You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying “This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership.”

Unless it’s protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.

Even if they ARE an “honorable” company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.

Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a “kill the golden goose to get the eggs” move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.

Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it’s a GAMBLE. It’s a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it’s not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.

Pro-tip: If the company hasn’t already been around for over 100 years, NEVER buy a lifetime pass for ANYTHING.

Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?

Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It’s not great that they’re paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they’re also not contributing to Anthropic’s code base. If they were? They’d absolutely be complicit.

The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.

Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.

It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.

I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.

Major watch dog

They were evil but constrained and minor. Their current power is the direct result of the anti-immigrant flames social media like Facebook have been fanning with their algorithms for years.

If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.

Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.

It would help if reality weren’t also currently a toxic pit of despair.

They can rent out or sell the building and recoup a measure of that investment. It’s nothing compared to the windfall they’ll get from selling snake oil on a military procurement contract.

As soon as people stop looking, Google will shut down the whole office. It’s how tons of huge companies get around “can’t lay off union workers”.

As far as modern replacements for legacy systems go, I also was NOT happy with the concept of systemd, but after using it for years, I have to say that not only did it NOT break everything, it’s on the whole been pretty stable, reliable, and I even begrudgingly admit I like the syntax better.

WAYLAND on the other hand…

It’s not about enforcing behavior. Not primarily. It’s about setting a precedent of what is important.

There’s a huge difference between “They didn’t let me drink underage but I did it anyway and became an alcoholic.” and “They explicitly let me drink and I became an alcoholic.”

The former AUTOMATICALLY comes with increased caution from even the people who break the rules. And more importantly, it completely removes the “I didn’t know” from the equation. Personal acceptance of the consequences of one’s actions is the first step to fixing it later, but with no rules, it’s easy to get bogged down in “Nobody stopped me. It’s THEIR fault.”

Critics don’t want to hear that young people whose brains aren’t fully developed yet have poorer impulse control than adults…

But young people whose brains aren’t fully developed yet have poorer impulse control than adults.

That depends… are you talking about actual AI, which is hard, or LLMs, which are resource wasteful, inconsistent prediction engines that even at their best are catastrophically wrong 1 out of every 100 times you use them, and require a $1000 GPU just to get a result in reasonable time?

Even your example there? Can be done in a 50 line bash script, with the exception of the “Review” folder, which would be wonky anyway because the files that you can decide are not useful, you already know how to decide are not useful, and the ones you don’t, you would have as much trouble with as the AI would, so you haven’t really gained anything. Instead of a continually iterating and improving script that does exactly what you want, you get an unpredictable application that will produce different output every single time it runs, with potential for regressions every single time you do it.

Basically, we’re still at the point where anything a general purpose AI could do on a local operating system, you could do better and more efficiently with a purpose-built tool.

But we live in an era where people legitimately put out Electron apps and call them “lightweight and efficient” with no dissonance whatosever, so I’m sure there are a million people ready to argue.

Please be “don’t”.

Everyone has their own line, and I don’t begrudge people theirs.

But at the end of the day we all have to function somehow. Nobody’s hands are completely clean.

In what reality is Trump going to clear his debt?

Don’t get me wrong - he’s stealing the money - but he’s not giving it to ANYBODY else.