Boeing is a company worth billions of dollars. "UKCSR" is not, there is absolutely no consequence to them getting shut down due to unsafe products. They'll just come back tomorrow as "JUSGB."
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
Quality was the norm when people had little or no disposable income and expensive things had to last for a lifetime, and some less expensive things (like shoes) had to last years.
Quality was what you judged products on and the origin of brands.
The overwhelming majority of brands today are meaningless because they have nothing to do with quality. They are either status markers or tools for exploiting our tendency to form habits.
You need go no longer than your local hardware store. Almost all the consumer grade electrical tool brands today are from perhaps 2 manufacturers. But you are likely to have a preference that you tell yourself is grounded in a rational, informed choice. Except, it mostly isn't. You probably buy the same toothpaste every time. Not because you have done an exhaustive study of toothpaste and concluded it is the best one for you. But because it is what you are used to buying.
(Yes, there are still some professional tool brands that make their own electric tools, but the kind of stores consumers shop in don't have those since they cost an arm and a leg)
Yes, quality used to matter. A lot. But most people alive today have not lived in those times. People have a hard time imagining things that are outside their own experience. So much so that they can even conclude "it can't be if I haven't experienced it".
For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.
Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution.
I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.
Those streaming services don't have free options for the same content. You're not primarily paying to get rid of ads, you're paying for access. So for that and other reasons I'll say again I'm not talking about those services, I'm talking about the state of normal web pages.
The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
That's an interesting point, reminds me of the dark pattern of donation options at checkout used to check for disposable income which the store could have captured.
I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.
For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.
Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.
Do you verify every input and output of your car's fuel system map? No, if the car runs well enough most of the time for your purposes you stop looking.
That is where chatGPT is for me these days on the kinds of tasks I throw at it, and for the seriousness of HN comment threads.
You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.
But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.
Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.
I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
My gas pump has ads, despite me paying for the gas. My airplane has ads, despite me paying for the ticket. My phone has ads, despite me paying for the service. My doctor's office has ads, despite me paying for healthcare. My car has ads, despite me paying for the car.
I can pay for a service to watch sports, and I get ads during the event, ads painted on the field, ads superimposed on the field, normal ads embedded in the commentary, obtuse ads shoved into things like "and he's the Lite Beer Co.® Player of Match", ads in the name of the building, ads in the name of the match itself, ads on the player's jerseys. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
Corporations have decided "why make ${service_cost}, when we could make ${service_cost} + ${ad_revenue}?"
Where can I find an oven made with entirely US parts (or even ~85-90%+)?
I'll tell you in advance that I haven't been able to locate one in a few years of looking. Most major appliances are, at best, 60-80% american with no accurate accounting, even if they're "assembled in the USA". Cars are the only thing with accurate sourcing labels due to legislation.
Entirely US parts is a very high bar. Isn't it the final product design and assembly that counts in the end? If China has a comparative advantage making resistors, who cares, let them.
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.
I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.
I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months - great if you need a cable NOW though. Or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.
The thing is the stuff retail stores sell locally is just the same stuff I can buy from China. Except they need to make a profit, the local distributor needs to make a profit, and the regional distributor needs to make a profit. So you end up paying 10x more for the same thing and/or they sell lower quality (= cheaper for them) items. I see zero value in them still existing other than convenience, it's not like the workers can tell you anything that you can't just ask Google yourself.
For what it's worth, Apple chargers are, or used to be, pretty high quality. There's this infamous teardown video of a cheap clone showing 0.5mm of air is all that's between you and a potentially fatal electric shock.
I 100% agree regarding Apple charging adapters. It is mostly their cables I have a problem with, and even that seems mostly around strain relief. I don’t mind being careful with the stain on cables, but I don’t want to have to convince others. They also do make some that have a braided exterior which seem to last much better.
In general, when I see people using cheap power adapters, I encourage them to use cheap cables if they have to, but at least the adapter should be from a company that would be embarrassed if it exploded or killed you. Usually people have enough adapters around from when they bought old phones.
My mum has an odd habit of plugging in the phone and then turning on the power switch afterwards. A knock-off Apple charger she was using caught fire with a bang, and somehow threw the phone some distance. I’m not clear how that is possible. The fact she wasn’t holding the phone may have been very important.
Great example! YouTube is currently being sued because people with Premium still get ads.
Granted they're the ones creators put in their own videos, which is kind of a technicality. Premium does block the overt ads that YouTube itself pushes. (There's no telling if it blocks submarine ads that are videos) However, it was promised to block all ads, and that's what the lawsuit is about.
I don't see why that's a technicality. Youtube has plenty of rules already for their business partners. They could definitely make it so e.g. no paid advertising is allowed, or all paid advertising must have metadata attached so that premium users never see it, etc.
Appeals were made time after time to "Buy American!" as each manufacturing sector was offshored, first to Japan, then to China and the rest of Asia, but they were ignored by workers in other sectors. So, yes, you'd better believe the working class do not escape blame.
Mathematics is a tool. What make such understanding possible are the relentless, disciplined, often-pointless-looking collection and categorization of data of any kind, by generations and generations of selfless scientists.
You can incrementally refactor existing code to make it more maintainable and easier to implement the things you are working on.
The issue with Netscape (per that article) was that it was a rewrite, not a refactor. I.e. replacing all the existing code with new code. That's why it took a long time to release a new version: the previous code hadn't changed and the new code wasn't functionally equivalent to the existing code, let alone have any new features.
I mostly work with Python, and often coding agents answer questions about dependencies for me just by digging around in the site-packages folder in whatever virtual environment they have access to.
The "clone X and tell me" trick is something I mostly use on my phone - I can answer questions about pretty much any piece of software on GitHub with a regular Claude session, no coding agent needed.
The problem good developers have is that they develop software people want to use, and software that people want to use eventually requires more help, and once you need help then it is inevitable that you will need to bring poor programmers into the mix. A good programmer may respect the beauty of Haskell, but it isn't a practical option for them.
Ironically, only poor developers have the luxury of being able to choose something like Haskell as they never have to worry about building something anyone else wants to use.
It’s the same principle as accessibility. We are all poor programmers sometimes, just as we are all impaired in various ways at times even if we don’t have a disability.
Boeing 737 MAX tragedy did happen because of self-certification abuse, still I would not call FAA certification worthless.
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