The payer is the owner of the account? I doubt that is AWS' default stance, because their contract is with the account holder, not the payer.

Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.

If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.

I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.

I wouldn't say it's "just as bad", but I also couldn't imagine a big university publicly and strongly going against the federal government in Germany on "culture war" issues.

If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.

If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.

Thank you for the voice or reason.

It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?

Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.

> You don't though, unless your funding depends on him.

Or your broadcasting license.

Or your public assistance.

Or your citizenship.

There's a difference between rights and privileges.

If the government gifts you $1000 a month because they like you so much, that's a privilege. Privileges can be taken away.

If the government gives you $1000 a month because it's the law, then they can't take it away without breaking the law (or changing it first).

Public funding for specific universities is not the law, so the government can stop giving it to someone (yes, yes, there are contracts and laws involved and what not, but the general point stands).

The government cannot imprison you for saying you like pineapple on pizza, but they can stop funding your pizza experiments.

Usually it's brought up by people on the left and I think they're right: freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Freedom of speech protects you from the government as in the executive branch can't just imprison you, but it doesn't protect you from any and all consequences. It's just that they usually don't find themselves the targets suffering those consequences.

And opinions often depend on whether you're affected.

Your opinion is based on the constitutional republic of the past. In the authoritarian dictatorship that Trump is building, there's no difference between a right and a privilege because rights don't exist, only privilege for those who have the approval of the dictator, which may be revoked at any time. This whole "rule of law" idea you're professing is antiquated and a relic. The new world order is: might makes right.

I've received messages from people (who don't even report to me) asking whether they did something wrong because I had forgotten to close some google doc they shared which then showed me as "active on the document" for hours and they thought "he's combing through everything, I'm in trouble" and eventually reached out because they couldn't take it anymore.

People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.

What about people who don't have human companions? Should they not have any companionship at all over having dogs, birds, cats, or chatbots?

Chatbots are on a different list than the rest of those. Animals aren't human companionship, but they're still physical beings with physical needs that interact with you on their own schedule for their own reasons.

My cat will harass me if I'm on my computer after midnight. It's time to put the technology away and lie down where she can keep an eye on me. She's quite clear on this point. This is an entire category of interaction not available to chatbots. There is a difference in level of reality.

And when lacking human companionship, grounding to reality is really important. You've got to get out of your head sometimes.

The problem I see is that since the chatbots are so easy to chat with, some people use them before they even try to do the work at getting human companionship. It almost never true that it's impossible for a person to find other people to be friends with or chat with. I've known plenty of people who said they would never find a companion due to X, Y, and Z intractable reasons but who stumbled into strong relationships anyway. A chatbot is "companionship" in the same way candy is food.

I think animal companions are a different class than chatbots since they're not trying to be people so I make no comment on those.

> before they even try to do the work at getting human companionship

Why do they have to "do the work" to be deserving of companionship when most of us don't have to do anything because it comes natural to us and we can relatively easily regulate the amount of companionship we want.

I fail to see the bad thing. For some people it's either a chatbot (or a dog) or no interaction at all. Should people starve instead of eating at McDonald's because that's "not real food"?

Everyone deserves companionship, it's just that chatbots don't provide it. What I worry about is people who don't want to have conversations with people at work, or go do a hobby with other people, etc. and use a chatbot as an alternative when it's just a parrot pretending to be a person but providing no actual interaction. A chatbot has no needs, tells no embarrassing stories, requires no compromise, makes no promises, does no favors. That's why I said it was candy, not McDonalds. They provide no nutrition but sure taste good.

That sounds similar to me like the argument against anti-depressants that it's "not real", and you're not actually better, you're just addressing symptoms, not the cause. But my experience is very clear: that's a huge improvement.

Clearly people have needs, clearly they feel chatbots satisfy those to some degree (otherwise they wouldn't use them). To those people, it's an improvement, I don't see how that's a negative.

People who don't have human companions should find them some human companions. They could settle for an illusion of companionship (as with pets), but every human can have the real thing. They NEED to have it and they ought to have it.

If you want a really hot take: ai chatbot companions are just an evolution of pets. They are a vaguely life affirming substitute created to medicate human loneliness, for a fee of course.

> People who don't have human companions should find them some human companions.

"Have you ever tried just not being sad?"

"Wow, I never thought of that. Thanks!"

But "a few months" isn't 5 years, right? Last update in January 2025 seems fine for a lot of things. If that was January 2020 I'd probably bypass it as well.

This second comment was more meant as an elaboration on why I personally dislike the not updated recently = abandoned assumption that a lot of people take by default, rather than actually checking on whether its abandoned.

As in, "I've personally witnessed people passing over mature libraries that just don't need any more updates in favor of ones that aren't really production ready but get frequent updates, which causes quite a bad dev experience down the line".

I am not really good at articulating my thoughts properly, so thanks for making me write this longer comment.

> Data breaches hardly ever cause hundreds of deaths in a violent fireball.

Insurance people will be happy to tell you the price of the average citizen's life. Estimate the total cost to the economy, divide by the average citizen's life-value and you have the statistical deaths caused by this type of incident. Draw a fireball next to it for dramatic effect.

But generally, I don't think _every_ SaaS needs to be tightly regulated. But everyone that handles customer data needs to be. It would also very quickly make them stop hovering up any data they can get their fingers on and instead would make them learn how to provide their services securely without even having access to the data, because having that data suddenly becomes a liability instead of an opportunity.

While I'm absolutely not a design-should-rule-all person, I think there's quite a range between "pixel-level control" and "you can't choose which font to use".

If we'd reliably have the top 50 google fonts on every OS, there'd be a lot less webfonts used.

This is also something the browser vendor could provide, without OS-level changes.

> I can’t understand why anyone would become emotionally invested in any of them.

I think that's simple: because they are financially invested in them. That's obvious for the developers working on the frameworks themselves or building libraries / plugins / UI-themes for them, but I believe it's also correct for "normal" developers who build things with these frameworks.

They know these frameworks and can use them, and they've made an investment in time to get to that point. Likely they're also making at least some of their money _because_ they know these frameworks. Emotional attachment follows the economic attachment, and then you'll get plenty of rationalizations.