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I loved the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 slide mechanism.

The front camera was hidden and you would slide the back up to expose it. Was not motorized and functioned using magnets. Very similar to what old dumb phones used. Super reliable and easy to use.


Why not purchase used then? 66% discount for a mint condition sounds like a steal.

That is what brought some interest, but at the same time there are no steals in farming. Although in the end it was largely technical. The M7 wasn't enough frame for my needs, but I didn't really need the HP of the M8 (which is actually a Versatile anyway). Other manufacturers offer models that more closely align with my requirements.

Fines like these are simply considered Cost of Doing Business. Part of the reason why I love the GDPR fine structure so much (percentage base).

It has to hurt.


"Doxing" has negative connotations.

Its almost always associated with a private person (ie not police or anyone of a judicial system) releasing personal information with malicious intent.

As the person above you said, semantics are important. This is a judicial system specifically searching for a person they believe to have caused severe criminal harm.


While I don’t think this case is accurately described as Doxxing I also reject the definition that the state can’t commit Doxxing. The reason this situation doesn’t count is because of due process, not simply state action. The state is not infallible, regardless of what immunity may try to establish.

That's a fair point and I agree with you on both counts.

As you said, in this particular case, the respective judicial entities purposefully released the personal information with the intent of arresting both. Whether that is successful or not remains to be seen but that's a different story.

For me personally, I understand doxing to be the release of personal information with malicious, indirect intent. For example, hoping that an angry mob will find the home of a person and attack them, send the person death threats through the post, etc.

Assuming a decently functional justice system, I don't consider an arrest warrant a malicious intent.


> ...also, Germany has 84,000,000 people, so definitely not half of Iran.

I think OP meant land mass not people with the country comparison.


They also write that Iran is "2/3 of Russia", when surface-wise it's not even one tenth, so I doubt that they meant that...

Fair. Depends on the game to be honest.

I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).


> And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now.

I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.


I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.

A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?


Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are working with use Teams then there is less friction if you also use Teams yourself.


Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.


Chat software is absurdly expensive. I’m not saying teams is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for businesses too.


>Chat software is absurdly expensive.

Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.

My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.

Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?


You do not need anywhere need a full time employee to spin up a Matrix instance.

You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.


>You need 1 of the IT people you're paying already to do a couple of hours of allocating a server, running it, and setting up permissions.

We did that at my previous job during covid because we also though maintenance would only be a couple of hours of effort. It didn't work out that easy. It became a full time job so it was scrapped. People underestimate the amount of effort required maintaining on-prem infra across an org to match what cloud hypersacler providers offer.


What on earth could someone being doing to a poor Matrix server that would necessitate a full time job?

potentially wrapping their own package or distro rather than using something like ESS Community? Or perhaps they left registration open and had abuse problems?

18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.


That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.


6k would be a no-brainer.

In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.

At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.


That's a very upside down way to think about it.

The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"

The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.

Not 'But it costs $X million!'.

Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?

Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.


This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy.

The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced:

"Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?"

"That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."

"You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."

And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them.


My company doesn't OK basically any software requests, even cheap stuff :( We also don't make anywhere near $10k/mo (not USA). REcently got a new dev machine and it had 512GB m2 SSD and 16GB of RAM. I had to order 32GB but I had to explain why: to run docker images (and i'm hitting limits with 32GB constantly). I had to wait 2 weeks for the RAM upgrade. I wanted a bigger SSD but it would have taken longer and I needed to upgrade ASAP. It doesn't even have a USB-C plug (but a SD card slot, good grief).


Careful, at some companies that kind of talk leads to discontinuing catered lunch.


I would not be working at one of those companies in the first place.


> You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month,

Mhh, far from it.


Monitors are a personal choice. My monitor doesn’t force anyone else to install yet another a chat app to talk to me. The choice of chat app has to be made centrally, or at least at an organizational level.


I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.


> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.

I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.


Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.


A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive realm, where most of the startups you hear about are working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6 months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge amounts of money overall.

Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous fields. I know a few companies making agricultural products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-tech news sites.


Quicker and bigger is better than slower and smaller. Especially in a competitive sector.

Better to go bust quick, than to eke out a tiny profit by being super frugal. The latter is a waste of everybody's time.


The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC.

You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.


> 6k would be a no-brainer.

"It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?"


That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company.


So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.


Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16 million dollars?

Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts.


You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'


yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.


How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.


And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week.

(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)


We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.


We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing


It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.


You get teams for free with office but how do you justify that logic when free office suites are available? You can’t justify your decision on functionality because that could also be used to justify the cost of Slack. If you’re actually considering cost vs functionality then it’s no longer a no-brainer.


yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse through their monopoly position

Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.


Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money or asleep at the wheel


The other thing is availability of alternatives.

Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.


> good luck getting the average person through the setup process.

an enterprising hardware manufacturer can take on the mantle, and be the trail blazer with a no-setup machine that works.

Personally, i would imagine something like framework laptop, and steam machine, are the best candidates.


This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they aren’t getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.


That's mostly because they didn't care before. It also took a massive amount of work to get gaming to work on windows.


How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and other things?


Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people who are idealistic like the average Linux system customer. They know their clientele, they know it would be bad for business.


Good luck getting the average person through the setup process

AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.

The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.

So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.


> Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.

Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon. The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.

Besides that, part of the point of switching away from oil and gas is at least some independence. Europe isnt known for its nuclear fuel supply so now you're reliant on another country again.

Yes, most solar is produced in China but its about as low maintence as it gets and there is still enough knowledge to produce in Europe.


> The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.

Well you better get on that, then. It’s going to a lot worse in 5 years.


> Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon.

It wasn't going to happen in China either. China also disn't have the knowledge. And yet...


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