks and the role of fairness and meritocracy differ between those who were self-made (eg 1st of their generation to go to an IVY or get an MBA) vs not in "elite" positions of wealth or power.
EDIT 2: I'm not suggesting all people born rich don't deserve their success or do not possess these qualities of hard work, etc.
These are good insights. I think it is perhaps also worth noting that even the individuals who succeed on their own merit do so with a lot of luck, and it may not always be obvious to them the luck was there.
Milton Hershey is known for his candy company. Somewhat less known is the fact that his successful candy company was his fourth; his three previous bankrupted (mostly due to fluctuations in prices moving candy from tenable to untenable as a business) and he'd burned through so much of the family fortune pursuing them that his relatives cut him off from further loans. His father before him had liquidated his own piece of the family fortune speculating on opportunities. It could easily have been the case that those speculations might have paid off, which would have made Hershey the son elite category 1 (in status); similarly, if Hershey hadn't found one last source of investment money from a former employee, his candy-making aspirations would have ended when the family cut him off and we wouldn't know his story at all.
The system of stories we tell ourselves highlights the merit and downplays the luck; we don't remember the failure cases, including, often, the failures that predated the success. A lot of people who lacked support, didn't know there was a system to be leveraged, and grinded as far as they could before something critical broke are out there; they just don't get to give TED talks on what complete failure tastes like. Nobody gets to hear the lecture from Henry Hershey on "I mortgaged my family's future on opportunities that, had they paid off, would have made my son and wife wealthy and comfortable for the rest of their days... But none of them paid off and it was all ultimately objectively wasted effort, energy that would have been better spent tending a modest homestead and making it thrive in a small but sustainable way."
Great to acknowledge luck but too often it’s used as an excuse. Even the story you laid out has to do with a lot of persistence, grit, determination, learning from mistakes, etc
A better way of putting it is probably: barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough. And even if you get terribly lucky, it just makes your odds worse - there are people out there who’ve had worse luck than you and still became more successful than you.
> barring terrible luck, nearly anybody can be successful if they’re willing to make the sacrifices, work hard, learn quickly, and keep at it long enough
The problem is, I don't think we have nearly enough global signal to make that assertion. Wouldn't we need some objective metrics on how many people succeed vs. fail correlated against their level of effort?
I have some pretty deep-seated concerns that we have assumed "fortune favors the brave" without comparing that assertion objectively to other hypotheses such as "fortune favors the sons and daughters of the successful" or "fortune favors the pretty" (where "pretty" here is standing in for whatever mostly-permanent physical characteristic one might choose: sex, gender, skin color, working legs, what have you). To be certain, from a personal standpoint the only one of those you can control directly is your own boldness so that matters in terms of personal choice... But policy has to look at the level of not personal choice, but the effects rules, laws, and incentives have on sculpting society as a whole.
> Being genuinely competent, they don't have an innate imposter syndrome, and thus, they value a system that has a clear and objective criteria for them and others, because they are confident they will operate fine within it.
This is not a statement about competence, but about inflated ego.
Tihs is complicated by the fact that we seem to intimaly comply with others expectations.
That is to say, if I'm expected to be a hard worker, I will work harder than if I'm expected to be a lazy sloth. If I'm expected to behave kindly, I will indeed behave kinder than if I'm called "that scoundrel" all my childhood. If people think I must be "a genius like my father/mother" I will picture myself one and study harder. And so on. Not just because I want to deceive or am afraid to disapoint, but also because personalities are made up of such expectations, coming from us or others, and who we want to be, even unconsciously, influence who we end up being.
The people popularly referred to as “elites” are in practice status seekers who adhere to elitism, the belief that certain people are superior to others. Using the word “elites” without quotes is really creepy
Most of the social sciences would have you believe that if you are white and/or male, that you are automatically in the former category even if you had to do all of those things mentioned by those in the later category.
Nah, social sciences don't say that. It's a common misconception - borne out of people who don't want to engage with what they're actually saying, or from engaging with people who don't know what social sciences actually say.
All they really say is some people have an advantage. It doesn't mean they have it easy. We get advantages from all parts of life, and refusing to engage with recognizing them is a decision, but I don't find it particularly healthy.
Due to various reasons outside of my control, my life has been objectively easier than others. It doesn't mean it was easy. Just easier. If even one or two of those things changed my life could have ended up very different.
White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place.
A Japanese person has Japanese privilege in Japan, an Egyptian in Egypt, etc
If you’re “culturally American” in America (regardless of race), you will benefit.
If you’re White and culturally American in parts of America where White American culture dominates (like our institutions, which reflect a country that has been historically 90%+ White), you will benefit
If you’re White and in a place where non White culture dominates, you will be relatively disadvantaged. Most countries around the world, and even parts of the US (parts of Chicago where you have significant disadvantages from being White).
I've had challenges in my life. At no time have I ever lived somewhere for more than two weeks with no running water, because I was born American and sufficiently affluent and lucky to be both in towns with municipal water and in buildings connected to that water. So I get to completely cross off "Has clean running water all the time" from my list of needs and wants, and not everyone does.
... and I gotta say, potential employers like you a lot better when you've had a shower that morning.
We are not bots, we just loathe historically bad-faith actors and especially with the current climate, we will take the opportunity of harmless schadenfreude where we can get it.
Father of three here, I like the premise and execution of this a lot. I don't let my kids use iPads or iPhones and we only watch movies (not shows) as a family on weekends.
What resonates with me:
- Dead simple interface
- Zero risk of ads
- I like that you can ask follow-up questions
Some ideas
- Using this on Web, the cursor should autofocus on the text box
- A log / audit trail of questions asked would be fun to review as a parent
- One of my biggest concerns about AI is the lack of guardrails preventing them from generating answers rather than using the technology as an amplifier of knowledge. For example, if my son asked "what is 142 + 47?", I would feel better knowing the response explained how he could approach the problem 100 + 80 + 9 = ? rather than answering the question
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Wonderful feedback, thank you. We are a movies only and only on the weekends family as well.
- We log the questions asked in each child account for parents to view in the parent account, but the questions are only logged when they're signed in.
- Regarding giving the answer rather than fostering the process of discovering the answer, this is something we've gone back and forth on. I think we will add a setting for this in the parent's settings for each child account. We've talked to parents who want one or the other, so we will work on adding it as an option to just give them answers right away or have it start those teaching moments.
> For example, if my son asked "what is 142 + 47?", I would feel better knowing the response explained how he could approach the problem 100 + 80 + 9 = ?
I'm 35 and this is a game changer, my schooling failed my but thanks so much!
Agreed, I can't wait. It's this or they should install facial recognition cameras with social credit scores. Either way, something needs to happen.
Not an exaggeration, I witness some physical escalation 3 out of 5 days a week between Union Square and Midtown NYC on my daily commute. 10 minutes ago a delivery guy and a pedestrian got into it when the bicyclist ran the red light and went into the cross walk while a swarm of people were walking through it. I've personally been accosted 3x while holding hands and walking my 5-year old son to school in completely "random" acts aggression. Strangely, it's not them trying to rob me, the aim is just to harass.
Meh, you aren’t seeing it. You are likely noticing a fringe view of a minority of people being greatly magnified through coordinated and uncoordinated social media campaigns and broad sweeping statements intended to covey that a totality of people (ie “a country”) hold a given view.
Now, if we framed it not as an “expropriation of a company” but a “100% tax on billionaires profiting from the work of the creative class” then the numbers would get real very quick.
My brother acquired an aging app (from an aging founder) built on Delphi used by many dozens (or low hundred) of the world’s leading shipping, energy and commodities companies, used as a standard to calculate “laytime” and “demurge” (myriad of fees associated when a ship docks into a port). It used to cost $5k for a perpetual license tied to usb based key that had to be plugged in to activate. If you wanted to use on two machines, you had to buy two licenses with two keys.
Customers in the US and Europe hated the usb, especially during COVID. In random places of Africa, where they greatly valued the single perpetual license, it persists. From my perspective, I don’t see anything positive from being an installed application for this use case - he had to hop through so many security hoops that when he rolled out the web solution IT departments breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him.
Over a period of about 2 years he converted almost everyone to saas and 4x’d the annual revenue. That also generated enough fcf to hire more developers to ship more features.
Saas is generally the way to go. Installed apps are common in financial services and industrial applications. I can think of a bunch of other niche examples but I personally would never pursue this model. We put bugs into production from time to time and it is nice to be able to instantly roll out updates.
Thanks for stating this. Some customers (who are often the vocal minority) don't like SaaS likely due to subscription fatigue but most don't realize the amount of manpower it requires to continuously update software that will atrophy without them, not to mention adding more features.
The business reality is often not understood by the users and that's why every company is moving towards SaaS, it allows the company developing the product to continue to stay in business rather than providing a product then shuttering because it couldn't sell enough.
The former is simply more sustainable than the other, much as some (like the vocal minority) might disagree with this fact.
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That being said, there are many who sell one-time licenses, especially in the indie hacker space on Twitter, such as NomadList and BoltAI. Their model works because they make enough money from their products to retire on, as solo devs, and their products aren't necessarily ones that require constant updates (well, maybe BoltAI as new AI advances come out all the time that need to be implemented, such as RAG, parsing PDFs, storing "memories" like OpenAI, etc, but most advances come through new models, which is just an API call away).
Photoshop 6 does everything I ever want Photoshop to do. I wish Adobe would continue to sell a one time purchase copy of PS6 instead of forcing everyone to SaaS. Fortunately I own a physical copy of the PS6 disks that I purchased years ago, so I don’t have a problem acquiring PS6 on any new machines by various means.
A little off topic, but, if you'll indulge me: Why do you think nobody has been able to make a successful alternative to Photoshop? Everybody I know complains about it constantly, and yet it's still the industry standard.
There are plenty of successful alternatives to Photoshop (Affinity, Pixelmator, Krita, etc). The issue as always is vendor lock-in - when everyone you're doing business with is expecting to be able to collaborate using Adobe then it becomes a huge pain point.
Because Adobe photoshop is what people are tought how to use. It is the same thing with excel. It isn't enough to have a superior product, you also have to overcome the momentum of the prevailing software. That's not to say it is impossible, but Photoshop has a significant advantage.
Photoshop isn’t on top simply because people know how to use it. There’s simply no better tool for most users who need that level of photo editing tool.
I’ve never seen a superior product to either Photoshop or Excel. Have you? Maybe they’re on top because they really are good products.
I find Excel a clunky piece of junk so use Apple Numbers for my spreadsheet needs. The majority of people probably don't need to pay the M$ or Adobe monthly tax.
To be fair, you have to pay the Apple tax to use Apple Numbers. It's not monthly (or even a subscription), but it's not a one-time payment if you want the ability to use it over a long period of time.
Once in >5 years is nothing like a SaaS, especially since it's such a tiny part of a product. Even with the traditional software there'd be no guarantee it would keep working for longer than that, e.g. on new OS versions, especially with more specialized software which is a lot of the market for such things.
Googles spreadsheet is much more performant, useable and shareable for me. I also never got warm with excel weird and heavily limited language, no matter how much I tried to.
For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.
Sheets lags at 1000 rows. Excel allows 1 million. Excel has incredible optimization capabilities, it's numerics are vastly faster (and more accurate, thanks to Javascript being terrible for accurate math). While Javascript (sheets) is decently performant, it's no match for C++ and hand tuned assembly making Excel work. I tried but cannot find a single performance benchmark where Sheets outperforms Excel.
And the first time you need sheets to interact with any of the zillion excel spreadsheets running on the planet (all of finance and pretty much all of corporate America) and it fails and it costs you a contract, you'll switch immediately.
I'm guessing you really don't push either much at all.
Despite Sheets having a free version for almost 20 years, Excel sales are at all time highs. Go figure.
Sure I am not a power user. I doubt most people are :) I never found a CSV and instantly thought "oh wow let's put that in excel" I usually would just write a random script to get the data I want the way I want it.
Edit:// I am not sure if increased sales means anything when they switched their license model so often and aggressive
Most people aren't power users of Photoshop either, but no other program comes close to being able to do what it does, which is why it's the tool of choice for the vast majority of professionals that edit photos. The same thing goes for Excel. Your anecdata of being an amateur doesn't provide evidence that Excel is not a superior product, any more than a claim MSPaint is better than Photoshop because all you do is draw circles.
If all you do is CSV things then you're not even a basic user of either. The power isn't a viewer for a table of data.
As to increased sales, I find it amusing where there's good evidence for a thing being true, and people not wanting it to be true make up the most fringe excuses. The fact is sales are up by a lot. If you're going to make handwave claims, demonstrate a fact that your excuse is an actual fact, not a wishful claim to save face. If anything, as the world does more and more data analysis, Excel is one of the most used tools, because it's good for that, so it also makes sense there is more, not less, demand for Excel. And if the license model pissed enough off there a completely free "alternative". Why don't they all jump ship if it's usable?
Occam's razor :)
I just did a search on indeed.com to see job listings with "microsoft excel", 500,000 hits. I did the same search with "google sheets", zero hits. Ouch.
Having used Gimp and Photoshop fairly extensively, I'd agree that Gimp works, and it has the features that Photoshop has (for the most part). However, there's quite a bit of user interface issues with Gimp that make somewhat simplistic activities rather irritating.
Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on almost every process, and the interface makes you feel like you need to, because they're all exposed immediately.
Photoshop (personal opinion) is better about having an initially functional feature, with relatively "what you expect" defaults, and then layers of fiddly knobs you can tweak if you "really" want to or need to for a project.
Every time I've used Photoshop the whole UI/UX changed. Buttons are moving around, getting renamed. Some functions are hidden in submenus of submenus, etc.
IMO Photoshop is just simpler because people are usually used to it. In reality Gimp always had a much more reliable UI
You need updates these days or stuff stops working fast. Everyone at every stage is quite happy to make breaking changes without long term backwards compatibility other than a transition period because it’s understood that everything can be quickly updated.
Every time I updated macOS I find that some program stopped working and I just have to update it and it works again.
As well as the fact that most software these days has an online component that has an ongoing cost to provide.
Windows is pretty good with backwards compatibility. We bought some software back in the early '00s and it still runs fine on Windows 10. You do have to install the manufacturer's update after installing it off the CD, though. Even though the update says only for win2k machines. :)
Frankly, I may have serious issues with Microsoft, yet backwards compatibility is one of the few areas where there's almost nothing to criticize, and MS is almost off the deep end on the other side. You can install stuff from the 90's and it will still have the hardware drivers. It's really kind of ridiculous.
I tried compiling modern software in Visual Studio, and the number of includes for historical support was mind boggling. "Holy s*t, I think MS just added every printer for the last 30 years to my project. There's like a 1000 includes on a 5 file project. Doesn't even print." (maybe a teeny bit of criticism)
> You need updates these days or stuff stops working fast.
Maybe some engineering course will help. If you make a product that breaks in 6 months, i won't buy it from you. This really means that the amount of testing is minimal and, instead of fixing bugs, you just rewrite the "app" keeping the bugs.
You misunderstand, it is not the application code that changes, it is the code of the environment that the app lives in that changes, macOS is one of the most famous examples of breaking APIs.
That's just Apple life: users must constantly pay to keep their stuff working. But if you evade the system API entirely with SaaS, you don't need updates for broken system API. Might as well go with PWA, java or wine.
Depends on the size of the company. Perhaps you're simply not the target customer for that company, you self-select out of their customer pipeline which makes it easier for them to handle costs, as it is more expensive to maintain separate SaaS and one-time versions (essentially on-premise, which is often much more expensive and for enterprises who can afford them due to said hassle). However, some solo devs and smaller companies do exist that make only one-time purchase products, because they don't have much overhead.
> and that's why every company is moving towards SaaS...
This is a bold and not necessarily true statement. It really comes down to your target market. A SaaS is a much less disputed cost when it's targeting businesses but you're much more likely to encounter resistance to a subscription when you're targeting individual consumers.
There is plenty of highly successful mainstream modern day software that offers a perpetual license for one time fee. (DAWs come to mind: Bitwig, Reaper, Logic X, Studio One, Cubase, etc.).
Personally, I think a good compromise is the annual subscription with a fallback perpetual license, a.k.a. the Jetbrains model. I've never had an issue with paying a reoccurring subscription fee, but I take great issue with the proposition that the moment I stop paying I lose all access to the software - it's too close to rent seeking.
100% this. This helps consumers understand the need for SW maintenance services on their own, without having to convince them... "You want to keep the software alive on your WindowsXP machine after the 2yr support garuntee that comes with your perpetual license is up? Have at it. However, here's a nice service package that will get you back up and running when your ready to upgrade your environment to align with the rest of the world."
I suppose the risk to the SW company is that consumers never learn and just keep opting for the one-time perpetual license every 5 yrs or so, so the perpetual license needs to be priced to bridge that time gap (effectively rolling multi-year support agreements into the perpetual license cost).
I don't belong to a country club, but I've heard they work that way. A big one time payment to join, then annual dues to maintain a membership. If you leave (don't pay dues) for a period of time, then you'll need to pay the big payment again because you haven't been contributing to the maintenance/operating costs of the club to 'keep it alive', so you need to back-pay your fare share.
What do you do that windows xp is not enough for you? It has network, file system, gui, and these things didn't change much lately, only hardware support changed, really. Same goes for something like CentOS 6.
It's due to a-hole fatigue. These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much. There are just too many vendors in the middle to get any expectation of a good experience. And to top it off, every time I buy SaaS the vendor is bought by some private equity giant before the first payment and the product turns to shit by the second one.
That said, it depends what the software does. If it's a platform for sharing or interacting with the public (e.g. eBay), then a true web app makes a lot of sense to me.
> These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much
I mean, you try making such software and let me know how that goes for you. This type of vague criticism sounds a lot like the typical engineer retort of "I can build it myself in a weekend," discounting the real complexity involved.
I'll try to be more specific. Stuffing a win32 app into a Citrix box and selling it to the next private equity that will offshore your support while your customer's contract milks them for another 3 years doesn't make for an enticing offer for decision makers. It makes a lot of sense for the private equity purchaser who will sell the company again before those contracts run dry and the software is shuttered or replaced.
As the decision maker (also a software engineer) I will work hard to avoid SaaS because it's a sensible move. And that is especially true if other engineers believe as you do that it's difficult to make a good product.
By comparison, the same app, installed locally, doesn't suffer from any of the above problems. There is no contract, no latency, and I don't have any risk if the company is sold. I will likely just have to find another solution provider, in the last case, but at least I'm not locked into additional years of servitude supporting a poor product for my users.
In summary, SaaS itself might be great. But the subscriptions that it usually comes with tend to incentivize bad vendor behavior and a poor customer experience.
Why would there be no contract with a local app? At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be. These aren't going to be standalone 100 dollar apps for that level of scale.
>At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be.
Many very large enterprise software providers (Sage, Oracle, IBM) and small OSS shops (Grafana, Zabbix, ProxMox) offer run local versions of ERPs or entire applications with no usage restrictions. The licensing pays for support and updates, not usage. In this model, the software provider has incentive to provide good support, and quality updates. They care to maintain the product because their care is what they are selling.
So, it won't absolutely be the case at this scale. Business as usual is the opposite of that at this scale. I should have to prove beyond doubt that there is no alternative when I agree to sign for SaaS. I'm agreeing to take on a lot of risk when I do that.
>Why would there be no contract with a local app?
Because that's what I want to buy, and for good reason (see above). And someone has figured that out and sold it to me.
Companies prefer SAAS, as IT costs to manage that software is non-trivial. Individuals prefer standalone software, as managing costs for that software are non- existant. But company market pays much better. So we get this weird situation of SAAS for individual licenses.
Nitpick here: both models are still SaaS, the only difference is the first way was deployed via (desktop?) app and the second via web.
But indeed, web is typically the most flexible option unless you are leveraging something on the OS that would otherwise be cumbersom or impossible via web (not often the case)
Unfortunately, a vast majority of WebApps are hot garbage and even the good ones can never be as functional or as performative as a native app. We have such powerful machines, but we relegate them to such a horrible method of using them.
Very few components are needed to make a bare bones web browser that is more of a vm. It would need one or more advantages over normal www browsers. Applications could be memory, and computationally heavy, it could store its data locally with some guarantees, it could run conventional web application on very crappy hardware. A new platform also offers countless opportunities to do new things or do things differently. That list is endless.
My brother was a consultant and is an extraordinary networker (and salesman) in the shipping space. He knew of this tool, was looking for a challenge, cultivated a relationship with the owner and then made an offer.
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