That’s good to know your personal preferences. Please keep us posted!

Tool de jour, similar to web framework of the month etc. Gemini and ChatGPT are just as useful

Thanks. I've used ChatGPT a million times and never had any input issues.

Half the people in IT have no business being here.

this is very naive. go compare the Olympic men 5k times to the womens 5k times.

i was a very below average cross country runner in high school, if not flat out poor. my times were still fast by female standards.

Radio is very useful during natural disasters. When you're sitting for hours (days) without power, internet, etc, listening to the radio can be the only connection to the outside world.

I'm bored of the everyday Claude spam. I've used Claude extensively and it was very sub par.

what did you try to make? how?

"you're holding it wrong"

I started on 35mm and dark rooms then went to digital. 35mm is more fun and more rewarding.

do you really expect us to believe ms is pushing 'far right news'?

perhaps youre just so far left that anything slightly in the center feels 'far right'?

when bing / edge recommends me stories it's never ever 'far right'. it's almost always something pro-left or that makes the (R) look negative.

You really have no clue how this works. Microsoft is just the intermediary. They take money from whoever pays to shove you ads, sometimes malicious ads that could infect your machine (if you're not heavily protecting yourself from that). And it's not only Microsoft that's the culprit, they all do it. Google does it, Meta does it, Microsoft does it.

>"It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate."

developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who dont understand the day-to-day user experience.

No this is product and finance. Product wants more features because that looks better to leadership. And finance likes ads

>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives

pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.

even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.

had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.

In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.

He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.

There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.

Just noting that the phrasing "readily available alternatives" by itself is slightly ambiguous: it could be read as subsetting ("the alternatives that are readily available") or just attributive ("the alternatives, which are readily available").

I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

You couldn't get cable internet in Houston?

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.

I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).