This hasn’t been true for a while. Unless you are constantly looking for only the most mainstream stuff, huge swathes of material is lost with every shutdown, especially now that the costs of servers and storage have quadrupled.

The idea of piracy being invincible is a myth from a different internet era along with old patterns like “platforms spring up and die constantly”.

Yeah, in the 2000s that was true - but the main platforms we have today have been around for 20 years and have a stranglehold on users. The internet logic of the aughts no longer holds.

The real threats are much less sci-fi and more good old fashioned resource theft and exploitative slavery.

You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying “This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership.”

Unless it’s protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.

Even if they ARE an “honorable” company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.

Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a “kill the golden goose to get the eggs” move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.

Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it’s a GAMBLE. It’s a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it’s not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.

Pro-tip: If the company hasn’t already been around for over 100 years, NEVER buy a lifetime pass for ANYTHING.

Moosejaws

Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?

Because if you put a roof over the lot trucks can’t keep getting perpetually bigger and more expensive.

deleted by creator

“Oh, baby… you’re even hotter like this.”

Double mermaid all the way

Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It’s not great that they’re paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they’re also not contributing to Anthropic’s code base. If they were? They’d absolutely be complicit.

The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.

Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.

It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.

I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.

Major watch dog

They were evil but constrained and minor. Their current power is the direct result of the anti-immigrant flames social media like Facebook have been fanning with their algorithms for years.

If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.

Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.

It would help if reality weren’t also currently a toxic pit of despair.

Even if it were true, I have more respect for someone who gets ahead using sex than making PowerPoints. At least with the sex presumably at least one of the people involved is having a good time.

Sorry, my eczema says “no”.

I mean… it’s enterprise software. That’s the MO for most of it.