Sure, that sounds bad, but look on the bright side…

The costs are going up because we’re using all the energy for the hallucinating lie machines that are using all the water and trying to kill all the jobs while increasing the costs of all computer parts.

St. Louis?

shouldn’t it have been extremely easy to foresee…

I mean… look who you’re talking about.

Without getting into too much detail because I want to stay relatively anonymous/unidentifiable as much as possible, I chose to go to Asia rather than Europe.

I know that’s basically useless, but it’s as detailed as I’m willing to get.

I got out last time Trump won and finally secured permanent residency. Worth every sacrifice I made.

The worst part is this stupid asshole won’t acknowledge that everyone else is right and has been all along - it’s “You just happened to be right, but MY special conclusion now, happening now, is the only logical way to have concluded this.”

You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying “This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership.”

Unless it’s protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.

Even if they ARE an “honorable” company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.

Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a “kill the golden goose to get the eggs” move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.

Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it’s a GAMBLE. It’s a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it’s not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.

Pro-tip: If the company hasn’t already been around for over 100 years, NEVER buy a lifetime pass for ANYTHING.

Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?

Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It’s not great that they’re paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they’re also not contributing to Anthropic’s code base. If they were? They’d absolutely be complicit.

The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.

Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.

It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.

I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.

If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.

Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.