iPhone Duo - Apple Sorry Apple™, I’m really finding it quite hard to justify spending thousands of dollar on your products!

From $1999 or $83.29/mo. for 24 mo.*

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ When it was just me and my wife, maybe, fine, okay. But now I have two young children that also want the same shit™ as we do. This starts becoming a nearly ~$8k expensve just for some fucking whoop-ti-do-da foldable iPhone with a bigger screen.

Who cares? 🤔 I want my ~A$800 iPhone back that fits in my hand. #Apple #Rants #Expensive #Crap

Google Will ‘Degrade’ Search In Europe to Avoid EU Fines
Google says it will overhaul Search in Europe to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, giving more prominence to comparison services like Expedia and Hotels.com while stripping some real-time features from hotel, airline, and restaurant results. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans – boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local … ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net Double standards and cognitive dissonance are great, aren’t they? 🙄

(My favorite line last week came from one of those hardcore AI bros: “Awww, man, hardware has gotten so expensive, everything sold out, this really sucks … *Thanks, nVidia.*“ 🤦‍♀️)

Valve Slowly Expands SteamOS Support On Non-Valve Hardware
Valve is continuing to broaden SteamOS support beyond its own hardware, with the latest beta adding “initial gamepad support” for a few recent gaming handhelds and improving compatibility for a few others. Ars Technica reports: Those newly supported handhelds include MSI’s Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around I … ⌘ Read more

USB4STREAM Adding Busy Poll Option For Lower Latency At The Cost Of Increased CPU Cycles
One of the nifty new features of Linux 7.2 is USB4STREAM as an Intel-developed solution for quickly sending data between USB4 connected systems. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, a busy poll mode is being added to provide lower-latency data transfers at the expense of increased CPU activity… ⌘ Read more

Double Fine get layoffs after split from Microsoft
Double Fine have announced that 23 members of their team have been let go, as they need to cut down on expenses to keep the studio alive.

Image

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me if you have some weekend home type place, with no Internet, getting TV through an antenna and a DVBT box, my recommendation is to just buy some old Dell monitor with HDMI to 3.5mm audio output built in, so you can connect speakers to it.

Doesn’t have to be Dell, but you can often just buy one of those from your employer, for under $25 here.

Were this sadly makes much less sense, in with Internet TV services. Those usually need a dedicated TV app to function and while that can be replaced with a $200 TV box, that some providers force you to rent, thus making you pay more for your Internet TV forever - this also means giving up the “archive app”, that gives you access to all the on demand content, included in the price of your mandatory TV license. None of these overpriced boxes come with it, as they’d mauch rather make you pay, for yet another subscription service instead.

So yes, you can kinda do it with an Internet TV too, assuming you trust the expensive box to not spy on you, but in that case you’re mostly just paying a whole lot more, for a lot less, than you would be, with the LG TV.

@prologic@twtxt.net Our company is paying a shitload of money for all these (different) AI tools … I’m probably not allowed to tell you the exact number, but it is a lot. The only other way would be to lay off employees, so we can pay even more for AI. (Needless to say, that would be the worst possible move.)

For a private person, $20 a month is also pretty expensive, isn’t it? And then assume that you maybe need more than one AI tool. You’re quickly up to $50 a month or much more. This isn’t something that I, as a private person, will ever be willing to spend for this kind of stuff.

“AI” is just expensive as fuck. On every level. They will have to (ab)use every possible way to squeeze more money out of it, and that includes ads and what not.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The nice thing about properties is that you can compute and cache things on the fly at first attempt and also ensure validation for writing. But like you said, since it’s not obvious that reading or writing might do some more things, it’s strongly advised to avoid doing expensive stuff disguised as properties.

I reckon the vast majority of property use cases is to provide read-only access. At least that was my impression when I was doing a lot more in Python.

Personally, I think that this just reads a lot nicer:

oink.my_property
oink.my_property = 42

Than:

oink.get_my_property()
oink.set_my_property(42)

Btw, any field access is implemented using method calls. I might be wrong, but I believe there’s always __getattr__ and __setattr__ involved. 8-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de yup, yup! Our neighbours spent their $50-60K to build their swimming pools. Our community (73 houses) has 52 pools. Our house is one of the few that doesn’t. They are expensive things, not just to build them, but their maintenance. Ain’t nobody got money for that!

IBM is Getting Ready to Scale Quantum Computing
IBM spent a decade “building, testing and improving” quantum computing, reports the Wall Street Journal.

“This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project.”

IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers n … ⌘ Read more

The firefly season is ending. I only saw 200 of them or so. There was one female directly on the forest road. If only I brought my camera and tripod, that would have worked out I reckon. I had my torch with me and this looked really cool.

Dusk took forever today. It was really long light out there. Full moon is tomorrow.

On the way back, there was suddenly a load clatter and crashing sound 100 meters away from me. I didn’t see anything, but a tree fell over in the forest out of the blue. Fuck me dead, that was scary as hell. Luckily, I was already on the main road, only meadows around me. It’s the second time I witnessed a tree accidentally coming down. The first one was during the most expensive hail storm in our area so far in 2011 behind me when setting up a summer camp. The weather changed in less than 15 minutes.

Maybe not such a good idea to go out so late alone. :-? Any rustling in the forest immediately reminded me of the boar the other day. Luckily, always false alarm. Still a bit terrified from that event.

AI Law Firm Wins UK Court Case For First Time
Garfield AI, the UK’s first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. “I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming,” said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitalit … ⌘ Read more

I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions

Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).

I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …

My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.

Gah!

The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

Truth submerged? AUKUS will cost us $368 billion, so this is no time for secrecy
Secrecy in policy development is rarely justified – and it certainly isn’t for AUKUS, our eye-wateringly expensive defence deal with the US and UK. ⌘ Read more

Restated accounts turn up in 3M’s latest annual results
The local branches of large foreign company 3M New Zealand have restated its 2024 accounts because of incorrect figures in its support services expenses, resulting in a higher tax bill.

The US multinational’s latest accounts for the year to December 2025 show it underestimated its “other income” revenue by $2.27 million. ⌘ Read more

‘World Cup of chaos’: Can the most expensive sporting event deliver?
The World Cup returns to North America after 32 years. And just like in ’94, when O. J. Simpson’s police chase threatened to steal the show, the event is not without dramas. ⌘ Read more

James Bond Videogame ‘007 First Light’ Sells 2.2M Copies, Earns $150M
The new James Bond-themed videogame 007 First Light had a budget of 1.3 billion Danish krone — a little more than USD $202 million, reports IGN, citing a report from Denmark’s public service broadcaster. “Denmark’s TV 2 said that makes 007 First Light the most expensive entertainment product in the country’s history” — and the game “still ha … ⌘ Read more

The Odyssey Popcorn Bucket Is Absolutely Perfect for Christopher Nolan Fans
The Odyssey popcorn bucket is here and it’s a must-have for Christopher Nolan fans. The bucket has been exclusively designed and released for the upcoming epic fantasy action film. The Odyssey is arguably Nolan’s most expensive film to date. It follows Odysseus, the legendary Greek king of Ithaca, on his long and arduous journey home […]

The post [The Odyssey Popcorn B … ⌘ Read more

SBS Bank’s profit slips as tech-overhaul expenses weigh
SBS Bank’s after-tax profit slipped lower in the March year as its modernisation expenses acted as bottom-line ballast amid a performance the deposit taker called resilient.

“This has been a year of steady progress for SBS,” group chief executive Mark McLean said, while noting the overall challenging economic environment. ⌘ Read more

How to Edit, Merge, and Split PDFs With Free Online Tools
You don’t need expensive software for basic PDF tasks. In fact, all you need is a handful of free web-based apps. ⌘ Read more

@arne@uplegger.eu Indeed. I’m glad that it’s all just static HTML. The most expensive part about this is probably TLS. 🤷‍♀️

Meta tests AI subscriptions and rolls out new paid plans for Facebook, Instagram
By Dean Seal and Meghan Bobrowsky

Meta Platforms has started the rollout of subscription plans for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and is testing new subscriptions for users of its AI chatbot as the company seeks to recoup some of the costs from its expensive AI buildout. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Jesus, that’s expensive. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net my gosh, that’s some expensive lottery! I have the feeling I would win, but I never play. 🤭 Wife, on the other hand, does. East and west coast, with a bunch of her friends (a pool). They win nothing, for many years. 😅

NZ’s early AI adopters are already reaping the benefits
When Air New Zealand updated its uniforms last year, it faced a large and potentially expensive job: updating its library of 18,000 brand images.

“So, what are we going to do?” the airline’s data and AI lead, Mike Parsons, asked rhetorically at one of the last formal Techweek26 sessions in Auckland last week. ⌘ Read more

[$] Further progress toward removing the page map count
The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings
(page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a
mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be
reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly
challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in
complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it.
This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to
bring … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees
Article URL: https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48244434

Points: 54

# Comments: 14 ⌘ Read more

Beggar-thy-neighbour
Beggar-thy-neighbour is an economic policy in which one country seeks to improve its own economic situation at the direct expense of another country.

“Beggar” = make poor | “Thy neighbour” = your neighbour or trading partner. ⌘ Read more

AI Hard Drive Shortage Makes Archiving the Internet Harder
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Int … ⌘ Read more

What if Tech Company Layoffs Aren’t All About AI?
“Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley’s AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less,” writes the Washington Post:

Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outp … ⌘ Read more

Airfare Keeps Going Up. Here Are Some Tricks to Finding Cheap(er) Tickets
It’s an expensive time to fly. These tips can help lighten the load on your wallet. ⌘ Read more

Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Gets a Price Cut
Microsoft is cutting the monthly price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, but the tradeoff is that new Call of Duty releases will no longer arrive on the service at launch. Instead, they’ll show up about a year later. The Verge reports: After Xbox CEO Asha Sharma admitted last week that “Game Pass has become too expensive for players,” Microsoft is dropping the price of Xbox Game Pa … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Reveals Major Price Increase For All Surface PCs
Microsoft has sharply raised prices across its Surface lineup as RAM and component costs keep climbing. “Both its midrange and flagship Surface lines are now significantly more expensive than they were just a few weeks ago, with the flagship Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 now starting at $500 more than they launched at in 2024,” reports Windows Central. … ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

Teardown of Unreleased LG Rollable Shows Why Rollable Phones Aren’t a Thing
A teardown video of LG’s never-released Rollable phone helps explain why rollable phones never became a real product category: they were likely too expensive, fragile, and complicated to manufacture at scale.

“The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Announces Claude Subscribers Must Now Pay Extra to Use OpenClaw
Anthropic’s making a big and sudden change — and connecting its Claude AI to third-party agentic tools “is about to get a lot more expensive,” writes the Verge:

Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sen … ⌘ Read more

Why the prices of laptops, phones and game consoles keep rising
The AI tax is making memory more expensive, and it doesn’t show any signs of letting up. ⌘ Read more

Will AI Force Source Code to Evolve - Or Make it Extinct?
Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There’s now been experiments with minimizing tokens for “LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers.”

This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects edi … ⌘ Read more

Can Private Space Companies Replace the ISS Before 2030?
China’s orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there’s not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bi … ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I never saw the point of a registry to be honest, as it defeated the point of what I believed to be a truly decentralised non-social social ecosystem. What can and does work however is a search engine and crawler. I used to run one, but I took it down, mostly because it got expensive to operate, at least the implementation I built… Maybe one day i’ll try again with a SQLite backend.

Long Before Tech CEOs Turned To Layoffs To Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is Op … ⌘ Read more

Europe’s Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes – problems California shares in abundance – but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estima … ⌘ Read more

Secondhand Laptop Market Goes ‘Mainstream’ Amid Memory Crunch
Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets – Italy, the UK, Germany, Spai … ⌘ Read more

NYC Private School Tuition Breaks $70,000 Milestone for Fall
The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries. From a report: Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side are among at least seven schools … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold Will Cost $2,900 in the US
Samsung said today that its Galaxy Z TriFold, the first tri-fold smartphone to ship in the U.S., will be available starting January 30 at a price point of $2,899 – substantially more expensive than any other phone on the U.S. market, including Samsung’s own $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a fully loaded 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The company will only sell the device through its … ⌘ Read more