Doing this as a browser extension is one thing, but selling an interface to Instagram and YouTube sounds like it's very risky.
What's your basis for thinking this will work long term? I see you're selling yearly or lifetime subscriptions, suggesting you think the product can exist. There have been many attempts at this in the past that have been taken down, why is Dull different?
In the same vein as adblocking, the fundamental question here is, does a service have the right to control how you DON'T use their service? Are you legally obligated to be mentally influenced by adverts and cannot close your eyes or look away?
I'd love to see the EFF or similar take on Big (Ad)tech and settle this in court.
They've gone after youtube-dl and lost, Invidious is still there, etc.
It might not be illegal (criminal) to use a tool like Dull or an ad-blocker, but it is almost certainly a violation of the platform tos. This means the platform (Instagram/YouTube) can legally ban your account or block your IP address for using such tools, even if they can't successfully sue the tool's creator in court.
Given how broad the CFAA is, Instagram/YouTube could just try framing it as accessing their systems without proper permission, as the ToS disallow such usage.
How can you be sure that they “will not even consider” doing that? (That’s a disinformation from your side!)
If this app were to gain traction and start to be seen as a real problem by IG/YT, they would have all legal grounds to act. They can totally sue the app creator and they would very likely win the case under the CFAA.
How exactly is this disinformation?
It is speculative, but calling it disinformation is dishonest, especially since you then presented your completely unargumented claim that they somehow won’t even consider it. It is totally in the realm of possibilities and hence IMO something to keep in mind when considering selling this sort of app/service.
The problem (or not depending on POV) is that TOS are subject to legal constraints. As the dominant platform YT in a critical service area needs to maneuver carefully.
Why does it have to work long term? Claude Code probably built it in 2 hours. Sell it for as long as it works. If it provides some value to some people during that time, good for them.
What a rotten state of affairs that we’re now openly suggesting producing garbage with the least effort possible and selling it until caught. We used to criticise those who did that, calling them spammers and scammers and worse. Now, “telling some LLM to take a dump and trying to sell it to some chumps without a sense of smell” is viewed as a smart business model. Anything for an extra buck.
Why is it garbage? If you want something to block YouTube shorts, here's something that does it. It won't work forever, but you won't pay forever. Not all software needs to be high-craft and high-quality. Sometimes it can be just something a guy sells you off the back of his truck.
You misunderstood. I’m not criticising this specific software, I’m criticising the attitude suggested by the parent comment. It was a general commentary, it has nothing to do with this particular app, which I have no idea if it was built that way.
Lifetime payment was highly requested by users (including existing users), since they have subscription fatigue. Since I use the app myself every day to reduce screentime myself I'm extremely motivated to fix every bug and make the UX as seamless as possible.
I agree with this in principle, but this seems conceptually at odds with selling lifetime licenses (which this product does). The lifetime license option reads like a statement of intention that they'll be around for a long time, but when the TOS of the underlying services come into play as they do here, offering (or buying) a lifetime license seems like a gamble.
It's still questionably legal (at least here in Europe) to sell a yearly subscription for something and then have it stop working halfway through the year.
They should probably care about not getting sued so easily.
If it's providing value to the user month to month then it makes sense to be a subscription. Lifetime license are racing to the bottom for ongoing value.
Fair question. The honest answer is I don't know if Instagram or YouTube will try to shut this down. They haven't so far, but that doesn't mean they won't. They can try to come after me:) But seems like they are the ones losing in court currently for making their own apps so addicting. Wouldn't be a good look to come after such apps.
The subscription model exists partly because of this — if it stops working, you stop paying. The lifetime option is a bet on my part that I can keep maintaining it. If I can't, that's on me. But since this is an app I use daily myself I am extremely motivated to fix every bug and keep the app excellent and all filters working.
> What's your basis for thinking this will work long term?
Even if this approach doesn't work long term, the important thing is to establish product-market fit, and to get enough people committed to the idea that your product is their gateway out of the closed platforms.
I can think of at least three different ways to set up a system that can go around the API restrictions and re-serve the data to a different client that the user can control. But if I go and implement any of those, someone will try it and give up on my product until that approach gets shut down.
By selling lifetime subscriptions, the users get invested in the success of the product as well and they will be more willing to fight the restrictions that the companies impose with you.
1) it's already been live for about a month, so definetly not a week long project
2) I use the app myself every day to reduce screentime so I'm highly motivated to keep the app up to date. When the platforms change DOM elements, or try to distrupt Dull from working I am also disrupted, so I work quickly to fix all bugs
3) There is a 7 day free trial for anyone to test out if it's a "scam". It's not.
a funny reading - if anyone pays for something that won't be around in a week they deserve to be scammed by some scammer.
that said it seems somewhat close to a scam.
but having said those things I'll just note here, knowing you were not the original poster, that people do not in any way deserve to be scammed because they fall for easy to spot scams.
Obviously it isn't, but also obviously: this isn't a web browser in anything but technical implementation. It's a packaged, sold, interface to a proprietary service with a set of T&Cs that they are free to enforce.
Also every single one of these that I've seen before has fallen down in the same way. Chat apps that embed Facebook, third party YouTube viewer for Apple's VR headset, various other third party Instagram apps, etc.
I can't tell if this is a good faith question, but in the interests of good discussion, there are many ways they can do this. Technical solutions include blocking the user agent, blocking request patterns, client-side feature detection, client-side attestation, but importantly they are not limited to technical solutions, there are also things like cease and desist letters, breaches of contracts, pressure on the software distributors, lawsuits.
This is no judgement of whether these are the steps they might take, or whether they would be right in doing so, I want to remain neutral on this. But I would point again to the many instances of things like this happening in the past.
Detect usage patterns of normal users vs these, and then block access. Ultimately comes down to the companies' ability to throw however many devs at thwarting this one as makes sense for them.
Just as an example I remember, Facebook sponsored posts would be labeled, but if you dug into the HTML, what you'd get was random permutations or junk added to the label, like SSpoSnoSsorReD or something, and they'd use complicated overlays or other things to get the label to be visible. So you wouldn't just be able to use a simple easy rule.
Like most things.. it is a cat and mouse game dependent on how heavily they believe their revenue could be impacted. I am not sure why you think either of those corporates would have a problem of banning individual users, who are only suspected based on the app signature..
I assume the sheriff would be totally fine with putting up signs in that area saying "audio and video recording in progress" then right? That would somewhat address the issue, and should be entirely uncontroversial to both sides.
That doesn't sound like a good compromise at all. First practically speaking, you can't just leave the court building to discuss with your client if they're in chains, and it's super inconvenient based on the layout of many courts. Second, this becomes the excuse for adding audio and video surveillance everywhere, with the excuse that you know about it, so it's okay. Third, considering audio can pick up things like jokes, irrational things said in anger, or just one's mumblings to oneself, it very quickly becomes the excuse to haul in anyone you don't like by misconstruing their words. The fact that it was brought by law enforcement tells you they are looking to use it against people.
It's so fundamentally terrifying that someone would consider that "totally fine".
Prosecutors will take breaks in their offices within the same building while the defense has to leave the building in order to have a private conversation, that sounds totally fair and reasonable.
The whole point of contention is that one of the spaces is, effectively, the only convenient places to have a quick, heretofore private, conversation. No one is confused over where the things are.
There are times when I want to argue that the solution is to make the question one of truth rather than guilt or innocence, but any solution runs up against human nature, my first experience of which was when playing sports and being told by my team mates that I should state that the ball fell on the side of the line which was advantageous to the team, rather than where it actually fell.
I doubt that comes into it. Ive wants to design what he wants to design, whether people like that universally or not is clearly not a concern to him. Everyone hated the MacBook keyboards for years, the lack of ports, the iPhone not getting USB-C until a decade late, whatever the Magic Mouse is, etc. Ive is just ungrounded from what people want, 20% of the time he knows better and changes the industry, 80% of the time it just annoys people.
I can really get behind this positive take on ATProto and the ecosystem. I know there was early criticism, but much of that stems from the project taking a fairly long-term viewpoint early on, and then having to work their way towards fulfilling that. We're now at that point, and the model looks great.
I still don’t think the model is quite great until the bandwidth problem is solved in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive for alternative appview hosting.
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
> If you want a repairable machine, buy one.... Framework
Sure, but Framework doesn't run the OS I want, doesn't run the chip I want, doesn't quite meet the form factor I want. It's not an effective market because I can't pick and choose.
The problem here is vertical integration. If you want anything from Apple you have to buy everything from Apple.
Being an effective market doesn’t mean you get everything you want.
You’re actually saying: “I want Apple’s software, and I want certain chips, and I want a certain form factor. And if Apple won’t build what I want, I will pass a law to make them build it for me!”
Come on man. You will make tradeoffs either way. The answer isn’t: force a company to build what I want them to build.
Well another version of it is: I want to be able to talk to my family, but I don't want to buy an iPhone. The EU rightly regulated that any chat network big enough must open their doors to different platforms. Or I don't want to buy Microsoft Office for my employees but I want to be able to do business with those who do, and thankfully we have relatively open document formats now.
The chips argument is contrived, the OS argument less so, but it's all just network effects at some level, and it's important for competition and effective markets that we prevent the largest networks from locking people in and forcing them to make a lot of other unrelated decisions.
iMessage being a closed ecosystem. Apple finally added RCS support, but only after regulatory pressure.
To not recognise this as a limitation is to be wilfully blind to network effects. The "green bubbles" issue was a huge issue in the US. Similarly, WhatsApp not being open is a huge problem in forcing people onto Meta's platforms.
I'm biased, but I don't think less trustworthy is a fair assessment. I think you can suggest that open source software provides a different trust model than closed source and distributed by Play, but to conclude it's less trustworthy is a real stretch.
The vast majority of software on Google Play is absolute spyware-laden slop. There are turstworthy apps, sure, but they are drops in an ocean. F-Droid’s trustworthy-to-ad-ridden-slop ratio is pretty much definitionally lower than Google’s, by virtue of it being actually curated. That everything on it is libre and they are working hard on reproducible builds just makes it all the better.
This is a bunch of opinion though. I'm not saying I disagree, but I do think it's bad faith to state as fact what is opinion. Is Play a "walled garden" or is it not curated? It can't be both depending on what suits the argument. You may disagree with the policies, but suggesting there are no policies in favour user privacy is just false. You may think they aren't enforced sufficiently, but again this is opinion. The policies are there.
F-Droid has the benefit that it essentially doesn't have to deal with malicious actors. It's very easy to have a high quality library when there are no malicious actors.
Nah I'm good thanks. Slop takes more effort to read and just raises questions of accuracy. It's just disrespectful to your reader to put that work on them. And in a marketing blog post it's just a bad idea.
“ deliver more than just a core count increase. The architecture delivers improvements across multiple dimensions”
“But we didn't just assume it would be a problem; we measured it.”
“ Instead of compromising, we built FL2. ”
Idk if i am now seeing this pattern everywhere because it is all AI slop or if people really do write this way.
Skimming it, this looks like they got a partnership with amd and tacked it onto an ongoing project as if it were planned. This confuses us as it makes it harder to understand how much was the rewrite generally or was it some hardware thing? Man, i used to really enjoy cloudflares technical blogs.
Cloudflare has excellent (human) technical writers. I don’t see any indication this is “slop”, it’s the standard in-the-weeds but understandable blog post they’ve been doing for years.
This is AI, but I can’t prove it, lol. :) The bulleted lists that are too short both in total list length and text per list item length. littles drama headers as parent noted.
To your point, this would register as “human bloviating for word count subtly” if llms didn’t exist, and at this point is probably the most useful feedback. I doubt it’s 100% one-shot AI, but someone definitely optimized it in parts, but the AI heard “concise” as “bullets and short sentences.”
Cloudflare definitely does have excellent technical writers, but a) this doesn't seem to be (entirely? substantially?) from them, and b) if there are AI tropes clearly visible, which they are to me, it's putting readers off regardless of whether the content is AI generated, and that's just bad marketing.
Agree to disagree. It is likely ai enhanced some where along the path to production. So many phrases reek AI but others do not. Is this a sprinkling of llm help or how a human genuinely writes, idk.
Out of curiosity, can you point to specific sections that reel of AI? I read the article and didn't see anything that immediately stuck out, but maybe I need to start looking for different signals.
> For our FL1 request handling layer, NGINX- and LuaJIT-based code, this cache reduction presented a significant challenge. But we didn't just assume it would be a problem; we measured it.
It’s not that the “it’s not just A, it’s B” pattern. It’s just that humans don’t write like that. You don’t go “I didn’t just assume; I measured”. People usually say something like “but we didn’t know for sure, so we decided to measure it”. The LLM text is over-confident.
> The choice to never invert raster images isn't a compromise, it's the design decision. The problem veil solves is exactly that: every dark mode reader today inverts everything, and the result on photos, histology, color charts, scans is unusable. Preserving all images is the conservative choice, and for my target (people reading scientific papers, medical reports, technical manuals) it's the right one.
It’s like a guy putting together a promo packet or something. A normal person would be a little hesitant and wouldn’t just go. “And what I’m doing isn’t because of constraints. It’s because I am making the right choices!”
It’s just an oddly stilted way of speaking in conversation. Imagine talking to someone like that in real life. It would be all like “And then I thought the problem was that the global variable was set wrong. But I didn’t just assume that, I verified it.”
No one’s accusing you of assuming it, dude. You don’t have to pre-emptively tell us you didn’t just assume it. Normal people don’t say that.
I don’t have much of a problem with LLM text because I just skip over flavor like this to charts, code, and tables but this is obviously LLM
Ah appreciate it. A year ago it was very clear when something was written by an LLM, but now you've gotta look for certain characteristics. I try not to infer to much, especially because llms are really helpful for non native English speakers to write faster.
I'd like to make it a bit more normalized to have public writing be transparent about if llms were used and how. That makes it quite a bit easier for readers to focus on the content instead of debating how something was written lol
I’m hopeful that future LLMs will be better at communicating information. If the facts are right, and the text is concise then I don’t care about the source. The problem is that the text is verbose bloviation.
Cloudflare had excellent human technical writers. But for the past months/years they got slowly replaced by AI, and the quality of the posts dove down drastically.
Remember when they had "implemented a serverless post-quantum Matrix server", where they blatantly lied saying it's production ready, when most of the encryption features were not even implemented. (Then rushed to removed the LLM's 'todo' tags from the code).
https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761
If you're asking this truly legitimately, then I don't think I can help you here. If you're asking this to make a point then I'm certainly not going to change your mind.
I think "Code Storage" (definitely needs a unique name), is less an API for git push (surely git push is that API?), and more an API for "git init"? It seems to be Git as infrastructure, rather than Git as a product. i.e. if you're using it for a single repo it's probably not a good fit, it's for products that themselves provide git repos.
Flighty is in a weird place because I'm a rare/leisure traveller and wow Flighty nowhere near reasonably priced for that market.
I used it in free mode when I was on iOS, but it would be ~£10 per trip for something that would improve my life less than a coffee at the airport.
In my opinion they need to aggressively cut costly features (like weather data), and if they have different international data feeds, perhaps do region locked pricing. I don't fly to the US much, so let me buy a Europe and Asia subscription and skip the US costs. Or vice-versa. It would have needed to be ~£10 a year at most.
I’m a touring lighting designer, I fly anywhere from 20-120 times a year. Every fellow LD I know uses Flighty, any time i get delayed flighty tells me before the airline does.
I especially love that it usually tells me or warns me about a delay before I leave the lounge, so i get to spend some more time relaxing. That and of course the amazing data in your flighty passport!
The promise is that it informs you quickly about flight delays, flight cancellations and gate changes. In my limited experience, it didn’t work satisfactorily for a flight delay of a few hours. It could not provide any reliable updates.
It’s a nice app and service, but I wouldn’t trust all those reviews that are like “I knew before the aircraft pilot knew”. It has its own limitations.
I don’t see any value in knowing before the pilot knows. I’ve mostly flown American the past few years and with their app I get updates about delays and gate changes on my phone just fine. I suppose there might be some advantage to getting the notification a bit earlier, but I doubt that they can reliably give information faster than the airline itself.
I think I figured it out - if you can figure out a cancellation before everyone else you can get to the counter and get on another flight before everyone.
I've had once cancellation in my life so I see why the need hasn't presented itself very loudly.
Yeah, the most notable "use", not necessarily "value", is when the airline is still prevaricating over the delay, you're approaching boarding time and you can see from ADS-B that the inbound aircraft hasn't even begun initial descent.
Last year Flighty literally saved me from an overnight delay because it notified me the incoming aircraft was still on the ground at the previous airport. I was able to snag the last couple seats on a later scheduled flight which actually departed. My original flight ended up getting canceled.
As airline crew, I stay in the lounge (employee lounge, not bar lounge) when I know I'm not going anywhere on time.
Flighty gets heavy use from US airline employees. We're frequently in the airport with a brief break before flying the next flight. Usually, this next flight will be on an aircraft that hasn't arrive to the airport yet. Most of us will find a quiet place to relax for awhile and it's really irritating to pack stuff back up and walk to the gate just to find out there's no plane.
Another scenario is you arrive to an airport and need to switch aircraft. The "turn" time might be scheduled for 45 min. It's really nice to know as you walk off the aircraft that "Hey, it's actually delayed. Now I have 2 hours." I'll go grab a bite to eat or catch up with family back home etc.
My particular airline will show you what the next inbound aircraft is and it's flight number and ETA but it's a "fetch" experience. You open the app, wait for a refresh, click like 4 times to navigate to the right page, get the tactical information. Flighty keeps it on the lock screen. Just lift your phone and it's there.
We're constantly asking our employer to emulate Flighty. Tech isn't their strong suit though.
Sounds like you identified a business opportunity for Flighty - license the functionality or just sell app access to the entire airline, at least for employees.
I fly around 6x/yr but I still found it useful enough to get the lifetime plan. I suppose if I only flew once per year I wouldn't have gotten it, but I don't mind paying ~$10/flight (probably even lower by now, and who knows what it will drop to by the time Flighty stops working, hopefully more like ~$1/flight). A typical trip might cost in the range of ~thousands of dollars so $10 to reduce my stress levels when there is a delay is worth it in my book.
For example... if there's a delay and so because you found out sooner you can stay home an extra hour instead of sitting at the airport I would pay $10 for that.
What's your basis for thinking this will work long term? I see you're selling yearly or lifetime subscriptions, suggesting you think the product can exist. There have been many attempts at this in the past that have been taken down, why is Dull different?
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