The article is all over the place with its analysis: On the one hand, it writes "The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers". Then immediately follows up with "There’s typically one big wave of new users who were previously sharing an account before the streamer plateaus to its new normal. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024".

9 million users might not be consistent on-going growth, but that represents 9 million new paying users. Do they stay users? If so, then 9M x $8 (or more) per month represents $72M per month, or $864M per year. Maybe that's a one-time bump in user counts, but that's a significant number.

I imagine that HBO looked at the results of Netflix and Disney+ password crackdowns and is seeing that it was successful in raising subscribers and revenue. "Infuriating users" isn't an important metric if those users were never going to pay anyway.

I agree. They should just own the fact that they 1) provide a valuable service in measuring people's credit scores and 2) they won't be liked for it. Especially by those who have bad credit scores.

If there are legitimate issues where people should actually have higher credit scores than they do, then that should be investigated and resolved. If people are just upset that they screwed up their credit scores and don't like the repercussions? I'm not sure there's much that can be done.

And I would go one step further: Whatever respect or luster games journalists once had, it's all gone and replaced by Twitch, Youtube, Steam Reviews, etc. Who needs a game journalism industry that exists in a perpetual conflict-of-interest grey zone with the industry they cover when you can get all of the info you'll ever need from actual people playing the game? And who would trust industry awards anyway?

Steam should just take 10 minutes and perform metrics on "Total Downloads", "Total Hours Played", "Total Concurrent Users" and "Average Review Score" and whammo, there are your annual game awards.

Those of us on the internet in the late 90's and early 2000's should all say an extra special prayer to YouTube for breaking up the tyranny of having to watch movie trailers using Quicktime. Huge files, long downloads and a clunky video player that constantly required updates. Thank you YouTube for putting an end to that nightmare.

The article (as far as I can tell) provides no breakdown on who is using BNPL. Nothing about age, gender, level of education, region, etc.

The quote about "using this for groceries" seems to come from self-reported surveys. (Whereas these companies should have exact insight into what the loans are actually financing, so there should be no reason for surveys). People might be self-reporting groceries because they don't want to admit using it to pay for inessential items.

I wonder if this is being driven by YOLO youthful idiocy, not realizing that these loans will have to be paid back OR they will suffer credit issues down the line when financing a house or car. But this article is extremely light on any type of useful details beyond that headline number of 91.5 million in the USA. That seems pretty insane as that is 1 in 4 people in the USA.

Right, that's the problem. I believe it takes more energy to heat a house from 30 to 70 degrees in the winter than it does to cool one from 85 to 70 in the summer. Obviously there are more variables at play.

Whether it's because of the CCP or just bad software development practices, TP-Link devices of all sorts have been riddled with tons of issues.

https://www.tomsguide.com/comp...

https://thehackernews.com/2025...

(This summary is from ChatGPT)
CVE202333538 – A command-injection vulnerability in models such as TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, TL-WR740N V1/V2.
CVE20231389 – A command injection flaw in the Archer AX-21 model that has seen exploit attempts.
CVE202453375 – Authenticated remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in the “HomeShield” feature of some Archer router series.
CVE20259377 – An OS command-injection vulnerability in models “Archer C7(EU) V2” and “TL-WR841N/ND(MS) V9” via the Parental Control page.
CVE202525427 – A stored XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability in UPnP page of WR841N v14/v14.6/v14.8.
CVE20259961 – Authenticated RCE via CWMP binary, affecting AX10 & AX1500 series, exploitable only via MITM (Man-in-the-Middle).

At some point, it makes sense to ban these on the grounds that they pose a security risk regardless of whether that risk is from malicious intent or just terrible software engineering practices.

Goodhart's law states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This leads us to the exact problem described above: A Rotten Tomatoes score can be useful for audiences determining whether to see a movie. Studios know this, and thus will juke the stats by whatever means necessary to increase that score, which means that the RT score is no longer useful.

My point still remains: For a concert of 100k tickets, 900k would have no ticket and still be disappointed. All you're arguing about is a fairer way to allocate the limited number of tickets.

So much has been written about how Ticketmaster collapsed, or long virtual queues or the high scalper prices and bots: None of it really matters. In my example, 90% of die hard Taylor Swift fans end up with no tickets and crushing disappointment. And there's no real answer to that problem.

Prosecuting scalpers makes for a fun headline but it solves nothing.

The reason scalpers were able to make so much money on these tickets was the fact that demand vastly outstripped supply. And the real answer is that there's no good answer. If 1 million die-hard fans wanted to see Taylor Swift at Metlife stadium but there were only 100,000 tickets, there is no solution that would make the other 900,000 feel satisfied. First-come-first-serve, certified fanclub accounts, dynamic pricing, scalpers: Those are different ways of allocating tickets but it doesn't make up for the fact that the concert would have sold out instantly and left 900k people with 0 tickets (and thus unsatisified).

You can blame Ticketmaster or scalpers or Taylor Swift, but there's no real answer (except to have it at ever larger venues, add LOTS more dates, etc). And even then, it would still leave people feeling burned because she's so insanely popular and demand will always exceed supply and drive prices higher.

.... because Brave will be even faster when combined with all of the ad blocking

One of the real issues in open-source software (referenced above) is the fact that you can't really force unpaid volunteers towards tasks that are uninteresting, such as maintaining years-old software that might not be heavily used. Maintaining LTS releases is definitely important but not necessarily interesting. And finding that balance to keep volunteers helping can be very tricky.

Even Microsoft struggles with this: Part of the reason they made Windows 10 free were the costs associated with having to maintain however many flavors of Windows 7 and 8 and 10; better to get everyone on 10 and make their lives easier.

There are no easy answers and we shouldn't be quick to condemn KDE if you are not also willing to help maintain older releases.

Who is looking at their current 7.8mm phone and thinking "AHH! This is just too thick!" and is demanding a 1.8mm reduction? How about keep it at 7.8mm and improve battery life?

And who is using an iPhone in China without a case (because it represents such a huge investment)? So whatever number of mm you shave off is just being replaced by the case because everyone is scared to drop their $1000USD phone.

Exactly. Any modern polls have to deal with incredible selection bias issues. And that means that any poll numbers require extensive data manipulation or extrapolation based on the small numbers of folks who do reply, leaving themselves open to criticism about methodology, massaging data, etc.

I honestly believe that anything less than hooking random unwilling people up to lie detectors is mostly useless guesswork, or will have a variance of +/-10%, at which point they're useless results anyway.

Right now, the core software for Crowdstrike's Falcon run in ring 0, with kernel access. That software goes through Microsoft's quality assurance process. The problem is that this software reads configuration files on disk (such as anti-virus definition files) that don't go through that process.

It seems like it would be very tricky for Microsoft to have to cover all definition files with the same level as QA as the software itself. The turnaround times for things like antivirus definitions need to happen very quickly. Perhaps Microsoft can have some sort of fast-track QA and approval for these types of updates?