Strong appears to be a fitness tracker. It's in competition with a spreadsheet.
OnX appears to be heatmaps as a service for outdoor recreation. They have to cover their opex costs.
These are not the subscriptions people have in mind when they say they hate the subscription model. People dislike obvious rent-seeking behavior; they really dislike it when there is no technical reason something can't be sold to them in a one-time transaction; and they hate it when a product that was offered as a permanent one-time purchase is then only available as a subscription service.
> I like subscriptions because, in the worst kind of corporate management speak, subscriptions align our interests. You pay for the app for the duration that you see fit.
We see the same pattern over and over again: (1) subscription service starts and operates at a loss, (2) people recognise this and sign-up, (3) the service gradually enshittifies to the point where there is no real value propisition, (4) company banks on having enough customers from 1 and 2 that enough people will put up with 3 that they can remain profitable.
I think China "advancing" faster is better. Hoarding some magic numbers on a hard drive isn't a sound business plan, and shouldn't be what we're betting the farm (literally) on.
Yes. They're turning on the consent manufacturing machine to make it an issue of "national security" to download some gguf file from Hugging Face. Absolutely disgusting.
For images, it makes sense: people dealing with 16k x 16k PNGs are uncommon. Give them an error message that tells them the setting to bump. But what should be the threshold for "big data"? I'm sure it will follow Zipf's Law, but the tail will be fatter.