If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.
I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.
So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.
I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.
It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).
I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.
Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.
Yeah I also looked into it and there seems no concrete information on that, just speculation about the policy change, like this one:
“While Google doesn't explicitly state that IP addresses and other fingerprint methods are now allowed, the Privacy Disclosure section of Google's February 16th Platforms Program Policies now explicitly mentions ‘cookies, web beacons, IP addresses, or other identifiers.’”
When you dive into it, it does look more like companies that sell encryption and VPNs using some potential danger to get more subscribers.
But what you say depends on what’s causing such prices to rise, doesn’t it?
Let’s say that suddenly the production of product X halts and the prices rise. You’d expect that once you start producing it en masse again, prices of that product would at least fall. But what we see in most of the world is that products didn’t get cheaper once supply chains started working again, arguably because of the phenomenon of price stickiness.
I always say the doom of humanity won’t be wars or something sudden. It’ll be something that’s been silently happening: the extinction of species and ecosystems one by one that’s been accelerating in the last 50 years. And now with global warming, it’ll only get worse because environments are changing and forcing species out of their homes.
And this is something I don’t see getting better at all. Social media just seems to have made people even more egocentric and selfish and actionless too, because ranting about problems online makes people feel like they did their part.
We’ll just witness the world falling apart one disaster after another and watch it as “entertainment” on TikTok and Reels, until it’s our turn.
“And this is exactly why Google wants to use digital fingerprinting: It is way more powerful than cookie-based tracking, and it can’t be blocked for instance by switching to a privacy-first browser.”
If I use Firefox and Firefox doesn’t send any fingerprint to the website, then how is it identifying me?
I get that if you use Android (which is normally tied to Google), you’re still subject to see it on Google websites, but how will it work otherwise?
There’s no denial that money has a huge role on it, especially because open source software has contributions mostly from North America and Western Europe.
But about older guys being more available, I wouldn’t be so sure. That would be a nice case to study. Because the older you get, often the less inclined you are to spend your free time on something like that.
I believe what happens with these people is that the projects are truly their passion, and they come from a different landscape where software development wasn’t something mainstream. I remember some comment on HN where the user talked about how there was a “coolness” to it in the sense of being something new and unexplored, the internet was a place for like-minded people that loved information technology, they had the chance to create a lot of things that have become established today.
Now software development isn’t the same as it used to be in general perception, I guess. The influx of capital that made the startup scene boom and made everyone and their grandmother to learn to code sucked out part of the passion from the field. Nowadays you have a lot of professional programmers who don’t know anything beyond their immediate IDE and programming language. There isn’t a sense of discovery any more, cause it feels like any project is a copycat (another todo app), while the important projects have grown super complex and are managed by organizations instead of lone programmers.
This kind of logic never made sense to me, like: if an AI could build something like Netflix (even if it needed the assistance of a mid software engineer), then it means every indie dev will be able to build a Netflix competitor, bringing the value of Netflix down. Open source tools would quickly reach a level where they’d surpass any closed source software, and would be very user-friendly without much effort.
We’d see LLMs being used to create and improve rapidly infrastructure like compilers, IDEs and build systems that are currently complex and slow, rewrite any slow software into faster languages etc. So many projects that are stalled today for lack of manpower would be flourishing and flooding us with new apps and features in an incredible pace.
I’m yet to see it happen. And that’s because for LLMs to produce anything with enough quality, they need someone who understands what they’re outputting, someone who can add the necessary context in each prompt, who can test it, integrate it into the bigger scheme without causing regressions etc. It’s no simple work and it requires even understanding LLMs’ processing limitations.
It’s not the people that simply decided to hate on AI, it was the sensationalist media hyping it up so much to the point of scaring people: “it’ll take all your jobs”, or companies shoving it down our throats by putting it in every product even when it gets in the way of the actual functionality people want to use. Even my company “forces” us all to use X prompts every week as a sign of being “productive”. Literally every IT consultancy in my country has a ChatGPT wrapper that they’re trying to sell and they think they’re different because of it. The result couldn’t be different, when something gets too much exposure it also gets a lot of hate, especially when it is forced down on people.
If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.
I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.
So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.
I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.
It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).
I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.
Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.