Well for an expats, it's really a gamechanger not having to play three card monte selecting the correct card to use for each transaction. You would be surprised how many transactions are (accidentally?) geofenced based on where your card is issued from, and Paypal pretty much solves these.
I'm an Indian with a few US subscriptions and Paypal was indispensable for years. When they set a KYC deadline involving some dude in a video call suddenly asking me to produce my Aadhar (national ID), I then discovered those services work with my debit cards perfectly. BTW autonomous charging of arbitrary amounts is not allowed in India, AFAIK.
As a buyer PayPal saved me after being scammed. It was a breeze to claim my money back, once I filed a police report.
Stripe and other normal card processors make it impossible. And before someone says to "charge back" with my bank, my card is from a country where that is almost impossible. In fact I think maybe only in the US that's actually practical, because in Germany I don't remember "charge backs" being a thing when i lived there.
Might work for some countries (like US). But if you are from country with their own currency PayPal will only allow payout to account with that native currency. You get payed in USD you can't payout to USD account if your nation uses different currency. And of course they will also exchange that USD to your currency with their exchange rate that's 5-8% above services like Wise.
Basically you either keep money in your Paypal and use it there or pay their cut. It's simply usury.
Interesting I’ve noticed the same behavior with Gemini 3.0 but not with Claude, and Gemini 2.5 did not have this behavior. I wonder what tuning is optimising for here.
The sheer amount of copium in this thread is illuminating, it’s fascinating the lengths people will go to downplaying advancements like this when their egos/livelihoods are threatened - pretty natural though I suppose.
We owe a lot to Boa: I would like to call Jason Williams a personal acquaintance, we've discussed JS engines in general, and Boa and Nova in particular both face to face and online. Some parts of builtin methods, like float parsing, have been copied verbatim from Boa with copyright notices to Jason.
As for comparisons, the focal difference is perhaps the starting aims of each project: Boa was started by Jason (according to his Node.JS conf talk) to see if one can build a JS engine in Rust, and what building a JS engine means anyhow. They've since showed that indeed this can be done, no problem whatsoever. Because Boa walked, Nova could "run": I started working on Nova actively because I wanted to see what building a JS engine using an ECS-like architecture and data-oriented design would look like; what would it mean to get rid of the traditional structural inheritance / object-oriented design paradigm of JS engines, and what would the resulting engine look like?
So, Boa is a quest to show that a (traditional) JS engine can be built in Rust. Nova is a quest to show that Rust-like non-traditional architectures can be applied to a JS engine, and hoping that this will lead to unforeseen (or previously unappreciated) benefits.
Oh, and of course Boa is much more complete and ready for action than Nova. If you need an embeddable JS engine in Rust today, go use Boa. If you want to try something new, then Nova may be of interest but it will probably also be an annoying piece of crap that panics on you every time you try to use this feature or that :)
It’s becoming clear that this issue is going to become one of the most divisive in history.
Apparently a large number of people outright dismiss even the possibility of “machine sentience”. It seems to trigger some pretty visceral reactions.
Never mind the fact we can’t even define sentience/consciousness to begin with. We have no idea why or how it arises - yet we’re very quick to make strong claims about it.
The problem is any discussion around this topic is tainted – these companies have to justify their valuations. Begins with the shift in nomenclature: "LLM" is now "AI".
