You can pay reddit $40/year, and browse with no ads.

That's $3.33 and change per month.

I've done this ever since the days when reddit actually needed the money.

Better yet, leaks of identity-theft level data should be punishable by a simple fine.

$100/head feels about right to me,

Japan tried a government-planned AI and Computing buildup called Fifth Generation Computer Systems. This started in 1982, and was supposed to revolutionize computing.

It didn't, and it probably contributed in a small way to the global stall in the Japanese economy afterwards.

I am not quite old enough for direct experience of this, but there was a major education panic in the US around the time of the launch of Sputnik.

There weren't enough math and science teachers in K-12 education.

There were two proffered solutions:

* New Math
* Chemistry and Physics courses on film and filmstrips that could be taught by non-specialists

Any guesses as to how well they worked?

Any similarities to current trends in math education and science-by-remote-learning are purely conicidental, of course.

I started giving them $40/year back in the days when they really needed the money.
I still do it, because Reddit with no ads is worth $40/year to me.

I only see ads on Reddit when I need to log in again - roughy annually, for a few seconds.

I have serious doubt that Apple hedges big on the Pro iPhones. The vast majority of money comes from their 30% App store sales. And they don't really have to anything for that. The phones are likely a nice bump in profits, but Apple hardly relies on their hardware at this point. That's like saying razor blade makers really get focused on the price of plastic for their handles. I mean they care because those handles are how they get razors out, but the razors are what they would care most about if there was something that halted their production. Apple cares about the phones, but they care about them about as much as they are a device for delivering people to their App store.

That sounded wrong to me, and it actually is wrong.

Apple gets about two and a half times as much revenue from the iPhone as it gets from Services, which include iCloud, Apple Music and TV, and App Store revenue.

Services have been going up as a fraction of total revenue, but Apple is still primarily a hardware company - the App Store is probably less than 10% of revenue.

Like the rest of current consumer electronics?

Only if the price drops way off, and manufacturers aggressively strip and recycle.

This sounds a lot like the plot of David's Sling.

This was 1988, so the USSR was the enemy, and the internet had not really taken off, but it envisioned the US as a massive just-in-time manufacturing system that was capable of manufacturing thousands of autonomous drones and tank-killing hovercraft in days.

... it's because they think it will inconvenience their competition more.

Witness Facebook/Meta saying "please regulate us!" because minor inconveniences to them can be killers to startups.

Their presence is the only thing keeping Google(*) from going all the way down to Facebook's(*) level.

For those of you who think they're equally bad, consider that Google at least has two major products that could exist with minimal dependence on advertising - search and email.

If Google were broken up, with advertising separated from search and email, all the pieces would survive - search and mail could openly sell ad space, and advertising would have less opportunity to be a privacy rapist.

If Facebook were broken up along similar lines, the social part would hopefully be seen as the net-negative privacy suck that it is.

(*) Yes, Alphabet/Meta - we know what we're really talking about here.

Or sometimes there are weird restrictions.

The email-to-SMS addresses are blocked on the machines I have to monitor, except for the Verizon gateway.

My iPhone XR was on TMobile (still the best family plan), so I moved it from a physical SIM to an eSIM, leaving the physical SIM slot open for a cheap Verizon reseller (Twigby) which I use for SMS only.

Running stuff like this on a local device should be a win for privacy and possibly latency.

However, Meta is involved, so surveillance and total lack of privacy is assumed.

Also, the descriptive CCs often describe the music with title and author info.

Reddit will suck more and more as long as the only way it can really make money is ad revenue.

The current API-access kerfluffle is definitely an attempt to get money out of large language model builders.

I suggest the following as a way out for Reddit:

* API access is limited to Reddit Premium members
* API access is rate limited by default - high-speed and high volume API access costs what Reddit says it wants to charge now
* Moderators get API access to their subreddits

This could herd the large language model builders into the revenue sharing arrangement Reddit wants.

I have been a Reddit Premium user ever since that option was offered, because I believe in paying for internet services, I hate ads, and I hate the attention/engagement/outrage/tracking system with a burning passion.

Reddit will suck more and more as long as the only way it can really make money is ad revenue.

The current API-access kerfluffle is an attempt to get money out of large language model builders.

I suggest the following as a way out for Reddit:

* API access is limited to Reddit Premium members
* API access is rate limited by default - high-speed and high volume API access costs what Reddit says it wants to charge now

This could herd the large language model builders into the revenue sharing arrangement Reddit wants.

I have been a Reddit Premium user ever since that option was offered, because I believe in paying for internet services, I hate ads, and I hate the attention/engagement/outrage/tracking system with a burning passion.