I see that A&A have finally started offering uncapped data plans since August, good on them, since that originally put me off and I never signed up with them despite all the praise they get on HN
I've been a customer of A&A for a few years - I had the same reticence at first but thought I'd try them anyway. The only time I've come close to the 1TB monthly usage quota is this month, entirely because (for work) I had to download a very large number of docker images, in addition to a normal usage of 500-750GB. I think it helps that some unused portion of the usage quota gets rolled over too. Out of curiosity, what are you doing that would make you regularly exceed 1TB?
I don't think I'm doing anything crazy, the odd game from steam, some ML models from huggingface, running a Plex server for myself and friends/family. I checked my usage and regularly exceed 1TB every month, so that's why I was put off.
I've been lucky that a new ISP came to my area and I can avoid Openreach infrastructure completely, they've put a FTTH line directly into my house and offer up to 8Gbps symmetrical
Kinda rich that the guy that thinks we don't need next-gen image formats because "bandwidth is cheap in most places" is making purchasing decisions around bandwidth being expensive.
Ugh. Does that affect the other people around you?
Asking because I live with a relative who has a similar problem (needs a tv on to fall asleep) and that noise directly stops me from falling asleep in the next room much of the time.
If it was bothering other people around me I'd listen with my airpods.
Interestingly, my parents who are in their 60s, have no problems getting to sleep early, and they both fall asleep together to TV all the time, mostly watching reruns of old shows like Columbo
I take that back. For the first time ever, last night the relative actually turned down the volume without cracking the shits, turning it up instead, etc. (!)
I just do not want to be tracked in random databases. We should not resign on basic decency. This nagware must be stopped either by public pressure or by more regulation.
There was time when spyware was not tolerated. We need to bring that back. This article is doing the opposite. Normalizing spyware while blaming the regulation.
If this nagware is on site that I consider valuable I try to email them about this immoral behaviour. But most of the time it is just reminder that I actually do not need to see the site and close the tab.
Most people do not care they just want to procrastinate effectively without clicking on banner.
Yeah, I use Mint on my laptop (not my main PC), but it's a bit rough around the edges. I spent an hour trying to get the fingerprint reader to work, having to compile the driver myself, and it's still a bit buggy sometimes.
Bluetooth also randomly bugs out, mouse or airpods refuse to connect for no reason. Touchpad a bit wonky, pinch zoom doesn't work out of the box, I assume it's some setting somewhere but can't be bothered.
Discord can't update itself, I have to download and install it from a file each update.
Little things that add up to hours and hours of your time wasted.
Otherwise known as the flame war detector, which does a decent job of keeping flame wars off the front page but occasionally has to be fixed by a mod when it kicks in incorrectly.
Moderation is hard, and HN actually does a pretty good job all things considered.
It pains me to agree, but this is quite right: for every important developing story that gets erased like this, there's like 500 nonsense flamewars that guaranteed you don't want to read, that get erased by the same heuristic. It's genuinely tuned well.
(I'll never agree with HN's title-editing bot though. That thing's cray).
Is that even a Shaggy defense? The whole point of the Shaggy defense was that it's saying it wasn't you despite overwhelming evidence ("She even caught me on camera - it wasn't me")
But in this scenario, there is basically zero evidence it was you
I thought it was, they would have to have some sort of evidence of your name, dob, ssn, blood type, etc. But in the end it was just your information used fraudulently; you the person did not authorize the loan and therefore it really isn’t your loan.
> Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight
By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival
If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM, and I don't see where the actual profit comes from, I would have laughed and left the room too
It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot.
I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat up anyone even though they've never trained MMA. The Alexa team looks in the mirror and sees big muscles, but they don't know how to use those muscles to fight. Yes, the strength and muscle helps, but ultimately to do well at MMA you have to develop specific skills, and you need to start with humility.
Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.
We're still tiny compared to Alexa, but we have over a million MAUs so we're not tiny for a startup.
At present, Alexa itself is not a direct competitor, although a large and growing use-case for Alexa skills would benefit directly from our tech. This may change if Alexa gets its act together, but based on the past year I'm not holding my breath!
