I just got finished listening to the most recent episode of Darknet Diaries this morning on the way into the office! It was about similar companies to the NSO group: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/137/
I listened to the first half this morning. Was thinking about going back and watching the NSO group episode he mentioned again. Then I get to work, and the first thing I see is this link.
> They're going to beat the drum until Justice Thomas resigns or stops being openly corrupt, which may be a very long time.
I don’t expect either of those things to happen, sadly. If everything stays as it is, he will remain in office and continue his behavior. He’ll stay there until he dies.
I recently had an opportunity to chat with a machinist who works for a shop that makes some parts for ASML’s machines. He showed me a picture of a couple of parts he finished that day. He said they weighed about a hundred pounds sitting there on the table, but at the acceleration they experience in the machine, they weigh roughy the same as a Toyota Tacoma.
I can't imagine that what I think of as a machinist - a human who picks up parts and places them into machine tools and adjusts settings - is who makes parts for semiconductor manufacturing machines. I'm guessing the title has a lot more to do with CNC/automation these days?
FWIW the Bridgeport milling machines could hit 1/10,000th of an inch which is 25 microns of accuracy many years ago. DRO and precisely controlled steppers on newer machines can do much better.
The main difference is the mill will be that accurate along each axis of motion independently, while the jig borer will hold that accuracy on all 6 degrees of freedom throughout the full workspace volume.
You kind of just described the job description of a modern "machinist". It's far more of a job regarding the machine itself (CNC in this case) and it's setup, versus the part itself being made. A mechanical engineer or manufacturing engineer deals moreso with that. Machinist is more synonymous with "operator" in my field.
Apple brings my snark out. After I went through all the BS to buy the base airpod for my kid, from the store, I then requested a printed receipt rather than give them my email addr.
Apparently the apple store near my house rarely gives people paper receipts anymore. It took 10+ mins for the poor sales drone to try every table in the store before he found the one that could actually still print receipts.
So I got to be the smart ass who said on the way out "goodness printing a receipt isn't that complex, i thought apple was a technology company."
They didn’t even have to reverse course for this to work out. Just give a reasonable runway before beginning to charge for the API (to give third party clients enough time to adjust their subscription customers who may have just paid for a year), and charge a reasonable price.
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.
Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
The premium account holders don't see ads in reddit. All Reddit had to do was require premium accounts for users that wanted to use 3rd party apps. If you want to keep using yoru 3rd party app, then sign up and pay or shut up and go home.
It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.
I think it's just a play to bump up their in-app DAU for increased IPO valuation. Fuck the users, all about the short term gains. I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
> I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.
> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]
I can't think of any software that the end-user pays API fees or even supplies their own API key/token. I've only ever needed to supply that when interacting with APIs directly in a developer setting. That, or open-source projects that require API access from some 3rd party.
I recall a fairly brief period a few years back where Twitter rate limited 3rd party API keys so heavily the apps basically stopped working... so some apps just put a feature in to input your own API key which you could get for free as a developer key at the time.
Passing it on to the users wouldn't have required billing by API key, just gate at authentication instead.
Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.
