If I want to buy today a smartphone that is positioned on the market at the same level as what I was buying for around $500 seven-eight years ago, now I have to spend well over $1000, a price increase between 2 and 3 times.
So your example is not well chosen.
Price increases have affected during the last decade many computing and electronics devices, though for most of them the price increases have been less than for smartphones.
With consumer phones you're not telling your customers "spend $200,000 with us to try and find holes before the bad guys do it". Commercial SAST tools have been around for 20 years and the pricing hasn't moved in all that time. With AI tools you've got a combination of the perfect hostage situation, pay for our stuff before others will find bad things about your product, and a desperate need to create the illusion of some sort of revenue stream, so I doubt prices will be dropping any time soon.
Yeah and to give a more recent example, it's exactly like how RAM, storage, and other computer parts have gotten much cheaper over the last 3 years... oh wait.
A recent (last year?) Windows update moved a lot of people's Documents folder into OneDrive, without asking. In some cases people lost data, in others it was a nuisance as all sorts of embedded or saved paths broke.
Yup, they managed to get my Dad on this. When he uninstalled it, they give you a small warning "oh you might lose some data" - when it is 100% guaranteed if you were over their 5gb limit.
Absolutely insane, glad I had Backblaze to restore from, but it even remapped his Documents and other home folders to a new place, so using restore didn't immediately make the files appear.
Don’t count on Backblaze to back it up anymore either. They don’t backup Dropbox directories or other cloud sync products. It wasn’t broadly communicated just a line item in release notes.
I’ve now decided to move on from BB. They changed that without notice or workaround and my files (which I pay for long term versioning) are gone from their backups too.
If anything I would have expected my files to be retained, no new syncing of the directories. Not simply disappear (which could be because it appears deleted if the client is skipping them) - even then though my long term versions should take over.
> A recent (last year?) Windows update moved a lot of people's Documents folder into OneDrive, without asking.
Something similar happened to my Dropbox on Mac: the change to the macOS File Provider API meant that a lot of my locally synced files became cloud-sync only. Not cool when I was expecting limited internet access.
I still have no idea how to redownload and keep everything local while synced with cloud.
Did that really happen? Like existing and populated with existing files /user/Documents content had been moved automatically to the /user/OneDrive/ without asking? No offense, but I have a hard time believing it.
If if was a new setup and people accidentally started using OneDrive dir as a primary folder and then something broke, then yeah, that may happen. Or if the users got conned into enabling automatic backups for folders. That's also possible. The problem is that backup setting is off by default. But automatically copying or moving files from outside of the /user/OneDrive without any prompting?
There are plenty of reasons to criticize OneDrive and I personally would not use it. But I think comparing it with a weekend vibe coded self hosted project is a bit of a stretch.
Microsoft has zero goodwill from me with regards to software quality or pro-consumer business moves.
I will forever assume that microsoft product is 1) technically broken 2) trying to upsell and 3) probably required by some esoteric software suite, which is the only reason a sane human would put up with it.
I think many people are just looking at the outcomes. Slop is now being retroactively applied to human produced software as well, as a new adjective for software generally.
There is also sentiment / understanding that Microslop has been pushing their devs to do the ai thing and that it is resulting in more downtime and bugs. This is not limited to one company and more an artifact of the hype cycle. If anything, it's worse with the corporate product because there should be more checks and balances, but here we are.
How can I practically verify 2TB of a life's worth of files while guaranteeing I won't have data loss due to some edge cases and race conditions that delete my data.
Every time I've created my own backup script I realized knowing what to delete and when is not easy. IMO the practical solution to this is to just pay for more storage (within reason).
How can you guarantee you'll have access to your 2TB Google Drive when they ban your Google account for breaching terms or accidentally tripping a circuit breaker across one of their offerings?
A backup is not something I fear of losing access to because by definition it’s a copy.
However I am more afraid of my data being exfiltrated and imo there is a more risk of that with a “vibe coded 1 person 1 week old” app rather than any of the major providers.
This is unironically why I do not depending on google for products this important. I do have premium google drive as I needed barely over 15gb, but my main cloud storage is dropbox. A YT comment I made 10 years ago can't break Dropbox's TOS, and since premium storage is their whole business, they will take the product more seriously.
I also have a 14TB RAID 5 NAS at home. And my Desktop PC has 6TB of RAID 5 (had that first, mostly used for video games these days).
> How can I practically verify 2TB of a life's worth of files while guaranteeing I won't have data loss due to some edge cases and race conditions that delete my data.
Same with literally every other backup software. Have two, and test restorations regularly. It's not easy, but nothing worth it when you need it ever is.
I will never use one drive even if they paid me. I use Dropbox + Homelab NAS with RAID 5 + old desktop PC with a RAID 5 drive. I have a lot of RAW photos to keep.
I'll never forget when my Grandpa died 20 years ago, the first thing my dad did - even before telling us - was look for photos. His siblings did the same and they came up with a collage of around 30 photos I had never seen before that gave me a small glimpse of the highlights of his life.
My other grandpa, controversially used a big chunk of their wedding money on a good camera. They traveled the world and lived abroad for several years right before and after my mom and aunt were born. Because of this, we are all able to see such a fascinating and meticulous glimpse into their lives. Each photo tells a story even if the story is boring, but I really appreciated the small details. Even random pictures of cars that my Grandpa thought were cool. Or the mean guard dog they had in Taiwan while it was still a puppy. Or my mom on the Trans Siberian Railroad in the middle of the Cold War.
These stories and my own appreciation of photography have made me realize how valuable every photo I have is, and I'm willing to put in effort to save them. When I'm old and dying of dementia, I'll be able to look back at my life in incredible detail one last time. Even the dumb meme's I decided to save will tell a story.
I still have a deep appreciation for living in the moment and knowing not everything should be captured, but we live in an era where I have a really good camera in my pocket at all times, and the ability to store all those photos forever cheaply.
But that response is grounded in the training data they've seen, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think their answer might provide actual insights, not just statistical parroting.
What do you mean? It is grounded on the text it is fed, the reason it said that was that humans have said that or something similar to it, not because it analyzed a lot of LLM information and thought up that answer itself.
LLM can "think" but that requires a lot of tokens to do, all quick answers are just human answers or answers it was fed with some basic pattern matching / interpolation.
Faster doesn't always mean better. I've "learned" things from LLM really fast, but I don't retain the information the same way as if I had taken my time to really work through it
Sometimes I wonder how deeply some people actually read these articles. What's the point of the comments if all we're doing is re-explaining what's already explained in such a precise and succint manner? It's a fantastic article. It's so well-written and clear. And yet we're stuck going in a circle repeating what's in the article to people who either didn't read it, or didn't read it with the care it deserves.
> That’s what the program he just took was supposed to be for, learning not output.
If you send a kid to an elementary school, and they come back not having learned anything, do you blame the concept of elementary schools, or do you blame that particular school - perhaps a particular teacher _within_ that school?
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