I'm willing to bet it's option B. Bet someone in management decided it would be best to cheap the fuck out now and then beg forgiveness later, and sell it as increasing security, than ask permission from the beginning.

Me neither

Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.

I have a rough idea of their efficiency as I've used them, not in professional settings but I wager it would not be too different. My point is more that it feels like the rugs are finally starting to get pulled. This tech is functionnal as you said, it works to a point and that point is enough for a sizeable amount of people. But I doubt that the price most people are paying now is enough to cover the cost of answering their queries. Now that some people, especially younger devs or people who never worked without those tools are dependant on it, they can go ahead and charge more. But it's not too late, so I'm hoping it will make some people more aware of that kind of scheme and that they will stop feeding the AI hype in general.

I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some "Zen" in computer UIs and that "Zen" is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of "you don't understand it". Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well. And also another idea of "you dummy talking about ergonomics can't be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit". So - pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked, almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that, blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications, objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that's why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.

Not easy but not hard actually really simple if you had the right energy. Just ignore this so I don't scare you.

I'm having a hard time believing the EU cant afford a $5 wrench for decryption