When Louis Rossmann started describing tech leadership as having a "rapist mentality" I brushed him off as being sensationalist. But actions like this make me think more and more he's right. The product managers pushing for changes like this are despicable scum.
The situation you describe has dynamics that don't apply when your windows laptop is trying to get you to install an update. A woman can't have 100% confidence that saying no won't trigger a man into rage, so just the question being asked at all is already a bit unpleasant. WinRAR trying to get me to buy a license is not as offensive because I know it won't beat me up for saying no.
However, do you think people accept Microsoft backup because they want a backup?
Or do you think they click yes because it makes the popup go away for good?
Wearing me down until I say yes isn’t the same as just yes.
It’s the same dark pattern for the 10-11 upgrade. My father in law managed to upgrade by accident because it kept popping up. He didn’t really make an informed choice for himself. One day he just couldn’t figure out why everything was different.
There is this distinct lack of giving a shit about the user that you see coming through in a lot of big tech nowadays.
Take this extremely simple example about antenna pod. I can change the order and what buttons show up in the app nav bar. For example I can remove the "home" button or put other things there instead like playback history.
This is a small minor point of the bigger picture. Yet there is this distinct sense in which when using that app I don't feel like I'm beholden to some chain of management in some company deciding they get to decide what I get to do.
Like its almost unthinkable that the YouTube app let you remove shorts or reorder the navigation bar and decide what you wanted to have there.
I would point out Anthropic isn't profitable either (yet), it's just that enterprise is where the money is. Now that all the AI companies are narrowing in on that market, becoming profitable will be even more challenging.
This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or interact with the public.
we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is nothing impossible.
> How is exposing length of a password a vulnerability?
You're arguing exactly the point.. knowing the length of a password is helpful in cracking it. We all agree short is bad. Depending on your threat model, you (hopefully) don't use passwords as the only verification very many places - perhaps to unlock stronger secrets (ssh keys, an account without local login that can only connect with a certificate). You'd still rather a shoulder surfer doesn't know how many characters you pressed.
Any password of a length that could feasibly be cracked by way of brute force (So up to perhaps 8?) would only save 1/N of the total time taken to crack it with N being the length if one were to know the exact length.
So yes, sure, technically there is an effect, but it's such a small effect, and only for people that should change their damn passwords already, that it's worth making the change for the improved UX.
And to be clear it's not just QQQ; countless retirement target date funds have a Nasdaq component. That's the real target of this grift, your retirement fund.
When I order from Mouser (a Digi-key competitor based in Dallas) they plainly charge a 10-15% tariff fee. I'm struggling to understand why this solution isn't obvious. You have to pass the cost onto the consumer, or your margins dwindle. It's trivial math.
> People are also having to intervene in once-automated tasks. Thousands of orders that used to auto-flow directly to the warehouse floor for same-day shipping now often miscalculate tariff costs.
> > People are also having to intervene in once-automated tasks. Thousands of orders that used to auto-flow directly to the warehouse floor for same-day shipping now often miscalculate tariff costs.
> Charge a blanket tariff fee like Mouser.
The importer still needs to pay the correct tariff.
Also, according to the article, a big part of the problem for is that Digi-Key does substantial business selling imported parts to non-US buyers. It’s fantastic for the US that this business can exist (money flows into the US and actual good jobs are created), but the tariff system makes is difficult to run this part of the business and there’s a lot of pressure to move those jobs and the revenue to a different country that doesn’t have this problem.
I worked at Mouser as an engineer for a few years. This included work on the service that charges this blanket tariff rate, which includes incredibly complex business logic that ended up taking half the year to make. and that was with upper management pushing us very hard to get it done. Digi key from what i understood is a smaller company that lacks the ability the capacity to get something like this done as fast. or at least thats my best guess. Mouser knew the obstacles digi key dealt with when it came to things like capacity, storage, and developer power. I remember the discussions about how we could "beat" them out in sales revenue and why we were more "bulletproof" in the way we did business.
If Digikey consistently charged 10% more than Mouser, yeah that would absolutely ruin them. Digikey and Mouser don't have much to distinguish them already. It's like Aldi vs Lidl.
I worked at Mouser as a developer for a few years, the real reason is because our parts are used by terrorists, etc. to build weapons that kill people/bombs.
We created a service that blocks people from buying various parts using a ton of different complex business rules (one simple rule we had was we straight up didn't sell ANYTHING to the middle east for a while).
Startups were another business we didn't sell to simply because of the sheer amount of fake companies we got trying to work around our rules engine.
Alot of the rules for our service was mandated from the FBI. That was a fun call to reveive from them.
"The people who build weapon systems have countries backing them and they have ways to source any thing."
I think this is a bit short sited. Many parties are interested in building weapons that cause lots of harm. And not everyone who is interested in making weapons has countries backing them, in fact they likely have countries against them building said weapons. Hence the needed work around to try and source parts from Mouser.
Yeah that’s what I thought too. I think people are find with some 50-100% hike of prices on ham radios, oscilloscopes, and even phones, if local production starts to appear.
You can buy US manufactured oscilloscopes from keysight. A 50% price hike on one of them is enough money to buy a new car, with enough left over for a few months of bay area rent. There are much better uses for that money than throwing it into the money furnace of tariffs, like paying employees or buying half a dozen lower-end scopes manufactured in Asia.
If customers can afford a 50% price hike on lower end oscilloscopes, would that create a small domestic market? Like, I don’t really mind spending an extra 200 bucks on a 200 buck oscilloscope, or even an extra 300 bucks.
The comment you're responding to was literally pointing at the actual magnitude of prices for scopes that are merely US-branded. And for the lower end models you're talking about, they're not even anywhere near "Made in the US from US components". Siglent or Rigol are not going to be setting up manufacturing in the US to avoid tariff rates on finished products, and they certainly aren't going to do it when the inputs would be subject to tariffs as well.
Your comments in this thread basically come across like you just read an economics 101 textbook and are now asking leading questions to continue your study. In reality, markets are computationally hard and path/structure dependent. Merely tweaking a few knobs to increase some incentive won't make something magically spring into existence. A lot of market "proponents" ironically miss this - if markets were not computationally hard, then centralized planning would also work!
None of those benefits of a price hike go to American workers. They get low wage factory jobs, not old school pension jobs, and all their stuff goes up in price?
Laughable. I doubt Americans won’t even pay 5% more to get stuff made in the USA.
Ah OK, so when do we see production coming back to North America? On the other hand, didn't TMSC and other manufacturers plan to open a few spots in the US?
You don’t. Not with current lifestyles and general way of life people alive today would recognize at least.
I lived through Walmart systemically walking through the Midwest and destroying every bit of competition in its path. People looooooved to talk about how other people should “just pay $5 more!” to a local retailer and stuff made in the USA. But it was always for other people to do. Never underestimate the American consumers cheapness. If they can get more junk for less, they will do so nearly every time.
And this was in an era when there was still a large amount of manufacturing done in the US. The costs would no longer just be a minor 20% discount - they would be multiples since we lost both the capital investment in equipment and factories, the supply chains feeding them, and would have to spend a generation training up current high schoolers into skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing labor. Assuming anyone actually is willing to do those jobs these days.
Buying local became something for performative rich folks to do. Everyone else excused themselves due to “need” of some sort. Consumer preference was revealed and catered to - and now without severe great depression level pain it’s not coming back.
Perhaps after the incompetent performative fascists are evicted, all of the structure fires they wantonly started have been put out, and there is some halfway-competent administration that appreciates the scale of the problem we are dealing with.
Tariffs would have helped 20 years ago, but here they're basically just a wistful dementia echo of something that could have been. Applying a policy that's decades out of date merely further strangles American industry. This article is a great example if you actually examine the details of the situation - Digikey is an input to the types of domestic manufacturing that actually employs labor, yet blanket tariffs simply make them even less competitive.
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