You're not wrong. Reddit & Elon started it and everyone laughed at them and made a stink. But my guess is the "last dying gasp of the freeloader" /s wasn't enough to dissuade other companies from jumping on the bandwagon, cause fiduciary responsibility to shareholders reigns supreme at the end of the day.
This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscription members right before a potentially large wave of turnover not only chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
> the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this
That sounds absurd to me. Committing to not building in advertising is very important and fundamental to me. Asking people who pay for a personal subscription rather than paying by the API call to use that subscription themselves sounds to me like it is. Just clarifying the social compact that was already implied.
I WANT to be able to pay a subscription price. Rather like the way I pay for my internet connectivity with a fixed monthly bill. If I had to pay per packet transmitted, I would have to stop and think about it every time I decided to download a large file or watch a movie. Sure, someone with extremely heavy usage might not be able to use a normal consumer internet subscription; but it works fine for my personal use. I like having the option for my AI usage to operate the same way.
The problem with fixed subscriptions in this model is that the service has an actual consumption cost. For something like internet service, the cost is primarily maintenance, unless the infrastructure is being expanded. But using LLMs is more like using water, where the more you use it, the greater the depletion of a resource (electricity in this case, which is likely being produced with fossil fuel which has to be sourced and transported, etc). Anthropic et al would be setting themselves up for a fall if they allow wholesale use at a fixed price.
I'm sure there's a million reasons not to, but they could even just open-source Windows 10. Leave you alone with the hardware that you rightfully purchased, and let the community police the security gaps that arise. It's beyond me how planned obsolescence especially on perfectly sufficient hardware is even legal.
Am I missing something? This isn't what ssh's purpose is. Why should anyone care? We're talking about a game built to run over an encryption protocol? What are we even doing anymore? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but client-side option existing is secure design, really feels like it shouldn't be circumvented server-side without giving the client the choice to do so or not by default. Don't lobby for watering down security for convenience, especially for trivially important objectives, please?
Aside from the moral clamor, if something has a higher likelihood of fraud, there's a direct relationship with the increase of its cost. Both legal fees and labor cost to deal with these claims could add up more than we outsiders may realize. It's very possible that some risk-averse analyst "ran the numbers", and decided this wasn't worth it. I would also speculate that there may be a certain hidden coat of false fraud claims. Certain folks buying something in the moment, then shamefully claiming they didn't after the fact, which in turn could carry the costs associated with processing a new card & number or conversely fighting false claims.
As for the morality angle though, while I definitely agree that these companies' main motivation has to be increasing revenue and profit, and that their only reason for doing anything is cost-driven; you never know what middle-manager who is swayed by what belief is actually making these decisions. So as much as the monolithic goal of the organization is more money, there are still emotional (and financially fallible) people pulling the levers.
The fraud thing explains why they might avoid an entirely adult storefront for it, but for steam? who has their own refund policies and support system that presumably shields the payment processor from charge backs most of the time?
There are also large anti porn lobbying groups applying pressure to the payment processors, so that angle creates costs in a different way.
Steam’s refund policy and support system doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone buying on steam with their CC and then calling their CC and claiming fraud.
Funnily enough, the courts are the best place to change/challenge that law without a literal act of Congress. (Apologies for any snark, but this is somewhat fueled by another, similar debate had previously) In America there should be no such debate regarding defying law being bandied about as infallible or intransigent.
Courts are a good place to challenge the law only if there is a higher law that contradicts them. If we’re talking Federal law, then the step up from there is the constitutionality of the law, which is not an easy case to make. Usually what gets challenged is the Executive’s interpretation of the law more so than the law itself, which is still not an easy case to make, but easier than challenging a law passed by Congress. Typically these are big cases that make the news, but actual constitutional challenges are statistically rare and successful ones much more so.
The Internet Archive didn’t even get dragged into court for an interesting case, and their defiance was ideologically interesting but jurisprudentially uninteresting.
An interesting point, perhaps it's just me, but my initial reaction to this was that, for purposes of comparison, the volume of "usable" or maybe inhabitable land be measured instead, as opposed to the volume of the entire planet including mantle, core, etc. this graphic seems very prone to misinterpretation and usage as a memetic weapon against globalization, as it is.
I completely agree with you. Let's add to the fact that volume, being three-dimensional, is being represented on two dimensions (graphics on a computer screen), which might cause some loss of perspective, fundamental for comparison. Perhaps a better way to represent it would have been the volume of inhabitable land (as you suggest) vs the volume of available water but extrapolated to two dimensions?
It's similarly misleading to color coding a map of a nation's or a region's land area to show how the people who occupy various parts of that land area voted in an election. The graphic representation tells a story about the land that deceptively implies facts about the people that are not true.
