You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying "This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership."
Unless it's protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.
Even if they ARE an "honorable" company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.
Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a "kill the golden goose to get the eggs" move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.
Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it's a GAMBLE. It's a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it's not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.
Remember... for most young people now, the internet isn't even something you access through a browser - it's a series of apps, some of which have replaced the majority of text with icons to avoid multi-language headaches.
Anyone remember how much nicer the world felt before we all realized nobody in charge of anything with any real power has any idea what the fuck they're doing?
HeLa is extremely interesting, but still requires humans to cultivate her cells.
Canine transmissible venereal tumor however, is an immortal, contagious dog tumor from a dog thousands of years ago that evolved into its own lifeform - a sexually transmitted parasitic cancer - that has continued to this day to spread from host to host. Yet, genetically, it is still "dog".
Anyway, this is my answer when the job interviewer asks me about long-term goals.
In a democracy or republic with full voting rights, that's EXACTLY how it works.
People get the government they vote for. No more, no less.
I'm angry at the politicians, of course. But not NEARLY as angry as I am at my countrymen who PUT them there.
For as much as we constantly hear nonsense bullshit about "blood to water the tree of liberty", the SINGLE most important aspect of being a citizen of a representative government is being informed about things and making good decisions about your representatives. It's your FIRST duty as a citizen. But it's clearly too high a bar for most people to even attempt to meet.
I'm no fan of the CCP, but when they say that average people can't be trusted to steer the ship of society, I have to say reality is making a compelling case.
Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It's not great that they're paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they're also not contributing to Anthropic's code base. If they were? They'd absolutely be complicit.
The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.
Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.
It's the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don't have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.
I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I'd not made that choice, I wouldn't consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.
You got lucky. Companies can, and frequently do, either completely go under after a few years, or revamp their service, shutting down the old one, and saying "This is a NEW service. It requires a NEW lifetime membership."
Unless it's protected by a legal definition, the only thing between your lifetime membership and getting nothing at all is the good will of a company that does not care after they already have your money.
Even if they ARE an "honorable" company, and I use that term loosely, the moment someone buys them, they have absolutely no obligation to honor lifetime memberships. Most EULAs for lifetime memberships give the company total discretion to shut it down at any time for any reason.
Beyond that, $750 seems a LOT like a "kill the golden goose to get the eggs" move. Would look GREAT on a quarterly report of revenue, coming with huge executive bonuses, before selling and getting out, and letting someone else manage running the infrastructure on reduced revenue.
Bottom line? The lifetime membership MIGHT work out, but it's a GAMBLE. It's a gamble that you get in early enough to get your value out before the marks in a ledger indicate it's not worth providing anything for you anymore. Meanwhile, doing the Open Source solution is free now, free forever, and has NO gambling component.