I don't want a cost of living increase either. However, this raise the question of what the real cost is. The prices might be cheaper, but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections? Is it just because I'm greedy and I'm not willing to pay someone a liveable wage here or go without whatever it is? I'm not sure, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Right, and there's a good case to be made for tariffs that are explicitly tied to another country's worker and environmental protections, where the country has actionable steps to improve their worker/environmental protections in order to avoid the tariff.
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
For some things that's true. For others it is not, or at least not enough to make up for the difference. For example, "housing" might cost less, but the definition of housing might be different. Even if we adjust the standards and built the exact same thing, it would be cheaper, but likely still out of reach for the average person in the poorer market.
> but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
Sure, not every country needs the same pay. Things like cost of living can vary. It seems hypocritical to say that people in one country deserve better protections than in another though. If we aren't creating the same protections as the workers here, it would seem that we are exploiting the less protected group. Workers here deserve real unions, but not in China. Workers here deserve OSHA, but not in China. We've decided as a society that people deserve certain protections, benefits, and even environmental protections. These costs factor into the cost of the goods. To not extend these protections (or the remuneration to pay for them) to the poorer group is exploitation by definition.
If tariffs were being added as a response to poor working conditions, and a requirement of lifting the tariffs was to improve working conditions, that could potentially be seen as a generally positive outcome for the world.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
If the good is so cheap that we can't get close to it here, that might actually be a good case for a targeted tariff depending on the circumstances. It's essentially similar to anti-dumping depending on the specifics even if it isn't tied to overseas conditions.
"because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections"
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
Yeah, you don't want to stop business, but if the price gap is massive, it might be good to ask why. Sometimes it's because something is more efficient in that country. Others it's just people getting taken advantage of.
i’ve started slipping uv into production work projects along with an auto generated requirements.txt for anyone who doesn’t wanna use uv. hoping i can drive adoption on my team while still leaving an alternative for people who don’t wanna use it
Ooh, that looks wonderful for future projects, but sadly my current one isn't targeted at devs.
Quick question, have you used it for side projects before, and if so how was your experience? It might be nice to try to launch a side project and monetize it with this, having a small amount of profit would make it a lot easier to justify some things I'd love to work on sometime.
I'm not the poster you're responding to but I'm one of the founding team of EthicalAds. We're a small team, focused exclusively on marketing to devs, and really trying to show high-quality ads without tracking people (ads are contextually targeted).
You can get a feel for what you'll earn here[1]. Basically you earn 70% of the gross of what we charge advertisers (see advertiser pricing[2]). Keep in mind these are ad views which aren't quite the same as pageviews. They're a subset.
Ads are a straight-forward path to monetization but not always the best. If you can make a project work as SaaS or really make sponsorships work for you (this requires effort), those will definitely earn A LOT more money per pageview than ads. Ads require a lot of traffic to make them work well. Usually you want high tens to hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month.
From a what we look at for publishers (sites that show ads) perspective, we're usually looking for high quality dev-focused sites or projects that don't want to just show Google ads. Per ad, publishers will earn much more with us than Google display ads but if you want to stick 4-5 Google ads on your site, video ads, or the like we can't compete with that and we don't want our ads on sites that do that. Devs hate them. My email is in my bio if you want to discuss further.
We used it years ago as advertisers. It didn't work for us. Our products is pretty niche even among software development, and VC funded startups can easily outspend us. We'd probably use them again if we had more marketing budget.
That's the hard choice for me tbh, you explained it very well. Currently the operating costs are $0 since it's hosted entirely on Vercel's free tier, so my hope is mainly just to justify me spending a few hours a month improving it with new features and stuff.
Currently, it's hard to justify working on anything new for it since it is just a helpful web-tool, there's really no future for it beyond making it slightly more helpful for people's niche use-case. On the other hand, I don't want to ruin it for a couple bucks a month, so I need to be really careful on how I do this.
Honestly my main motivation is just that it doesn't feel worth it to spend time on most side projects because I could be putting that time towards my real paid tech job and actually be making money, so adding some profit makes it feel more worth it to do side projects i guess?
I do it for: fun, learning and planting a flag. Someday you might be looking for a new job and if you have some projects to show off that's the best thing for your job hunt.
(e.g. when I was at rock bottom in my life, my HELOC was maxxed out and I just rolled my car, I started what I expected to be a difficult job hunt so I created an 'application management system' and talking about that landed me a job at an AI company with my interview. Out of the experience writing that I've written a few intelligent assistants such as an RSS reader which shows me just the most interesting articles and an image sorter that lets me easily work with 800,000 images with Chinese metadata even though I don't really know Chinese.)
fwiw i think reasoning models have at least solved this. even the smallest reasoning model, o1-mini, gets it right first try on my test:
A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. Despite the significant difference in density and volume between steel and cotton, the weights provided clearly indicate that the cotton bag has a greater mass.
Summary:
Steel ingots: 9.99 pounds
Fluffy cotton: 10.01 pounds
Conclusion: The 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier.
If you read the research you'd know that they don't have access to the vector either. They never decrypt the data. All operations on their server are done directly on the encrypted data. They get 0 information about your photos. They cannot even see which landmark your vector was closest to.
I don’t care! I do not want them helping themselves to representations of my data. I don’t care if it’s encrypted or run through a one way hash. I don’t care if they only interact with it via homomorphic methods. They can, again, fuck the hell off.
A private corporation has no business reading my files for its own benefit.
> A private corporation has no business reading my files for its own benefit.
that's what i'm saying!! because of all these special privacy measures it's genuinely impossible for them to get any benefit from this. it is only used for your benefit to improve photo search on your local device.
they don't see any of the data, they simply perform computations blindly over the encrypted data that are then returned to your device to then decrypt the results locally and use them to improve local photo indexing for you.
Okay except "encrypted, low-resolution copy of your photos" is an incredibly bad explanation of how this feature works. If nobody on HN so far has managed to find an explanation that is both accurate and understandable to the average consumer, any "hey can we do this" prompt for this feature is essentially useless anyways. And, IMO, unnecessary since it is theoretically 100% cryptographically secure.
I think it's sufficiently accurate, why don't you think it is? I don't think the vector vs low-res aspect is particularly material to understanding the key fact that "even we ourselves can't see?"
