It's a little concerning to me when something's commercial nature is so far in the background like this. I guess I've had too many years of, "Surprise, our business model is you!"
What's the surprise exactly? Deno works the same way, as do hundreds of other companies that give out an open source version of their software for free and provide hosting and support as paid services.
One difference is that Deno, and presumably those hundreds of other companies, have a pricing page. Whereas bun could easily be mistaken for just another open-source project.
What's their point? That they should not be open source? Or should not be allowed to ever launch a paid product? Or be forced to add a pricing page that...goes nowhere?
The point is that Deno has already a plan to monetize and they haven't, which puts a lot of doubt into if they will ever manage to and whether that will affect existing projects which rely on the runtime.
Deno has already monetized. Their tech powers many of the "serverless" platforms offered by other hosts. Just because they don't have a public pricing page for B2C doesn't mean they don't make money.
My point is that they could be transparent about the fact that they're collecting users along the way to extracting money from them. They chose not to. That's concerning to me. Possible explanations include "they have no idea what they're doing" and "they know exactly what they're doing but think people won't like it".
As the rest of your hyperventilation, no, none of those are my points, and I think you were smart enough to figure that out without me having to say so.
> collecting users along the way to extracting money from them
Can you listen to yourself?
When was the last time you paid Node or npm inc? Projects have the absolute right to monetize without having to start that way. You can use bun without signing up, there’s no data, there’s no registration. There are only entitled users.
I'm not a JS person, so never. But the first has a foundation, and the second has a transparent revenue model.
Bringing up rights is a straw man. They have a right to conceal their plans. I have a right to criticize them for it. You have the right to do defensive, awkward, unpaid PR for people who have millions of dollars. All rights are being honored here.
Wow didn't know they took a loan of $7 million dollars. That is an insane amount for a runtime without market adoption. Another one of those 2021 VC play I guess.
My guess is that it was hacked together and they piled hacks upon hacks for decades. There’s no chance anyone can or wants to fix that. Let’s not forget it came out in 1995 so the codebase must be a nightmare now.
I think eBay has always been terrible. The website was awful and it went downhill fast after 2007 I think.
I still remember how I was able to include javascript and CSS that affected the whole page in 2005. Good times. I was using the former to enable Clippy in IE
That’s standard. This scam is nearly 2 decades old, except back then it was done via PayPal. I think you’ll find more by searching “PayPal chargeback scam”
1. Service launches
2. They get loaded with scams
3. They implement safety mechanism
4. Repeat cat and mouse game until the list of “if/else ban” reaches the distance between moon and earth
Basically all of these transactional companies lock themselves into corners and make life hell for everyone.
It happened with PayPal, it happens with eBay and it’s starting to happen with Stripe.
Which Google are you referring to exactly? With its many successful products, I don’t see Google being overtaken anytime soon.
Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
I see them just coasting, but an overtake is unlikely in this decade.
“The New Bing” sounds interesting but that’s not all that Google is about, it’s not 2002 anymore.
>Ads are doing better than ever, Android is holding steady worldwide, Maps has a huge moat that Apple has yet to overcome (in over a decade), nobody really complains about Google Search except us nerds.
What you've just described are the conditions that, time and time again, have persuaded companies to cut R&D spending and set the stage for being overtaken in a couple decades.
(After going 20 years without an engineering culture in management, would they respond to a threat by jumping on a real emerging technology, or a buzzword technology? That's why you can't cut your researchers and simply bring them back when your competitors are getting close.)
Companies like Google don't really get "overtaken" per se.
Rather, they become bricks in the wall: the kind of place where the firm is extremely unlikely to ever shut down because it's inextricably embedded into the business practices of major firms and governments, but it also has to run ads to get the next generation of employees to bother to go work for it.
Neither do the nerd complainers, apart from scoping their search to a few trusted information repositories (Reddit, StackOverflow, &c).
Nobody's cracked the "general search across the whole Internet" nut better than Google has right now. But that nut itself has encountered challenges in yielding value as of late.
Good news: kagi.com is mostly a shell over Google and Bings apis, but they do quality control and they are building their own index.
I have paid for months from my own pocket and since I started using it, search doesn't drive me mad anymore.
It is not perfect, but anytime I find a problem now a real human verifies it or ask for clarification within hours and a fix is made an pushed with a reference to my report.
Also: for some narrow searches like arcane git knowledge or some niche parts of history etc, search.marginalia.nu is actually a lot better than Google and DDG and Bing. I am actually serious! Much less spam and you find results that could easily have drowned in between "top ten" articles in any mainstream search engine.
I'm not a Kagi subscriber, but I'll be. Yesterday I was looking for a pdf reader app with a specific feature. Nor Google nor Bing helped me; result pages were almost 100% ads (most by Adobe). I was giving up. My first try with Kagi gave me exactly what I wanted.
Can I guess it wasn't a result of keyword stuffing with every result but Google and Bing "forgot" some of your search terms to show you more thinly veiled ads/"content"?
n=1 but the built-in Maps on iphone seems to be fine these days. Doesn't steer me wrong, integrates with a car. Not sure what the moat here is other than name recognition or current popularity. Perhaps app integration or API consumption?
Apple Maps, and the huge number of products based on OpenStreetMap are perfectly fine as maps. And actually, even better than Google Maps in many cases.
But where Google Maps still dominates is in its unrivalled, global point of interest (POI) data. Accurate business locations, opening hours, photos, reviews, etc... nobody else comes close.
Yea, I'm planning a vacation, and using a saved lists of places in Google maps to keep track of all the places I'm interested in seeing. Clicking on one of the saved places brings up all the information you mention.
Clicking the auto-link of my address on an iOS device will open a route in Apple Maps to an address with a different street name on the wrong U.S. state. Apple Maps has come a long way, but it still doesn’t cut it.
Honestly Apple Maps isn't even particularly good outside of the US and a few European countries. Roads are constantly out of date and can barely keep up and landmarks and businesses in tons of major cities aren't close to correct
It's not particularly good within the US outside of a few of the big cities.
Dallas has a lot of parallel highways/roads, and Apple Maps seems to get really confused and have to recalculate the route every few minutes when I'm down there. Google seems to understand it perfectly and simply doesn't do that.
Not to mention its complete inability to reroute sometimes if you take the wrong turn. It'll keep yelling to return to the route over and over instead of routing a turnaround somewhere.
This can happen if you've lost the data connection, perhaps? In my (UK) experience, Apple Maps is perfectly good at re-routing. Even if you haven't made a wrong turn, it'll sometimes suggest new routes anyway based on live traffic.
Accuracy of local business listings on Apple is still far behind Google. And Apple's new business admin interface is only slightly less trash than it's old one.
IMHO it’s high time China and Japan went the enlightened Hangul way Korea took half a millennia ago. There’s no reason to keep to absurdity going any longer; even they don’t know how to type their own words and use pinyin as input. The Vietnamese way would also be easy with their explicit tones written on each vowel, however they lost the advantages that blocky characters offer.
