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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Partly because doing so risks that they might decide to invest in their own production instead, and therefore not buy any electricity from you at all which would result in loss of demand, and a reduction in overall electricity cost.
    Like how rising a bus ticket fare by 10% means you will lose some customers because they decide to walk instead, so your profit increase will be lower than that 10%. Raise it too much, and almost everyone walks, and you sell no tickets.

    And it’s a lot harder to build your own solar or wind farm if you are a person living in an apartment building.


  • I haven’t, that’s the point.
    If a Raspi going from $25 to $145, an increase of 5.8x is fine, and a Zero from a decade back being twice the price today, then surely when you go from $10/GB of DDR4 to new shiny modern DDR5, that increase of 5.8x is all fine too. Just buy that decade old DDR4 for double the launch price if you think it’s too expensive.
    And from looking at DIMMprice, it’s still “only” around $25/GB, that’s a pure bargain right?

    Obviously neither of them are fine and both situations are utterly outrageous.


  • I’ve kinda come to expect in the last three decades I’ve been following this stuff that hardware has the tendency to both get better and cheaper as time goes on.
    Like, RAM isn’t really expensive at all right now either if you think selling an 8GB stick of DDR4 for $160 today fine, as that is also 10 year old hardware at double the launch price.

    So it’s not that I expect being able to buy an old Raspi model for $25 or $5, I expect to be able to the buy a newer better one without having to pay up to six times as much.
    It’s hilarious that those older models tend to be more expensive used than what they originally cost. Are we getting the housing bubble in tech hardware now too?








  • Few of them also could be open, but just don’t advertise it.
    IKEA stuff was all ZigBee, now upgrading to add matter support, so you could mix and match them with Philips Hue, Agara, Nedis and quite a few others. Main issue is always software support on the hub or app - Ikea has no smart thermostats, so even though it can connect to them, they don’t show up properly. That’s where Home Assistant shines, as it supports basically everything imaginable.

    But you are right, most are proprietary because they want to lock you to their ecosystems. Exactly like cordless power tools and their batteries.




  • Maybe? I do kinda doubt that as the original addon was benign and did exactly what it said on the tin to fix a problem one of the founders had themselves - finding and applying coupons automatically, and there isn’t an obvious way or need to monetise that.
    But they gained a massive userbase very quickly, which attracted investors like vultures ready to tear profits from those users. So even if they originally didn’t plan to do much more than scan for coupons, after a few years of venture capital greed and tens of millions of investor money, they definitely were chasing profits by any means necessary. Money corrupts, after all.

    And by the time Paypal was willing to pay $4 billion for them in 2020, it was blatantly obvious they were doing a lot of shady shit because there just isn’t a way to monetise free users that well while staying above the board.

    All of which is a damn shame, because the idea of an addon that scans and tries coupons for you is really simple and very useful :/