well, at my current job they use NoSQL, in this case it's DynamoDB and it's been frustrating at times. So I asked the question: why are we dealing with these problems day in, day out, if the problems we're trying to solve have been solved half a century ago with SQL?

The answer is cost. The way we access data may be convenient to do with SQL, but it's also expensive. We have big (not webscale but large) volumes of data coming in every day. Having this on SQL would cost us tens of thousands a month. Keeping it in DynamoDB costs us a few hundred. And it's stupidly fast - if we wanted to get that kind of performance from SQL we'd have to pay for a supercharged overprovisioned server.

And honestly it's been fun. It's turned "boring business software development" back into more of an engineering problem.

I see the problem as a more "get off my lawn" types here. They have fully adopted "vibe coding" as "anything made with AI assistance" as much as older people call anyone younger than them "millennials".

There's a big difference between an experienced programmer providing the AI with clear, concise prompts and guidance; than having someone with zero knowledge trying to build an entire app from scratch.

One is "augmented capabilities", the other is vibe coding. But the haters here just refuse ANY sort of AI involvement.

I refuse to believe the claim that "this would require billions of dollars and at least five years to get a factory operational."

There is clearly enormous amounts of money circulating in the industry right now. If a company like Nvidia genuinely wanted to manufacture its own memory, it absolutely could. Even with initially poor yields, the economics could still work. A 50% yield rate is far less concerning when RAM prices have increased by 200%, especially for a company purchasing memory in massive volumes alongside its hardware partners.

From my perspective, this looks less like an unavoidable technical limitation and more like market consolidation and price coordination. Companies have become comfortable charging substantial premiums for RAM, and the current situation provides a convenient justification for it.

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

they also remove drag-hover-drop . it's so infuriating to have to organize your windows in a specific way to drag a file over to another window, OR use ctrl-c/ctrl-v

it was as easy as drag the icon to the next window "through the taskbar" which made the other window come front, and drop the icon.

i guess they removed that option since they started forcing taskbar grouping by default. a feature i remove from every windows and KDE machine I set up. I don't see any benefit in "grouping" or "compacting into an icon". if i wanted that behavior i'd just get a mac.

we have two options: live with a bug, or hope the fix doesn't introduce another bug.

i mean that's not a bad thing either. I sometimes DO NOT want to learn "new to me" things. I've been contributing to an ancient, but still used software called Xastir. It's VERY OLD spaghetti code, low level X11 with Motif. I DO NOT want to learn Motif. It's not a marketable skill or something I'll ever need. But I let the AI code a few contributions (one of them was replace some parts with Cairo fonts for antialias in high dpi scerens, and the other was fixing a very old screen drawing routine that took 2-3 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 2 and cut it down to 5 seconds). Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

Just answering your literal question rather than advocating for whether this is right or wrong:

The 1936 Robinson-Patman Act "prohibits price discrimination, preventing sellers from charging different prices to different buyers for goods of 'like grade and quality' if it harms competition."

It's extremely rarely enforced, but ... there you go. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That's been asked once or twice with no answer, so I'll give it a shot.

Context: I'm a relatively new (~20 months) POGO player, currently level 75/80, with 34 platinum medals (you need 50 to get to the top level, 80). That probably makes me knowledgeable, but not entirely an expert.

The thing that has made POGO so successful, I think, is that "gameplay" is really broad -- there are a bunch of game mechanics in the game, and you can progress while specializing in some and ignoring others. You want to go out and spin pokestops and find new gyms? You totally can! You want to stay home, do remote raids, and remote PVP? You totally can!

I'm really not a PVP person, I kinda hate PVP in all games, but that's just me. Others really love PVP in general, and some of them love PVP in POGO. So a POGO tournament could literally take place in a basement, away from any pokestops or gyms, because you could just PVP against each other (Heck, if you didn't have to worry about cheating, you could have PVP tournaments involving players coming in from their own individual basements across the world).

Lol imagine defending a 75% tax rate. Fucking communists.

Not really. Google proposed these limitations, letting them claim proudly "hey, we proposed this!"

They didn't require these limitations, so my suspicion is Pentagon will say no, the deal will be classified so nobody will know, and Google will get the credit they want for "trying."

Ugh, yeah. My grandparents lived in Germany in the early 40s and told me stories about having to take the train to some sort of camp. Really terrible experience. Would not recommend.

so you're talking about reporting and I'm talking about the fact that a bank closed an account unilaterally

I understand you're left wing, pro-government control, etc but this is not about giving more power to the government. this is about a BANK unilaterally deciding to close an account because they can't be bothered to "comply" with what you're talking.

There are also more "grey" uses for crypto. Until 2 years ago Argentina was under severe exchange controls, criminalizing the exchange of the rapidly devaluating peso and the government was setting an arbitrary value for the peso. It was under half of what the "black market" rate was. Many people working for foreign companies were circumventing all of this. If you used crypto, all that was taken away from you was the crypto fee.

If you used the "legal" means, you got hit with 1) exchange rate conversion where you lost 50% of your money, and after this, 35% income tax because the tax brackets were deliberately left unadjusted.

Yes, i know, you will say that "it's still illegal" because your view is "government is always right". But you know what? I'm not giving the government 70% of my income, work the same hours, and get paid less than a worker in the country, because the government wants to dictate the value of the currency.

circumventing international restrictions on money laundering and terrorist funding might not be the best example of one

To expand on my previous answer: You're assuming this was an attempt at "circumventing international restrictions". The problem is: we don't know. The bank won't tell and they say "we are not allowed to tell you why". This is ridiculous, this goes against the most absolutely basic concept of any justice systems: laws must be known. There are no "secret laws" that you may be breaking. But in this case, there are.

And btw, if you ever try to make an international wire transfer, the bank will, first of all, ask "destination country". If the country is in a black list, you shouldn't be allowed to click "send money". If the country is in a grey list, the bank should ask you for "more compliance documentation". But NOT just close your account with your money in it.

Yes but bank decisions are arbitrary and you have no recourse. They will cut off all communications from you. They won't tell you which rule you broke, and will refuse to talk to you on the phone. The bank WILL terminate your account, and in many cases keep your money (suspected of being "dirty"), unless you sue them. You can't present any paperwork. No, you have to go through the justice system.

All of this in the name of "compliance". Many times, it's not even required, they just do it "just in case". They'd rather deal with you (by ignoring you) than deal with the government.

All of those regulations need a much broader discussion, not just a "compliance sorry".