You're correct that it absolutely isn't free but the gall of Google to, once they have all the data, to turn around and demand additional payment for continuing to store all the data they sought out and that they've resold many times over - it's shameless greed at this point.

And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).

Google just sent me an email saying my google account was deleted due to lack of use for 2 years.

It was a famously hard task. It was an ingenious idea for an unexpected task that falls outside of the bounds of predictable normal input but is still readily comprehended by the public.

Unfortunately, as soon as it's a famously hard task trainers know they need to succeed at it and it loses a lot of the power to detect correctness.

Eh, I think that does happen but is much less likely then either acquihiring or killing a potential competitor.

A program that is generated at runtime is fine (we have interpreted languages and often compile on demand) - the issue is with the non-deterministic nature of the output.

I think the core issue is that non-deterministic output is great for a chatbot experience where you want unpredictable randomness so it feels less like talking to the mirror - but when it comes to coding I think we're pretty fundamentally misaligned in sticking to that non-deterministic approach so firmly.

Just on a personal note as someone who worked in the game dev industry for far too long and is still suffering for it... if

> Why am I awake at 1:00am, ruining my brain and body, trying to get this feature finished before the end of the week instead of three days later?

is actually you (or some other reader) please quit/find a new job ASAP even if it means a pay cut. You don't want to deal with back issues, heart issues, weight issues, digestion issues, blood sugar issues - none of that. Please respect your body and your limited time with us. A coworker of mine had a stroke at thirty - that is a life changing event with, honestly, no real paths to full recovery.

I can type faster than I can think of the correct things to type. My experience may be non-standard but I think for most serious software folks the code has never been the bottleneck.

Or having some silly notion that the post service should be profitable.

Public services generally provide public good that outweighs their cost. Trying to quantify and charge for that cost is a useless exercise.

I, personally, have found the adtech bloat (for both disk space and processor usage) to be a huge issue for quite some time. If this is the hill where the public decides to take a stand I'll happily stand beside them to try and reverse this gradual enshittification. I think several other hills were more worthy to defend but nobody noticed those ones so apparently this is the place to fight that fight.

I doubt anyone would appreciate software bloat purely because of how widespread it is[1] - it just hasn't risen to the level where it's so noticeable for such a contemporarily controversial topic yet.

1. As an aside - ubisoft game sizes are absolutely bonkers. I didn't realize that each Assassin's Creed had twelve different operating systems crammed into it but I can't see how else they're clocking in where they do.

Modern games include assets with very large file sizes that operating systems do not.

Yeah, I was surprised to learn that Ticket to Ride (downloaded on Steam) uses like a half gigabyte, but the most data-intense thing it does is a few musical tracks and 2D images with scaling. They fit Final Fantasy 3 (SNES) with 3 CDs of music (albeit low quality) and Mode 7 graphics for the airship onto like 3 MB.

I would confidently state that in terms of hours of enjoyment per byte, nothing can come even close to the 16-bit era. I can't count how many hours of Super Mario World I played. 512 freakin KB. I don't think anything will ever come close to it - and even if you measured one full typical playthrough.

>They fit Final Fantasy 3 (SNES) with 3 CDs of music (albeit low quality) and Mode 7 graphics for the airship onto like 3 MB.

Sure, the good old days where _all of this didn't work without specialized hardware that you bought with every single cartridge_. Mode 7 didn't come for free, it was an entire additional, single purpose chip in the cart on a console that didn't have any concept of task management or even OS. But hey, if you want to have to plug in and swap PCIE cards for each piece of software that you want to run, feel free to reinstall DOS.

If Rockstar games can be criticized for Hot Coffee then Chrome can absolutely be criticized for such bloat ware.

Invoking a different case with bad logic doesn't make this one any stronger. I never understand this impulse, is it just "nuh uh!"?

That was also stupid

TIL, what a nutty situation.

Ah so the real problem here is the loneliness epidemic. If yall were less shy and came over more often to share my home baked peach cobbler then this wouldn't be an issue!

I think you'd face the same problem with peaches as I do with laugenbrötchen, or more specifically sodium hydroxide.

It's hygroscopic as all hell and I can only buy food grade stuff in 10 kilogram quantities. But I need like half a gram per dozen rolls, so I'd have to make around 50 batches of rolls a day to use it up before it goes off.

My electric bill is going to be hellish.

Well if you make laugenbrötchen and I make peach cobbler then we can swap and our friends can have both! Experimental baking and cooking is a passion hobby of mine and it's such a nice topic that allows quick iteration and wild variations.

Efficient usage of sodium hydroxide feels like a compelling use case for consumer grade at-home thorium MSRs - we've got to get the DoE in on this now.

> Well if you make laugenbrötchen and I make peach cobbler then we can swap and our friends can have both!

Distribution at scale becomes a problem when you're talking in the region of 600 rolls per day, but I figure some sort of compressed air cannon to shoot bags of them across town when they're still warm might be okay. Although, I'm in the UK, given the history of politically-driven homebrewed artillery enthusiasts, maybe drones would be better.

> consumer grade at-home thorium MSRs

Oho, now you're talking. Run a genny off it too, how are your 3kW solar panels looking *now*, guys? Oh you're only getting a wee bit from your feed-in tariff? Cool, cool, well there you go I guess...