If something is free, you are the product - it is "free" but Anonymous data is collected.

I generally agree with the sentiment—if something is free, there’s often a tradeoff. But when there’s a paid tier, the free version can act more like an entry point or hook to get users into the ecosystem, rather than relying on harvesting user data. In JetBrains’ case, broad adoption brings a lot of strategic value on its own (like establishing industry standards or building community mindshare), so it makes sense for them to offer a genuinely free version without necessarily treating users as the product.

Exactly, this I why I won't use Linux or Firefox, I don't want to be the product.

Most Linux distros are completely free of any builtin telemetry. Your fears are unwarranted.

I believe that's the point being made by the comment you're replying to

My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that the guy was being sarcastic.

We at the HN do not have a sense of humor we're aware of.

Linux is free as in free speech. It's also open source.

Firefox... is free as in free beer.

Firefox is covered by the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which is a free-as-in-freedom, open source software license.

What's your definition of freedom?

This AUP is related to the optional backend services run by Mozilla. The frontends for all of these services are open source, with no usage restrictions. It doesn't affect how Firefox is licensed in terms of copyright. Additionally, the backends for some of these services (such as Firefox Sync and Mozilla Accounts) are fully open source, so you could avoid the AUP if you wanted to.

Only for Gmail? no thank you.

Issue with desktop app is doing updates, pushing updates/hotfixes to all of them and then works for some and not for others, instead of webapps you only update the host and test on different browsers. thats all.

If you say so. Telegram for example updates in half a second on my Windows gaming machine, and having a daily update script on my Mac and Linux machines is easy as hell.

Sure many people don't update like ever, but Apple's and Microsoft's app stores do updates without asking people anyway (they learned, finally).

Not such a big problem as you make it out to be IMO, even for very casual non-technical users.

Not all were destroyed, couple were kept for museum, i took a picture with one at the navy station in Norfolk, Virginia

they are really blocking even with VPN, i was just testing stuff out. 1 - if you created an account in US and trying to login with that account, then it wont work. 2 - tried logging in to Canada VPN, and create a "Canadian" account so i can login to tiktok, no joy, it somehow throws errors on debugger and does not proceed on sign up button. 3 - Booted up an AWS ec2 free windows tier machine on Canada region, created and logged in with a new account no issues. 4 - if you try to use that account on your machine with canada vpn, you will get suspicious activity alert then it wont let you login even with canada VPN, so they must tracking device location differently. 5 - So, the only way to access it without any issues is by using some virtual machine located in another region - no VPN, maybe a dedicated region IP might work.

I'm in France and it still doesn't work. They might have just turned it off completely.

Edit: Nevermind, it works from an incognito window. So it's just my account they banned.

I guess tiktok is similar to Meta. It's basically impossible to create Instagram, and I guess Facebook accounts using VPN.

i use this to double check which of my web app folder/files are publicly accessible.

This is great, it couldn't find my actual city, so i used the closest one that was available lol.

You should be able to find your city now!

If not, don't hesitate to share some details with me through meet.hn/feedback. Make sure to add some contact info so that I can answer.

does not count the people using API calls.

This probably does make a difference but I strongly suspect that the average user has no idea what an API is nor how to use it

True but those average users might be using chatbots and other services with nice UIs they can understand that are making those API calls behind the scenes. So the average users are indeed using the API, just indirectly.

With so many AI products being launched these days, it could be that the user traffic is still rapidly increasing but just being spread out amongst all the interfaces becoming available.

Indeed. Anecdotally, I use ChatGPT through Raycast so that I get pulled out of whatever context I'm working in then.

Swapping to API and desktop app has saved me alot of cash over the paid web plan for the amount of use I am doing.

Is GPT-4 available as an API? that’s the only reason I still pay for it. Also we’re developing a plugin so we need the plus subscription.

Yep, several different context lengths can be used via API as well.

This is great