Look into the TiVo Stream 4K. It’s an Android box but has been very reliable for me. Tivo does force some quirks so I used ADB to disable core services and the default launcher has ads so I switched to Projectivy launcher.
I don’t understand how viable these helpdesk companies are anymore for non-enterprise customers. We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes. It has long term memory about our business. When a customer messages us, Hermes gets all the relevant details about the customer and creates a Pi session using Gemma 4 running locally and customer talks to that agent. That agent can escalate that issue to Hermes and Hermes can escalate to us.
I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service.
At that same time, I was reading about this story about WireCard. It was like Stripe for Europe and worth billions. Turns out it was run by a Russian spy network and was all a sham. That video alleged Germany’s bureaucracy is filled with Russian agents and this can be traced back to the East/West Berlin days.
To save a few bucks a month over DO didn’t seem worth it to me to send my passport to a foreign country.
I actually sent them a picture of my passport, and they still denied my account.
Hetzner was widely recommended and I was more than happy to pay a premium for their supposedly-excellent service, but I guess they didn't want my money.
Oh well. Went with OVH instead, and haven't had any issues since.
Same exact story here, they denied my account despite me sending them everything they requested, no explanation given. Went with OVH and had zero issues.
If they are spies, they are taking their time to use the data for sure. I run servers with them since 2009 or so. That's 17 years.
I feel like the whole password thing was meant as a protection against SPAM or using servers for nefarious purposes as they know who's really behind every server.
Although, I can also see how real criminals would work around that easily by supplying fake identities. Sounds like one of those "why we can't have nice things". Well, at least the password I gave them 17 years ago has expired since.
I mean it's not great that Hetzner require this but it's a bit of a jump to assume that means they have links to Russian intelligence. This kind of thing is pretty common in Germany; not every private company is captured by Russian intelligence
Yes, no connection to WireCard but reading about that situation made me pause about giving my passport. At that point, I was like I’m trying to save a few bucks a month and risk is not worth it. Now if you’re buying their huge servers and are saving thousands, I can see why someone would do it.
They also don’t ask every person for the passport picture so maybe me using a custom DNS and VPN might’ve triggered something on their end.
> I was signing up for Hetzner years ago and it asked me to upload my passport to use their service.
I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference?
Credit card is a largely fixed risk of financial loss, with some legal safeguards for recovery, and the ability to get a replacement card with a different number. Passport carries an open long-term risk of impersonation and you can't just get a new passport because some company has a copy. Just the financial side of that risk can have much greater impact. Unless a company has a legal requirement to "know your customer", e.g. a financial institution, this is a red flag.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Even with payment processors, most they ask for is SSN and business EIN.
When I read about the WireCard scandal, the KYC stuff sent to them over the years is probably in the hands of foreign intelligence already. That’s what gave me pause.
When many sites are collecting these photos, it increases possibility of them leaking. Since these are also used for KYC process in crypto sites etc, this in turn increases risk of identity theft.
I'm a Hetzner user in the US, but I pay for it with PayPal and was never asked to give my passport or identity. Americans are very rarely asked for these documents online, and even then it's typically only for government or financial services. It's also drilled into us that this info can be used for identity theft, so it's only natural to be wary of any non-government entity asking for them.
FWIW, if Hetzner had asked for my passport when I signed up, I would not have given it either.
I was doing the same here, trying to set up a Hertzner account. Getting away from US companies and buying European and all that. But after I had made the account (and wasting a lot of time on back and forth with their buggy sign-up flow), I got told that I needed to upload a picture of my passport to do anything.
Nice work from DO marketing team! Prices are completely not comparable and Hetzner was fighting scammers and kiddies, because low prices worked like a magnet for those.
Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport.
Look I'm just a dude who happened to land on DO a decade ago due to podcast ads and now wants to move away from it. Not due to prices but because I would prefer a European alternative. I didn't bring up Russian spies and I don't know if there's any validity to that story, I just don't want to upload passport pictures to random services. Their competitors don't require it.
I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time.
I encourage you to read about WireCard. It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding. I’m trying to dig up the video also I can link it. There is no connection between WireCard and Hetzner outside of both being German companies.
Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both.
I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.
I haven’t used Claude in more than a year and didn’t even try Fable.
As someone that doesn’t have a dog in this race, I feel like anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to neuter their model and make sure that it’s not able to do a lot of things that might can be destructive. So them saying that there should be a pause on new AI and then releasing this new product makes me inclined to believe them. Maybe I’ve drank the koolaid but it seems like Anthropic isn’t inherently “evil.”
> First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations
They did not do this, they just wanted to ensure there was a human somewhere in the loop. Despite this, the U.S. military utilized Anthropic's Claude model in classified operations, including target selection during conflicts in the Middle East.
Didn’t Iran consider their previous US negotiations a sham? Why would they believe them this time? Feels like the US wants to approach them with these deals, reneg, and once Iran is like we don’t want anymore deals, then the US can point to them and be like, see they don’t want peace.
For one thing, the US has agreed to give Iran $12 billion of their frozen assets before negotiations start, and another $12 billion during the 60 day negotiation period. When you repeatedly bomb the other side while prior negotiations were ongoing, before having to conclude that a negotiated settlement is the only way out of this, you have to make big concessions to even get the other side to the negotiating table.
Iran was fully abiding by the JCPOA (Obama Iran deal) until Trump pulled out in his first term. Trump hates Obama so that was entirely out of spite.
What is surprising is how co-opted the Biden admin was by Israel, that they didn't even bother to even consider reentering it despite it being a Democratic party "win" when it was first announced.
No, they tried to negotiate a new deal, not go back to the one they had agreed to. Why would Iran trust any new negotiations?
Iran was naive enough to trust the US twice in the last year and HAD THEIR NEGOTIATING TEAM BOMBED! I'm shocked they even trust the US to hold up to the deal they signed today. I'm guessing US concessions on frozen assets was just too much to pass up.
One way to take over a network is to start with an alternative front end. We'll see if this works out for AI companies. First you have the AI consult booking.com whenever someone asks it to book a hotel, then you get more and more hotels to directly communicate with the AI company, then you drop booking.com once you have enough.
It’s exactly what I’m building. First I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and then leverage that to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace.
It won't work. The future gatekeeper just has to threaten to send traffic to your competitor if you (a hotel) don't sign an exclusive agreement with them.
So marketplaces will not allow users to have their own storefronts and websites? Most restaurants on DoorDash have a website where prices are cheaper. AI will allow your computer go to that website and place the order. How could Doordash stop that? How many restaurants would be willing to take down their website to appease a marketplace?
Yes, but those businesses are normally started with the premise of only selling on DoorDash and Uber and they provide you a commercial kitchen. I’m talking about actual restaurants with storefronts, websites, and significant sales outside of these marketplaces. A restaurant like that wouldn’t close down their other sales channels just to stay on a marketplace.
Ghost kitchens might since that’s the only sales channel they are utilizing.
I've been recently asking ChatGPT specific questions about the food places near me like who has toro on the menu when I look for sushi places. Then it occurred to me that I'm better off storing notes about each food place separately in it's own md file locally. Then have an agent simply control a browser to spider every food place near my house systematically one at a time. So then all the restaurant has to do is have some way for me pull down the menu and pictures. This is something I've been wanting so I can order by talking to my agent. Whoever is working on this same thing I would say don't waste your time because it's one of the first uses of local that I feel will be superior to some generic thing like Ubereats which I don't use anyway unless traveling. So for ghost kitchens just drop a menu and show it online.
I’m building exactly that! We’re building an agentic commerce marketplace where you can bring your own shops too! We include ones we have audited ourselves but you can overwrite and add any restaurant you want.[0]
The missing part is the crowd sourced delivery. That will be more difficult to build like Uber and DoorDash have, but I’ve noticed the restaurants I use employ their own drivers so maybe we can tap into that.
I couldn't disagree more. These are intermediation businesses, that is they've inserted themselves as an intermediary between customers and providers. Everybody hates those businesses, ultimately.
Over time, profits tend to decrease. To a point you can counter that by expanding and entering new markets but ultaimtely you reach the point where your only options are raising prices and/or cutting costs. To maintain this you often need to engage in rent-seeking behavior (eg national ISPs lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal).
As an intermediary, Uber needs to increase their margin at the expense of the driver, the customer or both. Same with DoorDash and all these others.
You see this when people try and start intermediary businesses like MyClean, TaskRabbit, tutor services and so on. They all face the problem that the customer and provider are always better off leaving the platform and dealing directly because the value-add of the intermediary is a lot less than what they charge to justify their profits.
The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple
So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?
Right, there is a long tradition in it taking centuries to build great cathedrals, Chartres, Notre Dame, etc.
I've little issue with that, however taking so long to build something such as an O/S that it's obsoleted itself many times over before being finished is another matter altogether.
Only if it keeps being relevant for the computing model.
Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.
It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
> ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of
lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.
Easy, one use adminstration tokens, useful to anyone that cares about security.
Here is another one, enforced application sandboxing and signing, comming up in a future update this year, year another useful one for security.
Yet another one, ability to actually use Windows containers without having the same kernel version between host and guest, useful for Windows developers.
I would be happier if it really could search and pick every unicode character. I would love to be able to nab "not equals", "approximately equals", "supsercript 2", etc.
The Unix/Linux desktop world has had compose keys for multiple decades now for that exact sort of thing. <Compose> + <=> + </> = ≠, <Compose> + <~> + <~> = ≈, <Compose> + <^> + <2> = ², etc. It's how I get em—dashes and “smart quotes” and such into whatever I type.
Only downside is that defining custom sequences is… less than intuitive.
> It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.
When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.
Working with Windows 3.11 isn't even the problem there though, that is only a symptom. You could get one of the original authors of 3.11 in there and all they would get told by Siemens would be "no, you can't touch anything. You can't change anything, you can't install a new piece of software, even one designed for Windows 3.11. You can't fix this obvious bug, even if you are Chesteron. The absolute only thing we will allow you to do is to salve the very shallowest possible symptom that we never noticed until this week, and you can only do that by adding a new thing completely outside of the scope of everything that already exists and make the ball of pain larger."
The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.
I’m actually building an open-source Shopify for every vertical. The schema for each vertical is different and we are using Postgres. It comes with a built-in AI that you can ask to add new products, change prices, etc.
The next evolution for this is to allow users to use the AI to change the database schema itself. Like if someone is using our restaurant software and wants to start selling merch. I’d want them to be able to use the AI to change the database schema and add products and shipping from the e-commerce one.
I really do think that is the future of SaaS. You start from a base SaaS and the AI customizes it to your business over time.
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