In Germany too and I always found them strange. At least at our closest supermarket they recently got phased out and replaced with cashless self checkouts.

Same in Germany. Lots of people avoid digital transactions and almost exclusively pay in cash. It’s always weird for me to see huge lines at the cashier while the self checkout is completely empty.

Need to artificially inflate the numbers for their braindead investors somehow before it all comes crashing down like it should have a long time ago.

That sucks. For us it’s been working great for a few years already but we’re also all based in the same city, usually share a lot with each other, often meet (and log into the same wifi) and possibly most importantly, we’re based in the EU where tech companies are usually less anti-consumer as they’re more worried about fines.

Currently I‘m sharing a premium family subscription with as many users as Google allows which is like 6€ for each user.

If Google ever cracks down on sharing or this gets much more expensive (because even 6€ is too much IMO) we’re probably just gonna cancel the subscription altogether.

Also worth comparing to graphics cards here. After the crypto mining boom, prices didn’t drop significantly. Expensive cards were just the new baseline because gamers need graphics cards and do not have many alternatives to look elsewhere.

Renting out capacity sounds like a good opportunity for the LLM money circlejerk to make another round

As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.

Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.

Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.

I‘m definitely one of these pc gamers who didn’t get a PS5 because all the good games came to pc anyway where they usually had MUCH more potential in terms of graphics / modability

In Germany too and I remember how upsetting it was to me from the beginning. There were third party messengers that supported established (at the time) services like ICQ or live messenger but people got onto the hot new thing because it’s so much like SMS.

„Many of you will be laid off but that’s a sacrifice I‘m willing to make“

Yeah also noticing similar bullshit. People send me exact steps on what to do written by ChatGPT that understands exactly nothing about the context and is therefore often wrong or a half truth at best.

Another client has pushed a single commit to a messy project that added 70k lines and a load of new features. The project is now unmaintainable.

Was my first thought as well. Probably some poly market bullshit.