There's a funny effect that happens with mass centralization of services like this - there's a "safety in numbers" instinct that causes mass failures.

When you self-host, you are obviously responsible for managing outages. Part of what you pay for with AWS is outsourcing that blame.

AWS outages are treated like the weather; nobody's fault, It Just Happens. If your DC is down, you must be incompetent.

We all find that city a big pain in the ass to drive around in.

Excellent!

Fewer cars make the city so much better.

Before you rant at me, BART is right there. And if you're afraid of public transport you should just stay away, you're hopeless.

"We appreciate our collaboration with the security research community"

...the T-Mobile spokesperson said through gritted teeth.

You really can't compare insurance liability to "Slop as a Service" liability (or however we want to describe the robot rental companies.)

Insurance is one of the most heavily regulated industries around. (This is US-centric, but insurance is heavily regulated in all advanced economies except, arguably, Florida.)

Most folks tend to think Regulated Industry means they can "get away" with less than other companies. And that's true in certain ways. But it also means they can absolutely do things that would leave them exposed to liability if they were unregulated. It ends up being both restrictive and freeing in different ways, and the details invariably end up being really complex, arbitrary at the margin, and enraging when it bites you. It isn't even all the insurers' fault - in the US every state has their own regulator, and the rules vary quite a bit. (Florida has very few.)

That's how you end up with home insurance that covers squirrel damage but not raccoon damage.

Which all means that the abusive behavior insurance companies get away with ends up looking a lot different than that in other industries. Each industry is its own special tapestry of grift.

This is more speculative, but I think we are gearing up for one hell of a moral panic over LLMs. Most recent moral panics have been legacy media creations, and they're captured by robot-money, so we won't see Fox or ABC running with it for now. But I'd give even odds someone does something spectacularly awful because their robot friend told them to* within the next year, and then there will be buckets of organic "won't someone think of the children" for demagogues to exploit.

*details and nuance won't matter

I suspect we're about to find out how much liability these outfits can legally disclaim.

"LOL we didn't mean really do kratom" is going to be catnip to some eager AG with a dead blond.

This pattern gets rediscovered every so often, I'm really surprised Zendesk doesn't have mitigations. They have to have seen this before.

This used to happen to self-hosted bugtrackers and some other types of apps, too. Anywhere you want to be able to send mail to arbitrary groups of people.

Opt-in is not just a good idea. Zendesk may not want more UI friction, but the alternative is going to be blocking them - if you can't control your mail servers, I am not going to accept mail from you.

Ah, that makes substantially more sense.

Thanks for the history.

My first Bay Area job (and first tech job) was at an also-ran database company. One of the people I worked with was this crusty older man who had worked at Atari and didn't have a single good thing to say about it - claimed there was a lot of self-dealing, nasty behavior and general shittiness. (I have no idea, just relaying the story.)

But really I'd rather talk about him - he was a character. Said he grew up in Montana (I have no reason to doubt it), he'd also been a rodeo rider in his teens, walked with a limp. Wore cowboy boots & hat, jeans and pearl-snap shirts, never saw him in anything else. He held Very Strong Opinions about Coor's Beer and the Coors family. But my favorite was when he got in trouble with office security because somebody saw a gun in his truck. His explanation was, "Hell yes there's a gun in there, I don't drive in a city without one." I I thought that was the thing that was going to get him fired, but no, he was still there when I left.

I'm always amazed when I hear Atari still exists.

I actually agree with this. I bought one of those in anger - totally was not paying attention to the brand, just needed a grinder, and that was there. But now I've had it for, I think, five or six years, and it is still a great grinder.

(Stupid story, I had a house guest who stole a weird assortment of stuff, including my coffee grinder.)

I mean, it is not impossible for that to happen, but (a) most pages just don't change that much in general; edit histories usually show activity around creation and occasional later bursts of activity, with infrequent minor edits in between.

The robots just fuck up a lot. Especially the constrained, low-quality one that runs on every Google pageview.

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Yep. Photolitho applications are the first thing I thought of.

You know it'll happen. Cops is in its 37th season.

Netscape Navigator through version 3 (-non-gold) was pretty nice, modulo the normal warts and false-starts you see in a new category of software.

The problem came when competition from Microsoft started to heat up. The exec suite decided that, rather than focusing on what they were good at, they needed to go after the MS enterprise stack, which led them to buy an also-ran called Collabra who made enterprise groupware whatevers. Collabra ended up effectively taking over and drove them into the ground, both technically and financially.

They ended up bloating the crap out of "Netscape Version 3 Gold" and later versions to support their "collaboration suite" which nobody wanted, and that's the version you're remembering. Doing so eventually handed the browser market to Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation to AOL, and the code that became Mozilla to the filthy hippies. The end.

The non-"gold" version 3 and before were nicely performant, but that was effectively a different application.

So we're still doing random, spaghetti-at-wall features instead of anything resembling a plan to keep FF viable.

It is my daily driver, and I'm going to be bummed when the closest thing to a user-aligned browser is Safari, but there we are.

Now kids can gang up on each other to steal their accounts.

A fun game for the whole class!