# Enable on-device summaries: Users on macOS 26 have the option to have web content summarized on their device, so that web contents are not sent to our servers.
Another Google Maps request: Places I‘ve labelled used to at least sometimes (if inconsistently) show up in search. Now they never shop up, even when I type the exact name of the label.
A combination of good pricing, sane behavior and an offering with many TLDs right now is https://www.netim.com, based in France. Their UI is quite outdated, but it works ok. I've switched here after leaving Gandi.
If you're fine with a US-based provider, https://porkbun.com/ also has good pricing and a tech oriented mindset. They don't support many ccTLDs though.
In general, https://tld-list.com/ is the best place to research domain registrars in my opinion.
Where does the point of being disagreeable come from and what purpose does it serve in the business world, in your opinion or according to these books?
You need at least one or two somewhat disagreeable folks in a team. Because without this, groupthink emerges, teams have too much inertia, they follow the assumed norm instead of challenging it for something better, they don’t debate the options enough. That disagreeable energy, in the right dose, leads to better decisions. If you don’t have it naturally, you can encourage someone to “play devil’s advocate” in decision discussions (or do it yourself) and you’ll find sometimes the devil’s advocate is actually right.
This has also been my biggest gripe with Gemini 2.5 Pro. While it is fantastic at one-shotting major new features, when wanting to make smaller iterative changes, it always does big refactors at the same time. I haven't found a way to change that behavior through changes in my prompts.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet is much more restrained and does smaller changes.
This exact problem is something I’m hoping to fix with a tool that parses the source to AST and then has the LLM write code to modify the AST (which you then run to get your changes) rather than output code directly.
I’ve started in a narrow niche of python/flask webapps and constrained to that stack for now, but if you’re interested I’ve just opened it for signups: https://codeplusequalsai.com
Would love feedback! Especially if you see promising results in not getting huge refactors out of small change requests!
Interesting idea. But LLMs are trained on vast amount of "code as text" and tiny fraction of "code as AST"; wouldn't that significantly hurt the result quality?
Thanks and yeah that is a concern; however I have been getting quite good results from this AST approach, at least for building medium-complexity webapps. On the other hand though, this wasn't always true...the only OpenAI model that really works well is o3 series. Older models do write AST code but fail to do a good job because of the exact issue you mention, I suspect!
Having the LLM modify the AST seems like a great idea. Constraining an LLM to only generate valid code would be super interesting too. Hope this works out!
Asking it explicitly once (not necessarily every new prompt in context) to keep output minimal and strive to do nothing more than it is told works for me.
Really? I haven't tried Gemini 2.5 yet, but my main complaint with Claude 3.7 is this exact behavior - creating 200+ line diffs when I asked it to fix one function.
One idea I‘ve been toying with is to set up a non-profit registrar funded by donations. It would just pass through the registration fees from the registries without markup.
Similar to Let‘s Encrypt but for domains. Of course it would be more complicated because the entity would handle money, but nothing that couldn‘t be solved from what I can see.
Does anyone with experience in the field have any insights on what roadblocks would be encountered?
What would your pitch to donors be? Let's Encrypt was transformative by combining free and automated. Would your registrar be doing anything besides subsidizing domains for people who are willing/able to pay $9.15 (.com price without markup) but not $10.37 (Porkbun .com price)?
Also, registrants will not understand that you are just an intermediary who is making no profit. Since they paid you, they will hold you responsible for any problems they have, and won't shy away from disputing credit card transactions if you don't provide the level of support they expect. That's a lot harder to deal with than a free service, which can get away with providing no support.
> Buy and renew domains through Cloudflare Registrar at cost, without markup fees. You only pay what is charged by registries and ICANN
The problem is, running a registrar is complicated. It costs money. People get angry with you when things break - especially if they've paid you money.
You also have to deal with abuse reports, copyright complaints, and a legal demands. Good luck finding people who want to volunteer for that particular job!
Cloudflare does sell domains at cost but the catch is that domains registered through them must use CFs nameservers, so they can try to upsell you to their paid services. In that regard they are like most other registrars which treat domains as a loss leader for other products, except they take it to the limit of making nothing on the domains rather than a few cents.
I don't have a lot of deep experience here, but I registered by first domain the old fashioned way, send an email, get an invoice from NetworkSolutions, and mail it back with a check. And I setup two low volume OpenSRS reseller accounts for two companies in 2000, IIRC.
Registrar markup is not really that much. As I understand it, PIR, the operator of the .org registry charges registrars $9.05 / domain year [1], and low cost registrars typically charge end users $10 / domain year. I know there was a dust up over PIRs management recently, but I don't remember the details and couldn't find them in a quick look; if these aren't the actual numbers, they're pretty close. After payment processing, costs of included registrar provided services, customer service and operations, there's not really huge profits being made by registrars; providing service as a pass through at direct cost wouldn't be that compelling.
You'd need some other reason to encourage people to use your services, but I'm not sure what that would be. I've used specialty registrars at work, and they've got features like presence services where they have real people in the jurisdiction that satisfy the requirements of TLDs that require someone in the country to register a domain and corporate registrars that will work with the registry to enable registry locking that makes it incredibly difficult to change domain settings [2]. These are compelling features for the right kind of customer, but I don't think it makes sense for a non-profit to provide them.
[2] We moved to one of those after the current flavor of Network Solutions was phished and an unauthorized person used a customer service account to change our domain's glue records as well as some others; with registry lock, no changes can be made by the registrar unless the registry unlocks the domain after doing a song and dance routine with the end customer --- not very convenient, especially when the authorized person ignores the call to dance, but better than when a registry employee can get phished and change our domain without our consent
Exactly. I run a registrar price comparison service, and a lot of domain extensions are basically sold ‘at cost’. The catch is that a) a registrar will sell some tlds with a tiny/no margin, but charge a healthy extra for other tlds (like a ‘loss leader) and/or b) get you on the renewals (or c) keep increasing fees once their number of customers is high enough and hope most of them won’t notice for some time, double or triple of regular fees is not uncommon!).
So even though margins are low, as a customer it still makes sense to shop around.
Ps https://dot.bs is the service I run to compare tld registration and renewal prices
That's a good, but separate question. My point is an at cost registrar probably saves people 10% on a .org, which doesn't meaningfully increase access... If you can't afford $10/year, $9/year isn't really affordable either.
To your question though, I think PIR actually contracts out the operation of the registry to Affilias. I don't know what the current rate is, but before they renegotiated, they were paying about $3/domain to Affilias [1] based on a reported payment of $33M on just under 11 million domains.
I don't really know where the rest of the money goes. There were a lot of questions when PIR tried to sell .ORG to private equity in 2020, but I don't know if there was much follow up after the deal got quashed.
PIR is owned by the Internet Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which does a bunch of other stuff, like running the IETF. Most of the Internet Society's revenue comes from selling .org domains.
It doesn't. It could hypothetically cost PIR $0. 501(c) organizations are not prohibited from collecting and spending profits, they are prohibited from unreasonably distributing such earnings to private shareholders and individuals (see https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicc90.pdf).
The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”.
Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.
Journalists love writing articles people want to read. People like crapping on tech companies because they look at them everyday in their phones so it rings a bell. The average person rarely thinks of smelters or is confronted with one.
And what does “too high” mean, anyway? Using water in The Dallas is a totally different story than using it in Death Valley. Part of the reason the data center is there is the abundance of water.
We do it in New Zealand. The power source is renewable and dirt cheap thanks to the games Rio Tinto play, which have resulted in the population subsidising them.
Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.
Quebec too. And Quebec is far from landlocked, so an abundance of hydroelectricity has alternative markets.
The subsidies are staggering:
> The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864
And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages.
> It is far more profitable to export electricity directly
through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots.
Alcoa had a pretty large aluminum smelter on the west coast in Ferndale WA, but it shut down near the beginning of covid. The bonneville power contracts with Alcoa were pretty generous, somewhere around $0.035/kWh for ~300MW, and even then, they couldn't make it work.
A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.
Cheap power requires good infrastructure which countries with cheap labor generally dont have. There are locales in US with pretty good electricity rates
This makes the datacenter out to be a massive water user. Which it is, in some sense. It's also worth considering that this volume of water usage -- 274.5 million gallons per annum, or 842 acre-feet -- is about 1/3 that of an average-size (445 acre) farm.
From personal experience, most auto-fill fields will correctly find Dallas for "dal", but will quickly update to Dalles for "dall". Which is weird since "dalla" comes before "dalle" alphabetically which makes me think their "learned" use implies more people looking for Dalles type "dall".
I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.
Every time I want to launch Photos.app or Photo Booth.app through Spotlight, it keeps flicking between one and the other almost with every key press... then when I think it's done, and am about to press enter, it updates the top result a millisecond before I hit enter.
Last week, I helped a friend update their new to them older mac book air. I used my machine to download the most recent OS compatible with their model. Now that's completed, I tried removing the installer from my machine, only part of it will not delete because it has the restricted flag set. According to the internet, I can only delete this file by rebooting into special mode disabling SIP, delete the file, then reboot into normal mode. WTF is that bullshit? This isn't a critical installed file that's a crucial part of the OS. It's just an external file used to install an OS. Totally baffling
Sure, it’s hilarious as long as it’s not you. Otherwise, it’s beyond frustrating.
Not sure about the hard to track down issue. If you have a Mac and the App Store, they’re there for the downloading. Trying to download to run in a VM on windows or Linux violating license agreement then it is not mine nor Apple’s issue
For VMs, usually on Macs but also on licence violating machines.
Whatever the need, it’s of no consequence to Apple that it was a struggle. Having it download as an app is irritating too as it adds steps with the conversion.
There are people who will run their graphical session as root, and throw in a "chmod -R 777 /" for good measure; and there are people who will go through convoluted steps to disable runtime kernel module loading, mount / read-only, and run their web browser in a container. Now I'm definitely not on the latter extreme, but if I can have a decently-hardened system out of the box, why would I throw that away just to remove a builtin app?
Are we still talking about macOS? If so, sudo rm -f does not work on a file with the restricted flag set. Based on that, I don’t see how modifying it with a child would work either. SIP is powerful
If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".
Exactly. I'm not typing D...pause...A...pause...L wait for suggested value. I'm typing dall by the time the first suggestion has had a chance to make its appearance. Then again, I'm on a real computer with a keyboard, and not some mobile device where it's impossible to type properly and forces those pauses between letters where the autocomplete might be noticeable.
And The Dalles, unlike Dallas, has a huge source of water available: the mighty Columbia River, currently flowing 140,000 to 240,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). (Snowmelt causes daily surges.)
The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
You mean The Dalles that sits on the banks of the humongous Columbia River? That’s the one they are worried about using too much water? The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in the Western Hemisphere. Are they worried about the Pacific Ocean going dry?
I get that it's common usage (and that's what language basically is), but when I see "80 times smaller" my brain screams "80 times what? Wouldn't `1 times smaller` be zero?" Yes, brain, yes it would.
Sounds like an interesting opportunity. Some ideas immediately come to mind. I'm a previous founder and CTO/CEO. Feel free to reach out if you're interested to discuss. You can find my email in my profile.
Valora Digital[0] is the digital unit of Valora[1], a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), E-commerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from scratch. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We are looking to bring the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom. I'm the head of this new unit and was previously a founder, CTO and CEO.
We are hiring in many roles, such as:
- Senior Software Engineer, Fullstack (F#) [2]
- Co-Founder / CTO for a Machine Learning Startup [3]
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12574142-chatgpt-atlas-d...
# Enable on-device summaries: Users on macOS 26 have the option to have web content summarized on their device, so that web contents are not sent to our servers.