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A lot of people did pay for ad-free Netflix, only to wake up one day in the future to find that product ending, and a similarly priced tier that has ads in it.

Amazon Prime Video didn't have ads. Then one day it did.

Maybe you're right that _the masses_ need to start rejection ad-tiers, but so far we've seen that people will accept advertising to get more.


Your comment is so naive. Most products out there have a terms and conditions that equate to 'the company can change the product at any time and you're always free to stop using it', while giving their salespeople little to no idea about future progress because that would limit sales. Even if you didn't "maybe forgot to ask", there isn't anyone to respond with the truth.

If you purchase a product that doesn't have ads and then they introduce ads - that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.


> that is a huge change in the value proposition of the product.

It is, but one that is already calculated at time of purchase. You'd pay a lot more if there were strict guarantees that it would never display ads.

The Belarus tractor company learned that lesson. Once upon a time they tried to infiltrate western agriculture with, under the backing of the USSR, heavily subsidized products offered on the cheap. But farmers saw through the thin veneer and realized that they wouldn't be able to get parts for the machines down the road. As such, the much cheaper price wasn't a winner. Farmers were willing to pay significantly more to American companies, knowing that they would provide not just on day one but also long into the future. The economic lesson learned was that the marketplace doesn't value just initial purchase price, but the full value proposition over its entire lifetime.

Many people are willing to gamble, of course, especially for "disposable" things.


I read it as more rhetorical than not. No one was literally expected to ask about the future. However, one could be expected to ask oneself “what could such a low price tag on such capable hardware mean for the future?”

It is unrealistic, of course, because it is a textbook case of information asymmetry (the enemy of the market)—only a vanishingly small number of people can adequately assess the pricing, having to know enough about hardware and all the various forces that could bring it down, like potential upcoming lineup changes or inventory overflow.

The right move is to fight information asymmetry. Many developed countries, including the US, already do it in countless cases. A mild way could be requiring to disclose things like this in addition to the ToS; a more thorough way could be simply banning this business model.


I'd love to see the rest of your postmortem template! I never thought about adding a "Where did we get lucky?" question.

I recently realized that one question for me should be, "Did you panic? What was the result of that panic? What caused the panic?"

I had taken down a network, and the device led me down a pathway that required multiple apps and multiple log ins I didn't have to regain access. I panicked and because the network was small, roamed and moved all devices to my backup network.

The following day, under no stress, I realized that my mistake was that I was scanning a QR code 90 degrees off from it's proper orientation. I didn't realize that QR codes had a proper orientation and figured that their corner identifiers handled any orientation. Then it was simple to gain access to that device. I couldn't even replicate the other odd path.


One of my favorite man pages is scan_ffs https://man.openbsd.org/scan_ffs

    The basic operation of this program is as follows:

    1. Panic. You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over with. Just don't do anything stupid. Panic away from your machine. Then relax, and see if the steps below won't help you out.

    2. ...


The standard SRE one recommended by Google has a lucky section. We tend to use it to talk about getting unlucky too.


A good section to have is one on concept/process issues you encountered, which I think is a generalization of your question about panic.

For instance, you might be mistaken about the operation of a system in some way that prolongs an outage or complicates recovery. Or perhaps there are complicated commands that someone pasted in a comment in a Slack channel once upon a time and you have to engage in gymnastics with Sloogle™ to find them, while the PM and PO are requesting updates. Or you end up saving the day because of a random confluence of rabbit holes you'd traversed that week, but you couldn't expect anyone else on the team to have had the same flash of insight that you did.

That might be information that is valuable to document or add to training materials before it is forgotten. A lot of postmortems focus on the root cause, which is great and necessary, but don't look closely at the process of trying to stop the bleeding.


No, QR codes are auto-orienting[1]. If you're getting a different reading at different orientations, there is a bug in your scanner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Design


It does seem to be possible to design QR codes that scan differently depending on the orientation, though they look a little visibly malformed.

https://hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-qr-code-leads-to-two-we...


> I didn't realize that QR codes had a proper orientation and figured that their corner identifiers handled any orientation.

Same, I assumed they were designed to always work. I suspect it was whatever app or library you were using that wasn't designed to handle them correctly.


Comments like these are why I come to hacker news! I'm working on a project right now where I've been learning mermaid, but have gotten to the point where it would be easier for me to draw it out and convert this way by a lot. I'll try this!


I was going to try it but when presented with no explanation and an account sign up, clicked out.

Great idea, could benefit from more upfront info.


Yup - and that was worth it! I love a good a-ha moment.


I agree, it's fun. However, who wants to play pong? It's not exactly a flashy "CLICK ME" type game.


It's a video feed of yourself with clippy in the bottom right corner saying "It's you"


I'm glad I checked the comments first, not worth it.


No, they actually succeeded because it's still leaning. The tower was known for leaning and they wanted to preserve that famous lean while still increasing safety, which they increased.


You've got it backwards.

The article claims that the AI does not have a tendency to innovate, specifically stopping when it doesn't have the most probably result at hand.


I just want to say that I love this and have it bookmarked! I've moved into my 30s and am now thinking about life "maintenance first" and this will be a helpful resource for planning.

I imagine the only help y'all need is for us to update EOL info when we see it?


Yes, great it like a Wiki. Additions of new products are also welcome, as is building tooling on our API or improving our release automation so we track releases better.


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