That is the wrong way to look at it.

If this requirement was in place they would be a bit more careful about terminating accounts because the cost equation would incentivize it. Maybe they would be more careful in their automation or require more than one level of human review before cutting off access.

These companies are gatekeepers for their platform. It isn’t crazy to require them to act more responsibly.

These are usually multi billion dollar companies, they’ll be fine, stop worrying about them.

Start worrying about the erosion of your rights as a consumer.

I agree in that case but be wary with these kind of assessments. There are tons of regulations that are meant for big players but can also affect much smaller negatively.

For instance I don't think to this day it is possible to operate a Mastodon server and be compliant with GPDR and the UK online safety Act. There was the famous case of LFGSS forum about to shut down due to the former, the forum was kind of saved by a group of individuals willing to take the risk but the founder stepped down from fear of legal risks.

There hasn't been home raided and servers and personal computers seized yet but that doesn't mean it can't happen and technically any EU or UK volunteer hosting some forums or open source based social media that isn't GPDR or online safety act compliant could be at risk. For most I believe it is not that they don't want to be compliant but they aren't aware of that and/or don't have the technical means without further development on the software they are using and despite them not abiding to their own user rights, most of their users would be more sad to see them shutdown than the current status of not obeying the law.

They sure do earn enough money to afford whatever number that is on your mind.

If it's impossible for a service provider to even talk to its customers, why is it in operation at all?

These services are designed such that security sort of depends on reviewing the programs that are allowed to run. Microsoft, Google and Apple all do this. It adds expense, annoyance, limitations, and really very little security.

The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like, may be more complex but is overall much better. There aren’t many personal-use systems like this, but systems like AWS take this approach and generally do quite well with it.

> The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like

There's a lot that one can gripe about Amazon as a company about, but credit where credit is due -- their inversion of responsibility is game-changing.

You see this around the company, back to their "Accept returns without question" days of mail order.

Most critically, this inversion turns customer experience problems (it's the customer's problem) into Amazon problems.

Which turns fixing them into Amazon's responsibility.

Want return rates to go down because the blanket approval is costing the company too much money? Amazon should fix that problem.

Too often companies (coughGoogleMicrosoftMetacough) set up feedback loops where the company is insulated from customer pain... and then everyone is surprised when the company doesn't allocate resources to fix the underlying issue.

If false positive account bans were required to be remediated manually by the same team who owned automated banning, we'd likely see different corporate response.

Even if they somehow were so expensive, that it would no longer scale to their size, that is still not our problem and if anything, a sign that either they need to improve their systems, or simply cannot be as big as they are. Shit happens, scale down, I won't cry for them.

> I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?

It wouldn't. For example, before Gmail, email was often free or nearly free (bundled with your internet service), but in most cases, you could talk to a human if you had issues with the service.

What we couldn't do is turn these business models into planetary-scale behemoths that rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. In essence, you couldn't have Google or Facebook with good customer support. I'm not here to argue that Google or Facebook are a net negative, but the trade-offs here are different from what you describe.

Honestly, it's not our problem. Once a service becomes so vital it cannot be terminated without any meaningful process. My meta developer account is suspended and none of my appeals are responded to . Who can I talk to? Nobody. It's wrong.

I don't think they would be so much more expensive but they would be less profitable for sure and perhaps less "innovative" as a big chunk of the profit will go into regulation stuff.

MS could literally double their global employee count with a fraction of what they spend on AI annually.

Look how much profit Microsoft made last year.

"Financially, it was a year of record performance. Revenue was $281.7 billion, up 15 percent. Operating income grew 17 percent to $128.5 billion." https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html

So don't be so naive to tell us that 1-2 additional people to handle the appeal process is anything but rounding error in their balance sheet.

Back of the envelope I did one time told me i could earn more by picking up cans off the street and trading them for the deposit.

Still, it would feel nice - after the initial cost- to have very cheap power (only charge when cheap).

Maybe you’re right in terms of true broad adoption, but I’m also curious about whether there’s a sustainable (and slowly growing) market in other market segments.

Maybe vr gaming is it? I hope so because I’d like to see the platform grow from there into other application areas.

Personally I’m curious if I can use it for something, maybe data visualization. Like a more powerful matplotlib. Maybe I’ll just try it if it’s affordable to try and possible to use it that way (custom code).

Didn’t Intel also try to brand the 64bit x86 extensions as ia-32e initially? Seemed like wasting an opportunity to me.

(Disclaimer: I work at Intel but this was way before my tenure.)

It was because IA-64 was a completely different unrelated architecture that until AMD succeeded with K8 was "the plan" for both 64bit intel roadmap and the roadmap to kill off compatible vendors (AMD, VIA)

Worse, IMO, is the never taken branch taking up space in branch prediction buffers. Which will cause worse predictions elsewhere (when this branch ip collides with a legitimate ip). Unless I missed a subtlety and never taken branches don’t get assigned any resources until they are taken (which would be pretty smart actually).

Oracle is also OCI, oracle cloud initiative. My understanding/impression is that oracle is betting the company on its success.

Well, I'm sure they were when "cloud" was the latest buzzword in public company reporting. Now that its AI I'm sure the next quarterly will show massive (fabricated by reshuffling) growth in their AI initiative.

I agree. (And believe me, I don’t enjoy fooling myself into believing a better outcome than can be expected.) so far my experience is that AI assistants are a tremendous help, but it still feels like programming and still needs a programmer to drive it.

The thing to look at is Sora. I have, at my fingertips, the power to generate all this short form content. I could make any Instagram Reel I can think up! Except that's not for me. I'd rather sit here with Claude code making shit. That's never going away. Even if there's no money in it, it's how I'm wired.

Interesting. George hotz has said his motivation to start tinygrad was the worry that nvidia would be nationalized.

There is just one rule. If they mention it, they'll do it.

this would pulverize the stock value then, right?

or would the government just buy the stocks on the market?

I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.

Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.

If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).

We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.

Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.

Just to add to this, people say the same about eg citizen Kane being such a classic but without the context of it having genre defining firsts, the film doesn’t stand out as much to a modern viewer.