I always wondered how telegram could afford being free. A chat is expensive to run, a chat with gigantic media quotas even more, and they don't have ads.
There is no way their premium plan cover their cost, espacially with their extensive bot API that multiplies their traffic tenfold.
Is it? A mid-size server can support couple of million of users. Storage of large files may cost something but not the chat service is super simple and cheap to run.
They got 1 billion monthly active users in 2025. This is a write intensive workload with signaling accross all of them, including in rooms with hundreds of users, who can upload huge videos in an unlimited searchable history.
Then you got misbehaved scripts, ddos attempts, authentication for every message, encryption...
Yeah, it's expensive as hell, even with an optimised erlang backend.
In fact, if they manage to get all that down to one cent per user per month, which is very cheap for such a service, it's still 10 millions to run just in hosting.
With wechat in china, pix in south america and wero in europe, I think it's quite the opposite. All continents want to see visa and mastercard dead so they can bring back those transaction fees in house and it will work as the phone is the low friction payment method now.
Wero in the EU is fantastic, albeit still very young. Once it's mature and deployed everywhere, I see no reason to use something else in my country.
In fact, in France, the CB system endured despite visa and mastercard for 4 decades, so we know how to do it already.
For me, claudism is Americanism. Overly friendly despite having a very superficial relationship, careful to be as neutral as possible when giving negative feedback or opinion, superlative on mildly interesting things to make it sound exciting to the point nothing has a scale anymore, and use of jargon you heard your smart friend say to appear you know your stuff (purple DB syndrome).
Overall, I'm used to it, having worked with the US for so long. But as soon as I hear or read it, I get into transactional mode; my human side is completely gone. I assume nothing is personal, and ignore my (usually quite high) empathy signals.
This was sad with other people and I assume one of the reasons extremes are taking off (at least it feels real), but it's sane with robots, so for claude it's fine. And it's also perfect for people interacting with you with claude as an intermediary, since they clearly see it as something that needs to get over with.
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
Because if enough idiots do it, stupid managers think it's the standard. The EU Commission is unlikely to know anything about their website, it's made by some department that blindly follows a manager's order that just looked at what others did and copied it.
We could all have used the DNT header as a bypass when the GPDR came out, and you can still use cookies for non tracking purposes without any banner.
So the EU commission put out a rule that you say has been widely misunderstood and implemented via malicious compliance. Where is the EU statement and education on this? Why aren’t they louder in explaining this isn’t what they wanted? And they allow their own websites to do the very thing that they supposedly don’t want?
Do you maybe want to reconsider? Perhaps instead companies are putting in a good faith effort to comply. I have been invoked in discussions around legal compliance of all sorts of regulation and trust me: no one has ever ever expressed “let’s do some terrible thing because we disagree with regulation”. It’s conspiratorial thinking.
The general council (lawyers) at companies are making the decisions around cookies banners and the like, not the folks trying to make money. Regardless of how you might interpret the law and requirements around GDPR, the legal profession as a whole seems to think the crap we live with today is necessary. If it isn’t, it’s on the EU technocrats to clarify in communications, written rules, and on their own damn website what it is supposed to look like.
And clearly, you think billion-dollar companies making dark patterns, ignoring web standards and choosing to track people left and right are less to blame the inconvenience of a banner (that warns you they do) than the people trying to protect your privacy and did it imperfectly.
I have made enought web sites and app that don't have a banner to know it's perfectly possible, even today.
I have implemented DNT support and know it was a great solution before it was taken away.
I have worked with enough clients to know why they chose the banner anyway.
Unlike you I actually read the law, and worked at implementing it. Including with and without a banner.
So I have to conclude you are not an honest actor in this debate, and you are clearly angry as well.
You bet I am angry. I am tired of people defending a law by saying “that’s not what it was meant to do!” As if the intent matters one bit. What matters is the result of the law. And the result of this regulation is to make the web universally crappier than it was before. It did basically nothing to improve things in the real world.
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
I've avoided buying any Lenovo product ever since their SuperFish fiasco.
At the beggining it surprised me that people still seriously recommended Lenovo products (even hackers). Now, my brain automatically "adblocks" the entire brand out when I'm looking to buy a new laptop or monitor, as it knows I can't buy it.
Same for me on Lenovo. And likewise, once upon a time ago I told myself I was never going to use another Microsoft product ever again, and I've also mostly stuck to that and even changed jobs over it. Unfortunately, I can't escape github for now but I'm Microsoft free everywhere else at home and at work.
We need more people willing to vote with their wallet over stuff like this.
Microsoft dragged their heels hard when Firefox 3 came to the scene. IE6 was the browser at the time. Chrome was a concept and Opera at least pushed to keep up but surrendered and went to Chrome.
Here here. 100% in agreement, people seem to have forgotten that the majority hold the bargaining power. You'll always have people who cross "strike lines", but by and large if the entire user base simply said; no, and walked; the world would definitely be a better place, in so many ways.
I don't hold France as a shining example of humanity; but by-christ if they get upset they actually take those feet, one in front of the other and fight tooth and nail against `$thing`. Even if they don't "win", they /don't go quietly/.
There is a strike or demonstration of sorts every other day in France. Or so it seems living there. It’s become so frequent that it has little to no meaning anymore. The government is scared to implement any meaningful change because it’s guaranteed there’ll be a strike or demonstration of sorts. And so we continue towards the wall pedal to the metal.
A democratic government should exist only by the consent of the governed. The government should be terrified of the people. Of course you have to be able to filter out the signal from the noise and majority vs minority desires, but by and large if a change is majorly unpopular, they should be terrified of trying to push it through.
That’s not how it is there though. Any change whatsoever, justified or not, is opposed. So the government goes for bust and makes changes that help the biggest companies, the richest in the country, friends of the president (whoever they are, different presidents same joke) because it’s going to be a struggle anyway so it might as well payoff for their friends. Plus they need the wealthy’s support (they own the newspapers and media)
And so we’ve given up on the train for instance because when it’s not striking it’s broken down for some reason.
Retirements and social security, same thing, the only changes made was for the industry not for the people. And we’re careening into the wall.
The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.
The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.
Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).
IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.
Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
Oh no, I remember well. At some point, everyone at the software home button on their phone setup, because the physical button was sometimes working and sometimes not.
Apple issued a statement saying it was a hardware failure and there was nothing they could do.
A hacker later on proved they were lying by patching the software and showing the problem went away.
That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
I will not be gaslighted again. This world is crazy, and people have a terrible memory.
>That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
On one hand, I think there will be entire subgenres of literature and media dedicated to this time, the way we spend entire units in the US on WWII.
On the other hand, I also know there will be a lot of "not-MAGA" people who will say they didn't vote for Trump (they did) but defend to death how these times weren't that bad with all the same soundbites you hear today. We're way too connected (and Trump way too loud) to reasonably do Trump denialism, so the next best path will be Trump sympathizing
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
It’s not only their printers. Their computers and peripherals are also very low quality nowadays. Enterprise buys them because they’re cheap not because they’re good. The bar they have to clear is to keep working for the lease’s duration (3 years typically).
I’ve been burnt a few times now I run away when I see HP (even their “enterprise” line, which used to be good)
It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances.
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
I actually opened a yandex mail account 15 years ago because, since I was going to be tracked, at least it would be from people who have no friendly contact with most gov entities and companies in my society.
I heard same argument with telegram (however I wouldnt consider it to be Russian tech these days) but yes. Choose your poison, basically. And some entities definitely seem(ed) less evil to our society than others.
We have, we just have much, much better conditions for food, hygiene, personnal safety and medicine.
But have worse hormonal health (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063751/), and are less fit (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4033061/). The flynn effect also seems to decline in some parts of the world: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301679
It just doesn't compensate the immense gains tech created.
Turns out it's ok to be weaker if you don't have to worry about dying of parasites, malnutrition, cold.
Which, you could conclude, means the individual is weaker, but the species is stronger.
It used to be the polite thing to disclose that you used a translation app. In fact, traditionally, you disclose when you translate anything so people know the context in which to interpret your text.
In the same way, I wanna know if a book is written by some famous people just ghost written.
Of course, the point is moot. Somebody using AI to write a blog post is unlikely to be self conscious enought to thing it's necessary to disclose it in the first place.
There is no way their premium plan cover their cost, espacially with their extensive bot API that multiplies their traffic tenfold.
And now they add free hosting of bots on top?
How the hell are they doing that?