This has really irrationally interested me now, Im sure there is something there with the internal setters on TS but damn I need to test now. My thinking is that overriding the setter to evaluate if its mutable or not, the obvious approach.

Yeah there's a lot you could do with property setter overrides in conditional types, but the tricky magic trick is somehow getting Typescript to do it by default. I've got a feeling that `object` and `{}` are just too low-level in Typescript's type system today to do those sorts of things. The `Object` in lib.d.ts is mostly for adding new prototype methods, not as much changing underlying property behavior.

> The Gemini app surpasses 650 million users per month, more than 70% of our Cloud customers use our AI, 13 million developers have built with our generative models, and that is just a snippet of the impact we’re seeing

Not to be a negative nelly, but these numbers are definitely inflated due to Google literally pushing their AI into everything they can, much like M$. Can't even search google without getting an AI response. Surely you can't claim those numbers are legit.

> Gemini app surpasses 650 million users per month

Unless these numbers are just lies, I'm not sure how this is "pushing their AI into everything they can". Especially on iOS where every user is someone who went to App Store and downloaded it. Admittedly on Android, Gemini is preinstalled these days but it's still a choice that users are making to go there rather than being an existing product they happen to user otherwise.

Now OTOH "AI overviews now have two billion users" can definitely be criticised in the way you suggest.

I unlocked my phone the other day and had the entire screen taken over with an ad for the Gemini app. There was a big "Get Started" button that I almost accidentally clicked because it was where I was about to tap for something else.

As an Android and Google Workspace user, I definitely feel like Google is "pushing their AI into everything they can", including the Gemini app.

I constantly accidentally use some btn and Gemini opens up on my Samsung Galaxy. I haven't bothered to figure this out.

I don't know for sure but they have to be counting users like me whose phone has had Gemini force installed on an update and I've only opened the app by accident while trying to figure out how to invoke the old actually useful Assistant app

> it's still a choice that users are making to go there rather than being an existing product they happen to user otherwise.

Yes and no, my power button got remapped to opening Gemini in an update...

I removed that but I can imagine that your average user doesn't.

This is benefit of bundling, I've been forecasting this for a long time - the only companies who would win the LLM race would be the megacorps bundling their offerings, and at most maybe OAI due to the sheer marketing dominance.

For example I don't pay for ChatGPT or Claude, even if they are better at certain tasks or in general. But I have Google One cloud storage sub for my photos and it comes with a Gemini Pro apparently (thanks to someone on HN for pointing it out). And so Gemini is my go to LLM app/service. I suspect the same goes for many others.

It says Gemini App, not AI Overviews, AI Mode, etc

They claim AI overviews as having "2 billion users" in the sentences prior. They are clearly trying as hard as possible to show the "best" numbers.

> They are clearly trying as hard as possible to show the "best" numbers.

This isnt a hottake at all. Marketing (iPhone keynotes, product launches) are about showing impressive numbers. It isnt a gotcha you think it is.

Yeah my business account was forced to pay for an AI. And I only used it for a couple of weeks when Gemini 2.5 was launched, until it got nerfed. So they are definitely counting me there even though I haven't used it in like 7 months. Well, I try it once every other month to see if it's still crap, and it always is.

I hope Gemini 3 is not the same and it gives an affordable plan compared to OpenAI/Anthropic.

Gemini app != Google search.

You're implying they're lying?

Companies cant get away from egregious marketing. See Apple class action lawsuit for Apple Intelligence.

I'm not sure if it's what you mean, but can't you have all your properties without a setter, and only init them inside the constructor for example ?

Would your 'readonly' annotation dictate that at compile time ?

eg

class Test {

  private readonly string _testString {get;}


  public Test(string tstSrting) 
      => _testString = tstSrting ;

}

We may be going off topic though. As I understand objects in typescript/js are explicitly mutable as expected to be via the interpertor. But will try and play with it.

I think you would want to use an init only property for your example

    class Test {
        public string Test { get; init; }
    }

I'm not a C# expert though, and there seems to be many ways to do the same thing.

I don't use the init decorator myself but I would hazard a guess it's similar. Don't quote me on that though.

The point does stand though, outside of modifying properties I'm not sure what a "private" class itself achieves.

> I don't use the init decorator myself but I would hazard a guess it's similar.

Genuinely curious, why not? Seems to be less verbose. I don’t write C#s so I’m not sure of the downsides of any particular feature.

I don't use even close to all the services they offer, mostly just DNS and some web workers but the convenience of it as opposed to rolling my own is, excluding down time, an incredible free offering.

Way back years ago when I used to roll my own, any problems I had to fix took extremely long and painful. Could I do it again today ? Yeah sure, but I know I couldn't do a better job than Cloudflare.

This topic is raised every time there is an outage with cloudflare and the truth of the matter is, they offer an incredible service, there is not a bit enough competition to deal with it. By definition their services are so good BECAUSE their adoption rate is so high.

It's very frustrating of course, and it's the nature of the beast.

False dichotomy. Both can be true.

> False dichotomy.

Not sure I follow, I didn't say it wasn't worrying or an issue. Just the reasons for it getting to this point are valid.

>However the https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ does not really mention anything relevant. What's the point of having a status page if it lies ?

What is the lie ?

> Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

cloudflare has a specific service names "Network" and it's having issues..

Please read my comment again including the update:

For 15 minute cloudflare wasn't working and the status page did not mentioned anything. Yes, right now the status page mentions the serious network problem but for some time our pages were not working and we didn't know what was happening.

So for ~ 15 minutes the status page lied. The whole point of a status page is to not lie, i.e to be updated automatically when there are problem and not by a person that needs to get clearance on what and how to write.

Well it was bound to happen eventually, the "Down Roulette" has decided it should be Cloudflare this week!

I picked up a new laptop recently and the thing comes with a dedicated copilot button, cutting space from the spacebar, it's infuriating. I disable the shortcut to open the slop generator but after each windows update, it reactivates.

I realised I don't actually need windows anymore, my light gaming is fine with the proton layer and for personal development I rarely use dotnet anymore and even when I do, I use .net core.

So, the neckbeard adventure begins. Arch will be the begining of the end of all my relationships maybe, but at least there wont be a copilot slop gen on my machine.

Imagine you could do with your hardware what you wanted. Brave. Innovative. Revolutionary.

/Old man laughing at "cloud" that is my baremetal.

I worry that the overton window has shifted so much after over a decade and a half of most downloads being mediated by "app stores" that most people don't realize or have the means to vocalize or understand what they're missing.

More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.

> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.

This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.

Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.

Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.

> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.

Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.

The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.

> Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up..

I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All these big companies keep driving up our cost of living, while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also a cost to not participating, so that's not an option either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their influence on our lives.

> The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.

I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't know how we'll overcome that.

>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service

The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.

That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.

Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.

Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.

Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.

That's a fair point. Thanks for the detailed response.

I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous. Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps, shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that are so outrageous.

I also use a malware blocker at all times (to not have one on all computers would be like running an open telnet server: insane), so can't say I have personal experience with it, but there is plenty of anecdotal discussion about blatant financial scams, e.g. [0][1]. That first one OP claims Youtube acknowledged receiving their report, investigated it, and determined that the ad was acceptable. If true, they are admitting they are specifically aware of these ads and that users are raising complaints about them (they don't exist now, but a court could subpoena information about whether OP's story is true).

Additionally, Google has a well known policy of allowing people to take out ads (which look exactly like a search result) for someone else's trademark (defeating the entire purpose of a trademark), and the FBI has a frequently referenced notice[2] to US citizens to be aware of fraud where scammers take out impersonating ads on "Internet search results" to e.g. lead people to the wrong site for financial institutions. It absolutely blows my mind that no one is prosecuted for participating in this.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18gjiqy/youtube_do...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1h6rdtj/massive_incr...

[2] https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221

Tons of blatant phishing, rug-pull crypto coins, illegal medications, or just fraudulent websites. Very content-dependent though

What do you think about YouTube showing pornographic advertisement to kids? Do you think they could, or do you think they must ensure that it's not displayed ?

Because I don't see how scam are less illegal than showing pornography to children, yet you wouldn't dare to tell me it's fine.

They have the money and the world would be better.

YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on servers and staff in three months.

Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.

Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"

The biggest difference is still the difference between physical stuff that only exist once and information, that just needs to be copied without loosing any value.

This isn't a piracy argument, it's a "leeching infrastructure that has real costs without contributing" problem.

Tapping into your neighbor's cable TV for free channels may not physically deprive anyone of something but it's still wrong.

I don't see how ad-blocking is unethical.

There are companies that make money by placing ("out of home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian thought.

It would be like attending a time-share dinner and putting in earplugs during their speech. I definitely think it's permissible to do it, but it's also permissible for them to kick you out for doing it.

It's more like tearing out the ad pages of a magazine before reading it. Even if the magazine has fine print saying "the reader may not tear out the ad pages..." It's still a ridiculous rule and it isn't wrong for people to ignore it.

The right analogy would be a newspaper delivering you the paper in ~milliseconds when you ask for it, whereever in the world, for free, and then you proceed to rip off the ads and read it.

The reason newspaper do the delivery was the promise that you'll see the ads, and they get to make money from that ads.

If they notice that you do all of the work of providing you the newspaper almost instantly and you dont see the ads, they are either gonna have to a) politely refuse to serve you b) point you to an alternate way of accessing the newspaper ("Newspaper Premium" for $$)

Firstly, ad watch time is not currency.

Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.

If they don't want to give me the paper for free, they should stop, but they haven't yet. Their expectation to make a certain amount of revenue from ads doesn't obligate the consumer. If their business model isn't making them the profit they need, it's on them to change their strategy.

> Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.

Absolutely! I run an adblocker as well!

At the same time, you'd agree they have the right to refuse to serve you (access denied) or make you jump through hoops (solve a challenge etc)

Sure. YouTube can put everything behind a paywall one day and I won't complain. But I reject the increasingly common belief that it's somehow wrong to block ads.

Again, not wrong to block ads. But they can make it very difficult to have you and I access to videos if we're running adblocker.

We're right, and they're right as well.

The implicit contract is that you see the content while letting the ads that support it play. If you disagree with ads, the ethical choice is to not watch the video, not to leech.

It's also ethical to change browser tabs or leave the room while the ad plays, but blocking it and costing the provider money while not contributing back is not.

> (presumably, I haven't looked into it)

YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.

Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.

You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.

*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.

Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.

I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.

PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.

I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then later, even when profitable can gradually reduce the quality of the service to the point where users have to pay to get back to an experience they used to have is textbook enshittification.

I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.

adblocking "users" are not Youtube's users. What do you mean blocking ads has no bearing on their service? It sounds like you are saying user experience is "I should get this for free".

YouTube itself is offered for free. The creators of content are not Google employees. Adblocking is a safety measure on my own physical machine.

Not YouTube's users? Maybe. But I am, so by that metric there's some doubt.

I paid for over 2 years for the premium, the cost increases and it's cheaper to pihole everything and support the usual suspects on patreon.

It's become a scenario of "I've given you so many adverts, you should pay me to get less."

Nothing about your response changes the fact you appear to just be upset that you can't get anything you want for free and that content creators deserve to be paid.

Enshitiffication is the user experience. The passive, impassive, drooling hordes don't even notice.