This is often a good strategy, but it's not easy at all. If your long term plan is to develop a product, focusing purely on delivery of services means no resources for product development.

If you offer services purely with off the shelf products, you then need to compete with other service providers why may be allocating all their resources to being a service business.

On the one hand you have to offer a competitibve service, while also working towards a product.

as a starting point, asianometry has some good videos on this

Yes, it's a recurring pattern also seen in European politics.

I always felt this moment would come eventually. The trend is centralisation of power and control. It's depressing. It's been a long time coming at a slow but consistent cadence.

It's always the same pattern. There is no way to protect the children while also preserving freedom. The rationale behind it is irrelevant. For this to work everything would have to be locked down right?

This is not in the interest of the people nor any children.

> For this to work everything would have to be locked down right?

No. As long as the focus is on giving parents tools to parent their kids and not on the government taking over that responsibility completely then there's no need for the government to lock anything down. You just give the parents locks and let them do the locking.

Using a coding CLI I was able to create a computed shape would otherwise by incredibly challenging to make (impossible in parametric CAD GUIs at least) LLMs + CadQuery is a powerful combo, this will be more and more common I think. It's just too powerful to ignore.

What can and what can't it do compared to Codex and CC?

The main issue was that they forked UBoot and did not release their modifications, making it hard to run anything other than their Armbian fork. They forked Armbian a long time ago and kind of hacked things together rather than adding support for their HW to Armbian. After a while I gave up running anothing other than their releases, I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 3 and 5. But it's really uncool that they don't release their UBoot build! Lame! Their WiFi chip (Dragon something brand), had a bug where the WiFI beacon frames had incorrect element orderings, causing inconsistent results with some clients. Overall their Wifi was pure garbage. But apart from the Wifi it's robust stuff.

I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 5 (only problem was soft reboot hanging), but only because Joshua Riek had created and maintained an Ubuntu distribution for the Rockchip. That project seems to be in limbo now, no kernel updates since at least a year.

Power is taken but also given. It's a dynamic and I agree it's gotten way, way out of hand. It may eventually supress progress and become a real parasitic presence, but we've not reached that point yet (in net terms). Google has been relatively responsible with the power, but cracks have been starting to show. It will get a whole lot worse before it gets better. That is why I embrace vertical integration despite the tremendous cost. Call it the cockroach approach; it allows being partially decoupled from outside fluctuations.

Addition: People underestimate Google's influence. It's easy to forget they de-facto control Firefox, leaving only Apple and Google in control of the Web. Scary, but looking away won't help either. The Americans have been consistently competent with technology since the advent of the transistor right after WW2. They're reaping the benefits of that still to this day. I say that as a European.

If the plugins were bought for six figures, then it must be incredibly lucrative. How on earth could they be making it back? Is injecting spam into Google results THAT lucrative?