How much my food costs is quite consequential, and I think it's very important to understand whether or not a business has some hackneyed algorithm that tells them to charge me 50% more than the man standing next to me.
It's only good for the man. It's not good for me. If you think I'm selfish, then you have no guarantee that it's the other man who would pay more and only I would get the discount.
>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.
Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."
"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?
> Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
This is the way, but also, places like eBay are increasingly “professionalized” by huge resellers and refurbishers who squeeze out any possible margin. I’ve also noticed that thrift and consignment stores aren’t such a bargain anymore. You can often get a better deal from large retailers when they go on clearance.
P2P transactions still pay off but it’s not as easy as it used to be.
That's good to know regarding ebay. I don't use it much, but I wasn't aware. Agreed with regard to thrift stores. Some of them have seen quite a lot of inflation. I think it's yard sales and minimalism for me.
Even those have price-constraints - if you watch for awhile you get a real feel for the prices that people will pay vs the "value" if you will. Certain thrift stores will be dirt cheap, others (Goodwill) will be barely below Walmart - sometimes you can even scratch the price off and find a clearance sticker for lower under it.
eBay is still worthwhile for some items, but lots of the "deals" on actual used product have moved to other marketplaces like Poshmark.
Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.
I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.
If the app could make another $0.05 selling your location to kidnapping gangs, they'd do it. There's no such thing as an app that cares about your privacy or your interests.
That's what I'm really trying to convey to many people (I work in privacy products) but people keep talking to me about "trust" which is non-sense, I keep arguing that if the data is on the server of someone, you must always assume that they'll use it somehow, it's a bit ridiculous imo to think otherwise, imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
> imagine you are a company and you sit with literal gold in a sqlite DB and you are like hmmm no let's not do this query, that makes no sense from a business standpoint.
I expect all humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. I acknowledge that many people will likely fail to meet that expectation, quite often I'm sure. But I'm never going to accept or become an apologist for this asshattery.
It's wrong to violate the privacy and dignity of other people. The correct response when you see people hurting others is not to make up an excuse about "business need", instead some anger, disappointment, and loud condemnation is required.
Stop making excuses for those hurting others so they can make money.
Yes, I agree that it's wrong, my point is really about the data itself being in their servers. Let's be real, a service nowadays DO have the choice to enable client-side encryption or methodology to be unable to consult data themselves, so any company that chose against that during development phase might have eventual motives of processing the data, my point is really about the blind trust from users which is just wrong from a security standpoint, every trust step added that you can't verify is just "faith" at this point, not security.
Term of services are irrelevant as they are breached all the time, major companies are getting fined all the time for it, we must rely on cryptography, not human trust and people needs to stop being surprised the moment they learn that the data they accepted to leave in cleartext is used, that would be a first step toward forcing the change and using proper security standards.
Want a useful action? Let's change the law to force cryptography regarding user data, attestation, SGX or whatever method (there is plenty), that would be a great start, the fact that in 2026 it's still legal to process user chats in plaintext is mindblowing.
Well, perhaps they make verifying it hard.. but what is stopping you from publishing an app in the app store, while also hosting the source code for anyone to see, and use? 99 bucks a year?
It is actually a perfectly practical choice to completely ignore those ecosystems. I am the founder and active engineer at two companies and two large open source projects and have a family, travel a lot, and have an active social life in Silicon Valley.
I also do not use any Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft products and exclusively use open source software for all of my work.
It turns out none of this is incompatible, everyone just convinces themselves it is.
Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers).
If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?
First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience.
Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you.
Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want.
From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home.
Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi.
Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own.
Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day.
At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want.
People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened.
I do own android devices for development and testing, but I do not have a cell phone plan and I do not carry any electronics when leaving home unless my explicit goal is working away from home, in which case I bring a laptop.
They'd only do it as long as the risk of getting caught and the punishment when caught made it worth it.
If the authorities that are supposed to enforce GDPR (and other data protection laws around the world) were doing their job, app makers would be a lot more careful with what they embed and what data they send where. Because these authorities don't seem to have been doing anything useful, it's now so normalized that you could probably send a $20M fine to every major app and be right about it.
Companies don't fundamentally care about cybersecurity. Most of them see cybersecurity as being similar to waste management; it's not something you get excited about. Sure, your company _must_ have a waste management plan, but it only exists out of pure necessity. It's required to do the real work of the company, but if you had a magic wand and never had to deal with it, you'd choose that option. And, like waste management, plenty of companies outsource their cybersecurity, since it's cheaper and they don't really care about it.
Yes, you're correct. To add - companies don't fundamentally care about all the things that we like to think of as "nice things", like good design, lack of dark patterns, robust security architecture, minimizing technical debt, etc.
If customers cared about reputational damage from cybersecurity incidents (sure.. some do) , then you would see that reflected in their priorities. Also, non-technical customers don't really know who to blame for security anyway. They'll just blame the OS vendor or other random parties even if its the Application that is not secure.
If I were a multi-billionaire, I'd pay people to follow around Microsoft executives with a megaphone. They'd just shout "Do you want to save that to OneDrive?!" every few seconds right near their ears. Indefinitely, all day long, all night long. Forever. Of course, there would be no relief. My request wouldn't make sense and there would be nothing they could do to make them cease
No, you gotta give them a chance to tell you to stop! That way you can tell them "pausing setup requests for now" and then go back to harassing them a few minutes later
Reminds me of the customer support bat, me and some friends envisioned in a bar - one far away day. It detect swinging motion and a controller in the tip of the bat plays a sound typical of customer support lifetime wasting platitude.
"All of your worries are extremely important to us.."
"We love our customers and will do anything to help.."
Start a GoFundMe! That idea deserves to see the light of day. Also: Follow pretty much every software product manager around Silicon valley with a megaphone shouting "Do you want me to keep shouting at you? [YES | ASK AGAIN LATER]"
Everything's in decline these days. We lack the political will to solve some of these large scale problems. This confuses people, since we do actually have the technology to solve a lot of these problems. But it's a coordination problem. How do you motivate millions of people across 2-3 countries to care about one particular issue? It sounds simple on paper, but for most people "their cup is already full" of other people's pet causes.
They're maxed out, and there's a limit to how many causes they can 1) be convinced to care about and 2) how many causes they actually have the impulse control to keep strict about.
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