Those are also very similar results to Mojeek, and Mojeek is free and was one of the first engines with a “no tracking” policy. https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=Steve+Jobs

Except, you know, people that live in any poorer part of the world where $5 or $10 is a shitload of money.

This pretty much matches my sentiment. These days, you’re always the product. If you get something for free, you’re the product. If you pay for something, you’re also the product. Companies have decided that data is simply too valuable to give up.

Also, if I give your company payment information, don’t you just have even more data on me now?

It’s also important to keep in mind that you can still be the product even when you’re paying. A lot of companies like to double dip. They’ll charge you to use the service and then also make additional money by selling your data. Or make additional money by having ads (even on a paid service).

And it’s further complicated by the fact that paid companies often know more about you than unpaid ones. If I go to Bing and do a free search, they don’t know my billing address, credit card number, real name, or any of that (probably, unless you linked an account). If I pay for Kagi, they probably know all of that information that Bing doesn’t. To me, this also raises questions with government surveillance. The government can potentially force Kagi to monitor all of John Doe’s searches, but if John Doe is using a VPN and not logging into Brave Search (or Bing or Google or whatever), they probably can’t monitor that because they don’t know which search session belongs to John Doe.

If they could find a way to have people pay without having any technical way to connect the searches with the paid account that made the searches, it would be much better IMO. (I don’t know if this would be possible, but there might be a way they could do something like generate anonymous search keys that authorize searches but aren’t tied to an account, kinda like one time use API keys. This would also allow you to “gift” a search to other users by sharing keys, which would be both good and bad.)

It’s ridiculous to me that they got a presidential override once before, and it’s ridiculous they’re hoping for a second one.

If some other company was found to violate Apple’s patents, and the president made the whole thing go away, Apple would cry foul.

Figures, but disappointing.

This is pretty much my thought. It’s an enjoyable movie, but I’ve always been of the opinion that “enjoyable” and “good” aren’t the same thing.

There are good movies and music that I don’t enjoy, and they’re are movies and music I enjoy that aren’t good.

AFAIK Google isn’t mirroring any of the binary stuff anyway though, are they? So how big is it? Surely with proper text compression it’s under 100TB. That’s 5 large hard drives at this point.

Are they adding back AVX512?

Yeah, it needs to get into Internet Archive stat.

I realize that, but they don’t offer a read-only plan either. He’s been paying for something, whether it’s an official plan or not. If they sent an email saying that you can keep your data in read-only mode, and he kept paying the bill, they should’ve stuck with that.

I do realize it’s Google and they can’t be trusted to not fuck this up, but everyone is talking like this guy was just expecting Google to keep letting him access his data without paying a bill. The email they sent me basically said that I can keep paying my bill, and they’ll keep my data, but I can’t add any new data until I get under the quota. This is a plan that they offered to these people.

AFAIK they keep charging you once it goes read-only. Does it say he quit paying? I’ve got an account that went read-only after the grace period, and they still bill it every month.

Where does it say he quit paying? I have a Google account in read-only mode from about the same time period, and they keep charging me for it.

You know, I’ve routinely been surprised what gamers do and don’t put up with, so I really don’t know what to expect anymore.

I dunno if you remember how gamers responded when Steam came out, but they really, really hated it. And it wasn’t just the issues with slow internet, bugs in Steam, and stuff like that. They seemed to kinda philosophically hate it. Even the gaming magazines ran articles about how it ruined software ownership, it was awful how it made it so that you couldn’t even do things like give your old games to your kids or your friends, etc. And gamer forums had the same kinda complaints. And it was even worse since Valve forced people to start using Steam to keep playing CS, even though CS had previously not required Steam.

But fast forward to some years later, and nobody cares about any of that stuff. Well, I guess they do sometimes. People complained about Epic moving Rocket League to EGS, which was kinda funny since it was moving from a service that had, years prior angered people when it started being required for a different hit multiplayer game.

Anyway, I could see gamers complaining and then just getting onboard 5-10 years later. That’s what they usually do if the developers they like push for it.

Right? It shouldn’t be that hard. It should be possible to enable E2EE for this using a private / public key approach, where the app delivering notifications encrypts them using a private key unknown to Apple, but it’s encrypted such that all the devices receiving the notifications can decrypt the notifications.

Also, for anyone really worried about this, there are modified versions of Android that avoid using any cloud notification features (including the Google one that spies just like Apple’s). I know that doesn’t help if you want to use an iPhone, but phones do exist that bypass this whole thing. It’s also one of the reasons I wish Apple would open up iPhone more. Why do I get the option to remove the spying features on Android but not iOS?

If you can transfer / buy everywhere, how would there be any exclusivity, though?

Platforms are all already dealing with the possibility that they don’t make money but still have to distribute the games. If you bought a game for $0.99 on Steam 15 years ago, and you download it today, they’re not making money off you. If you download a F2P game via Steam and never buy anything, they lose money. Hell, I’ve never bought anything on Steam, but I’ve probably downloaded terabytes of data from them. They’re not making money on me, except maybe with ads (which would apply to this other scenario too).

The platforms also already have to deal with the issue of not getting paid because you bought / got the game somewhere else. You can buy from GMG, etc. and then download from Steam. And publishers give away games frequently during anniversaries, etc. that you then download from Steam or Epic.

My thinking is that the platforms would obviously want to make money, so they’re going to price compete to make sure you buy it there instead of buying it somewhere else and downloading it from there.

I also think an inevitable outcome of digital distribution in general is that companies are going to start charging for downloads. Digital games are one time purchases requiring lifetime support. They’re not going to let it work that way forever.

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I don’t have numbers for how frequently it happens, but the need to use old releases happens on both OSes. If you’re using an architecture that Debian has since dropped support for, you have to stick on the old release. (They stopped supporting one of the MIPS variants recently.)

Debian also sometimes drops packages because they won’t build on the newer release and there’s no maintainer for the package. Now you need to stay on the old release (or port it to the new libraries yourself) if you wanna keep using it.

This to me would be the potential big benefit. One of the problems right now is that there really isn’t an organization that everyone would trust to just hold onto their licenses without demanding some kind of exclusivity, etc. If Valve is the one holding your license to Borderlands 3, they’re not gonna let you play on Epic using that license. They want you to use their services.

If there’s a third party that is just in charge of licenses, and those licenses work everywhere, that basically makes launcher exclusivity impossible and also makes it so that licenses continue to live even if the launcher dies.

For the record, I think NFTs / Blockchain solutions are typically the stupidest shit in the world, but there was a Blockchain game licensing proposal some years back, and it actually would have avoided some of the vendor lock-in / licenses evaporating when the vendor dies type issues we’re dealing with now.

The problem is just that none of the publishers or launchers would ever play ball with the idea. They stand to make more money by not playing nicely with everyone else.

Why would allowing transfer between platforms be a bad thing? You wouldn’t necessarily have to be able to buy on any given platform, but it could be the case that the license allows use on multiple different platforms.