It’s also in their best interest to set the price so as to maximize their own profits. If switching costs or monopoly power allow them to set a higher price, they will do so.
Have we learned nothing from a decade of subscription services?
Especially Adam Smith. The claims are scattered throughout The Wealth of Nations, but he hated them with specificity.
He said they raise prices and lower quality, misallocate capital, and corrupt politics, among other things.
Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
He’s said in multiple interviews (like on his own climbing podcast, Climbing Gold) that he’d do it for free with no publicity. He’s been trying for a very long time to get permission to do something like this, just because it’d be really cool.
The fact that Netflix was behind it might’ve made it possible to get permission to climb this specific tower though.
Just had a great experience with this on Linux. One time in 20, when my X1 Carbon (Pop OS 22) resumes from sleep, Bluetooth doesn’t work. This kinda sucks because my mouse is Bluetooth.
After 10 minutes with Gemini, we found the incantation to completely reset the USB+HID stack. I put the commands in a script, and I could make the script auto-run on wake if I wanted.
I was so happy. Even after 8 years on Linux I didn’t expect this to work.
After a couple of Nvidia driver update occasions (@Arch Linux) the resume brought back a broken resolution. I didn't need any assistance to think that an xrandr command executed after each resume whould solve the problem. Now it might be already fixed but I don't bother to remove the line.
I use the Nexstand K2 (well, the Chinese knockoff I got for $5), and I bent some coat hangers to attach to the top of the stand and tilt the laptop forward. I’m a tall guy, and the top of the screen is even with my eyes. Bonus is that with an X1 Carbon, the Lenovo M14 or M14d fits perfectly over the top of the keyboard.
Desktop CPUs have a lot more punch than their equivalent mobile parts.
My current dev machine is an X1 carbon from 2019. Compiling go code is slower than I’d like, some JavaScript-heavy websites like Jira take a couple extra seconds to load, and the GPU can drive a 4k monitor but it isn’t snappy.
Still, the form factor is perfect, and my next upgrade will be exactly the same machine but more powerful and with a brighter display with the same 2.5k resolution.
I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are.
Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend.
Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.
What am I missing? What's the real value that folks are getting out of these platforms?
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