Been using Gemini + OpenCode for the past couple weeks.
Suddenly, I get a "you need a Gemini Access Code license" error but when you go to the project page there is no mention of this or how to get the license.
You really feel the "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." [0] when you use these Google products.
PS for those that don't get the reference: US phone companies in the 1970s had a monopoly on local and long distance phone service. Similar to Google for search/ads (really a "near" monopoly but close enough).
> A jeweler might have high material costs (gold and diamonds), an artist moderate material costs (paint and canvas), and a greeting card company low material costs (paper), but they all have "material costs".
There is a great line in the book Narconomics [0] that compares the "value added" of creating high end paintings to narcotics. He points out that the input (paint, coca leaves) are VERY cheap. The end product (high end paintings, cocaine) is very expensive.
(I believe he makes this point to show that raising the price of inputs slightly has no real bearing on the price at the end given the size of the margins)
Not sure how many people are aware that the newer Alexa devices have "presence detection" that uses ultrasound so they can detect when people are nearby. [0]
Heck, even Ecobee remote temperature sensors can do this.
Reminds me of the story about how the Google Nest smoke detector had a microphone in it. [1]
Not even the biggest privacy issue of using Alexa devices. I think listening you 24/7 is a bigger potential issue.
Not sure if Alexa has this, but cheap mm-wave wideband multi-GHz sensors(or radars more accurately) now enable more finely grained human presence detection and also human fall detection[1] with the right algos, so you can for example detect if grandma in the nursing home fell down and didn't get back up, but in a privacy focused way that doesn't resort to microphones or cameras. Neat.
>Reminds me of the story about how the Google Nest smoke detector had a microphone in it.
Vapes have microphone arrays in them to detect when you're sucking and light up the heating element. Cheap electronics have enabled a new world of crazy.
The Nest smoke detector microphone was never really secret. It was part of the monthly self test to determine if the alarm was working. It would send you a notification telling you it was going to sound the alarm and that it would be listening for the sound to confirm it was working.
How many people have Alexa devices vs wifi? I got gifted an Amazon Echo Dot some years ago. We set it up and switched it off later the same day because it felt creepy to have the thing listening to everything we said.
with a high speed camera any vibrating reflective object like a potato chips bag can become a weak microphone if you have line of sight even behind a soundproof window:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8
At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance message boards.
At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.
Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.
Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).
Having worked at firms based in New York, Chicago and London, every time there has been a debate about "Should we use local or UTC time?", I ALWAYS mention Swatch Internet Time.
The fact that it's now on the front page of Hacker News makes me so happy.
When I worked for a nationwide company, that was chiefly WFH with several small satellite offices, and a few abroad as well, we had some timezone issues.
The main one, which became my pet peeve about event and meeting announcements, was that they always, always used Standard Time abbreviations, whether it was DST or not DST, they always specified standard time.
So if a meeting was at 3pm on June 13 in Delaware, it was announced as "3pm EST". If the meeting was at 9am on August 8 in California, it was announced "9am PST".
This drove me up the wall because, living in Arizona, there is a legitimate difference for us between "MDT" and "MST". Now if we anticipate this quirk, it is really not a problem, except for edge-cases.
But I complained and asked why they were doing it, and they said they'd always done it that way, and even implied that it was written into policy somehow, and I came to discover it was far more widespread than just our one company's internal comms, and my brain exploded with ASD dissonance.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:
If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.
(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
Been using Gemini + OpenCode for the past couple weeks.
Suddenly, I get a "you need a Gemini Access Code license" error but when you go to the project page there is no mention of this or how to get the license.
You really feel the "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." [0] when you use these Google products.
PS for those that don't get the reference: US phone companies in the 1970s had a monopoly on local and long distance phone service. Similar to Google for search/ads (really a "near" monopoly but close enough).
0 - https://vimeo.com/355556831
reply