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I have worked at a number of software companies that would be "interesting" to get access to, with enough intimate information to know if there was a super-sekret backdoor. If "all US companies" had to comply .. well .. I guess I was really lucky to work for those that somehow fell through the cracks.

Why can’t it throttle to something slightly higher? Even 100-200 KBps? Is that a requirement from the “upstream” network provider?

It's not. We chose this baseline sort of by default based on the practices of some other major carriers. Your question is a good one, and we'll take it as feedback.

I would be a lot less worried about signing up for that plan if I could soft-cap myself at 10GB until I login to the app and push a button that says "yeah for real I'm going to use another 10GB of mobile data", so that if iOS goes bonkers and tries to download my entire 90GB iTunes library over cellular, it doesn't fuck me over for a month. I haven't exceeded 7GB/mo intentionally for years, but it's happened twice so far against my express wishes, and carriers are uniformly awful at that.

This is good feedback. We don’t want caps and throttling to be a blocker for signing up and using us. Since we’re at a premium price point we should economically be able to be a lot more generous than existing carriers.

Yeah. As a olde ex-carrier type person, I want burst mode unlimited, I expressly do not want continuous saturated unlimited, if that makes any sense. So if you tune the service to warn me “you’ve used 10% of your cap in five minutes so we’ve slowed your service down temporarily, respond with YES if this is intentional and we should speed it back up, otherwise it’ll reset in the morning”, that would be an example of best in category service that’s on my side rather than the carrier’s overage fees profit line item.

I don’t mind that you have caps, I consider caps to be a marketable form of 90th percentile billing to consumers, so please don’t take this as “remove all caps” — but definitely find an in-between that’s more nuanced than “you reach arbitrary threshold 50G at 1gbps 5G and so it only took 8 minutes and 40% battery, too bad so sad now your entire month of data is at DSL speeds”. (This sarcastic tone is not a critique of you! but of the general carrier practices that leave me worried about you.)

In a dream world my usage percentile for the past 30 days would be inversely proportional to my bandwidth speed so that momentary usage to download a software update had no meaningful impact, but running nonstop continuous data for four hours straight caused a measurable drop in bandwidth (which protects my battery and the network health). It’s not fiber-optic or fixed-installation wireless and I do respect the shared base antenna capacity problems!


Charge $5 more for everyone, and then rebate $5 against your next bill if you don't go over X GB or whatever.

It ends up being the same as charging $5 if you go over, but it'll feel much more premium.


This is what my carrier does for me, except the limit is like 2GB or something.

I don’t think keeping the status quo of throttling caps will stop anyone from signing up. As long as it’s not any worse, I don’t think it would deter me due to the other features you offer. The main reason why I don’t change is my spouse and kids don’t care about privacy and I can get them service for cheaper!

I don’t really think about caps all that much except in theory. I would love speed tests to be excepted from caps, but I get why that isn’t always workable.


I would like to try Cape. How do guys deal with IMEI tracking from folks like Google when i search or use their email? Or that one is beyond your control?

What makes you think Google has access to your IMEI through using their search engine?

Friends at Google :)

Chrome may well have access to persistent identifiers on Android, but websites do not.

The search engine has nothing to do with it.


I thought access to IMEI and IMSI was pretty heavily restricted starting with Android 10. Graphene [1] makes a few extra restrictions beyond AOSP [2], but it's been around for a while now.

To get access to IMEI and IMSI, you need to either be a carrier app, allowlisted, or grant the `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE` permission.

Unless Chrome is running at a system level in AOSP or some OEM specific firmware, I wouldn't expect it to have `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE`

[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers

[2] - https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/device-identifi...


Can you elaborate?

That’s a great idea. I rarely use more than 10-15 GB except if I’m tethering and something decided to slurp up all my data.

A few Mbps would be nice - fast enough to make the modern web mostly usable. 256 Kbps is almost the same as not working at all.

This is some Andy Rooney whine-fest. Who cares? Don’t do it. Don’t read it. You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world.


> You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world.

If your spaces that were previously full of interesting things suddenly become deluged with uninteresting things then that is something to complain about.


I’d find someplace else to spend my time if I no longer found someplace interesting,


Where do you think you are, right now?


Oh, the irony.


.. but what about subscription only, paywalled sources?


many publisher's offer "first one's free".

For those that don't , I would guess archive.today is using malware to piggyback off of subscriptions.


Dude voice, totally. I can’t describe it other than dude voice.


Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s specific work as your own. Using a generative tool is closer to using a compiler, an IDE, or a library. I’m not copying a person’s code or submitting someone else’s project with the name filed off. I’m directing a system, reviewing the output, editing it, and taking responsibility for the result.

If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.


> If I paste in a blog post verbatim and pretend I wrote it, that’s plagiarism. If I use a tool to generate a starting point and shape it into what I need, that’s just a different kind of authorship.

If you cloned chapters from multiple books, from multiple different authors, didn't decide on the sentence structure, didn't choose the words yourself, didn't decide which order your going to place these chapters, didn't name the characters. At what point do you no longer get credit for writing the book?

What if it's code? what if you didn't decide which order you should call these functions. Didn't make the decision about if you're gonna write var i, or idx, or index. Didn't make a decision if this should be an u32, or an i64. Didn't read any of the source code from that new dependency you just added. Didn't name the functions, oh but no, you did have to edit that one function because it wouldn't compile, so you just renamed it like the error suggested... At what point does the effort you put in become less significant than the effort duplicated from the training set? How much of the function do you have to write yourself, before you take credit? How many chars have to by typed by your fingers, before you claim. You made this?


What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing. You’ve ignored that entirely to construct a version of me who pastes “write me an app” and ships it unread… then spent three paragraphs righteously tearing that down. I own the intent, the spec, the judgment about what’s correct, and the blame when it breaks. That’s authorship, and that’s why using a generative tool isn’t plagiarism. The rest is breathless gibberish dressed up as moral clarity.


> “write me an app” and ships it unread…

That is in fact, the behavior I see most often.

> What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing.

You didn't actually describe any of that though? You asserted that's what you do, but didn't describe any of those steps.

If you do, you'd be the first person I see actually do that when using LLM codegen. Most people who advocate for it, do behave that way. You're mistakenly taking my rhetorical argument against the more common, and substituting your own interpretation of how things are. Which is the very thing you're attempting to chastise me for doing. Just as you're unconvinced by my rejection of your hypothetical, I'm unconvinced by yours.

I might agree if you spend the same amount of time and effort, it wouldn't count as plagiarism. But if it's not faster, then what's the point?

> The rest is breathless gibberish dressed up as moral clarity.

Sure, that's a fair interpretation if you want to feel like a superior asshole. But really I was attempting to describe how I view the way most people interact with LLM codegen, before claiming they did all the work. Which if you recall, was my original question; why is that view wrong? What details would convince me I've misunderstood something?


You've made a straw man of how people use codegen and are not willing to change your opinion even though people are telling you this is not how they use code gen.


I've replied much deeper in the other thread. But my concrete problem is that insubstantial arguments can't override the overwhelming evidence I've already acquired. Just trust me bro; I'm different from every other vibe coder you've seen dump slop on somebody, might be true but is not very compelling.

I don't care about how you use codegen, I want to understand why you discard all of the process, while still claiming credit for writing it? Perhaps you don't say I wrote this. Or I made this. Perhaps you do say, I asked an LLM to create this. Or disclose an LLM generated most of the lines. Or perhaps you do modify most of it, but I've never seen the latter in real life. And even then, that doesn't help answer my question about when people who aren't built different like you, why isn't that plagiarism?

Because when I look at something created by the team, I do give the engineering manager credit for their contributions, they helped build the team. But I definitely don't think they helped create the thing.


You've already made up your mind. Have a nice life.


Your grieving doesn’t have to shit all over my personal enjoyment and contentment. Me enjoying the use of AI in developing software doesn’t take anything away from your ability to grieve or dislike it. I’m not asking you to be excited, I’m asking you not to frame my enjoyment as naive, harmful, or lesser.

Your feelings are yours, mine are mine, and they can coexist just fine. The problem only shows up when your grief turns into value judgments about the people who feel differently.


I used to be big into amateur radio. When I was considering to build a tower, I would have paid someone to build the tower for me and do the climbing work to mount stuff on the tower. Your statement is nonsensical, because it assumes that there is a binary choice between "do everything yourself" and "delegate everything".


I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.


Ha ha joke’s on you! I’d need to have friends in the first place!


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