Ads pay miniscule amounts per view… I’ve heard it said the £12/month sub is about hundreds of times what they get from ad revenue per user. So they spam them everywhere… the more ads the better.

Which means people block the ads because they’re obnoxious, and they make nothing…

There are some well known ones, like L4sbot, that copy everything but they’re upfront about it with bot in their name.

There are a few others more sneaky.

How am I going to fit my rackmount servers into it now?

Or Fedilab…

I made mine deliberately incompatible by disabling the fTPM but started getting the upgrade prompts recently.

They’re getting there with windows 11… first it was ‘hey you’re compatible with windows 11’ now they’ve stepped up to a full screen non-skippable screen a big ‘upgrade to windows 11’ but still with a button to stay on windows 10 hidden in the corner. It’s only a matter of time before that button disappears.

It’s only illegal in the UK in London (wierd exception, imo). On other places it’s down to local byelaws (our local council states that a car must allow enough space for a wheelchair to pass for example, although it’s rarely enforced).

Routing would be the hard bit I expect… if the person you were communicating was 10 hops away how to find the route? Things like BGP do that naturally, but really you don’t want to burden potentially nontechnical users with BGP…

I’d argue some magazines are basically ad pushers wrapped around a thin layer of minimum effort articles.

Hell, most of them, when I think about it.

Google, though… ads are their core business.

I don’t get it on a pixel 7 either.

Probably something added by a vendor…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

That’s convenient…

Yeah we have some tooling that isn’t up to API 33 yet… one app has been abandoned because of that - it’ll be ios only for a while until there’s resources for a rewrite.

Customers won’t pay maintenence. And code can’t be maintained forever that isn’t bringing in money. This is just the harsh reality.

It’s a mad rule really… it means work that was done for clients sometimes years ago and paid for has to be dug up and recompiled, when they were perfectly happy with the way they worked now.

Requiring 33 for new apps is fine, you’re working on them already, upgrading is just part of it (which is more or less how apple work, you must use the latest xcode otherwise they reject). Requiring it for older ones probably means a heck of a lot of stuff is about to vanish from the play store on somewhat short notice.

There are some apps we’ve already decided to let die because the maintenance work isn’t worth it.

Absolutely… service charge or tip, pick one. No double dipping.

Here in the UK service charges are always labelled ‘voluntary’ to get around the law I think. They’re incredibly bad for business though… people don’t like having extra charges slapped on and the servers don’t like being asked (not always politely, from what I’ve seen) to have them removed. People don’t go back to such places… It’s been a while since I’ve seen a restaurant try to do it, but I reckon they’re still out there.

I’ve definitely tipped developers (through the ‘buy me a coffee’ site, or occasionally patreon). But I’m unusual I think…

They seem to be massively overcharging, which makes the whole thing a lot wilder. At those prices they could afford to pay their staff well and abolish both tips and service charge…

Suspect the owner is just a knob.

In Europe everyone charges what’s needed to pay the staff, with varying tip/no tip cultures. There’s no added risk. In the US unless everyone suddenly switched at once (eg. making tipping illegal overnight) then the restaurants that increased prices would be taking a financial risk because it might drive customers away.

In truth, food price probably works out about the same anyway… in the US the menu price has service charges tax and another 20% added on top of that for a tip. In Europe the price on the menu is what you pay. . it already includes everything except the tip, and tipping is voluntary for good service (depending on country, Europe isn’t one culture).

Knowing some of the absurd stories I’ve heard from americans (tipping car salesmen, pharmacies…) then tipping walmart wouldn’t surprise me at all.