Sad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
Sad that people can’t see past their ideological bubbles. Tech spaces used to be dominated by people who saw free speech as an imperative. Now their own political biases have them supporting censorship.
And the pencil companies let people draw lewd drawings depicting minors. The typewriter manufacturers let a bunch of people write lewd stories depicting minors.
X is not a person, it is a website run by Elon Musk.
Elon, through his company, publishes the photos. I don't think it matters whether he posted them or not. He was aware of and encouraging of the practice, at least when applied to photos of adults.
In the EU the platform becomes responsible for posted content, the moment someone notifies them that they are hosting something illegal. They have plausible deniability until notified, after which they have a certain time to act, and if they don't they are criminally liable. The user posting the content is also liable, from the moment they made the post.
I decided to investigate these claims since it is frequently expressed by those attacking Elon or X. It seems to be yet another misrepresentation or falsehood spread around to achieve political gain.
"CCDH did not prove that X is widely distributing child sexual abuse material. Their report extrapolates from a small, non-random sample of AI-generated images, many of which appear to be stylized or fictional anime content. While regulators are rightly investigating whether Grok’s safeguards were insufficient, CCDH’s public framing collapses “sexualized imagery” and “youthful-looking fictional characters” into CSAM-adjacent rhetoric that is not supported by verified prevalence data or legal findings."
Scale of sexual content:
“~3 million sexualized images generated by Grok”
They sampled ~20,000 images, labeled some as sexualized, then extrapolated using estimated total image volume. The total image count (~4.6M) is not independently verified; extrapolation assumes uniform distribution across all prompts and users.
Images of children:
“~23,000 sexualized images of children”
They label images as “likely depicting minors” based on visual inference, not age metadata. No verification that these are real minors, real people, or legally CSAM.
CSAM framing:
Implies Grok/X is flooding the platform with child sexual abuse material.
The report explicitly avoids claiming confirmed CSAM, using phrases like “may amount to CSAM.”
Public-facing messaging collapses “sexualized anime / youthful-looking characters” into CSAM-adjacent rhetoric.
CCDH's bias:
Ties to the UK Labour Party: Several of CCDH’s founders and leaders have deep ties to Britain's center-left Labour Party. Founder Imran Ahmed was an advisor to Labour MPs.
Target Selection: The organization’s "Stop Funding Fake News" campaign and other deplatforming efforts have frequently targeted right-leaning outlets like The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and Zero Hedge. Critics argue they rarely apply the same scrutiny to misinformation from left-leaning sources.
"Kill Musk's Twitter" Controversy: Leaked documents and reporting in late 2024 and 2025 alleged that CCDH had internal goals to "kill" Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) by targeting its advertising revenue.
AI was also used to assist in identifying sexualized images of children, with images flagged by the tool as likely depicting a child being reviewed manually to confirm that the person looked clearly under the age of 18.
I don't know where you live but I've been able to express myself without any form of approval. Granted, I tend to not encourage genocide or glorify fascist regimes, but that's just me.
Where do you live where you're allowed to express yourself without any form of approval?
For instance, in the US, I cannot hysterically scream FIRE while running toward the exit of a theater, nor could I express a desire to cause bodily harm to an individual.
Not that I would, per se, but if I did I'd be liable to prosecution for the damages caused in either instance.
I'd have to get the approval of those involved (by their not seeking legal recourse), in order to do either without consequence.
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" line is one of the most misunderstood pieces of legal dicta in US history. It comes from a case that was overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969).
Under current First Amendment law, the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting "imminent lawless action" and is "likely" to produce such action.
To illustrate how high this bar is: you can legally sell and wear a T-shirt that says "I heart killing [X group]". While many find that expression offensive or harmful, it is protected speech. This is because:
- It is not a true threat (it doesn’t target a specific individual with a credible intent to harm).
- It isn't incitement (it doesn't command a crowd to commit a crime immediately).
In the US, you don't need approval to express yourself. The default is that your speech is protected unless the government can prove it falls into a tiny handful of narrow, well-defined exceptions.
FYI freedom of speech in the US sense is not so much about self-expression as much as it is to prevent e.g. the King decreeing a law that “nobody can say the word ‘Parliament’”. Or for a modern example, “discussing what to do about xyz group is ‘hate speech’.”
Anybody can run their mouths. Discussing ideas with others is what’s protected.
You're lucky that the only things you want to say are also things your government allows you to say. Quite a coincidence, don't you think? I'm sure if you were born and raised in Pakistan, you would have no inclination to encourage homosexual activity either and you'd be just as comfortable.
Sure — you just deny those same rights to anyone you deem a “fascist” in a secret report. Much like say, the Stasi would allow you to speak your mind unless you were a capitalist subversive, as clearly documented in your secret trial.
Obviously we should censor fascists and subversives!
My mental model is that each of these covers a different layer of the stack, from lowest to highest:
* hypervisor-framework handles the hypervisor bits, like creating virtual machines, virtualising hardware resources, basically a C API on top of Apple's hypervisor
* virtualization-framework is a higher-level API, meant to make it easy to run a full-blown VM with an OS and hardware integration, without having to reinvent the integration with lower-level primitives that hypervisor-framework provides
* containerization-framework uses virtualization-framework to run Linux containers on macOS in microVMs.
By analogy to not mix them up, it's a bit like KVM > QEMU > containerd.
1 GB of RAM for Postgres is really only useful for tinkering IMHO. Even for development, you’ll quickly need more memory, so HA doesn’t provide much value here. If you go with something even remotely reasonable (4 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD, 1/2 vCPU — and that’s still on the low end), the cost jumps to about $290/month. For that price, you could easily hire someone to set up HA Postgres for you on Hetzner or OVH and once configured, HA Postgres typically requires minimal ongoing maintenance.
Also, this is a shared server, not a truly dedicated one like you’d get with bare-metal providers. So, calling it "Metal" might be misleading marketing trick, but if you want someone to always blame and don’t mind overpaying for that comfort, then the managed option might be the right thing.
Considering they are charging an unfathomable $4529/mo for 256 GB databases, extrapolating that to a serious use case you can indeed just hire someone full-time with how much you'd save. And then you'll actually have someone who understands how databases work instead of treating it like an expensive black box.
Yeah per your edit that'd be for 256GB RAM which puts that into serious dollar category. For comparison I checked what AWS asks for for the same spec and that'd be $4616/month (for a db.m8gd.16xlarge), and that doesn't even yield you an actual NVMe. You can of course build the same for cheaper on Hetzner but again then you're on the hook also for the operations of the thing, which at that size is possibly non-trivial.
> $4529/month... can indeed just hire someone full-time
That's $54,348/year, not including the cost of benefits, not including stock compensation. Let's say you reserve 20% for benefits and that comes out to $43,478.40 in salary.
Besides the benefit of not needing the management / communication overhead of hiring somebody, do you know any DBAs willing to take a full-time job for $43,478.40 in salary?
But that's the point, innit? How many SMEs need multiple production databases of that size? Nobody's really suggesting that Fortune 500 size enterprises should get by without DBAs. There's a big difference between an enterprise paying for a DBA take care of fleets of production databases, compared to a <50 employee shop that should do just fine with a single production database.
I think this product is mostly only viable in NA market where the SDE wage is much higher than European one to justify spending $x/mo for DBaaS instead of hosting their own
It depends a bit on your cloud provider but some of them have an offering that doesn't always match your needs or their pricing might be much more expensive at equal performance.
You're pointing out exactly what bothered me with this post in the first place: "we moved from microservices to a monolith and our problems went away"...
... except the problems had not much to do with the service architecture but all to do with operational mistakes and insufficient tooling: bad CI, bad autoscaling, bad oncall.
That's an unfair representation of the situation. There's nothing about this device that implies "disposable". The EU is definitely the problem here. I think the problem is the EU loves legislating entrepreneurial creativity into the dirt.
The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
Calling out every abrasive comment would take more effort than I'm willing to expend, and would itself be pretty abrasive. So I picked the comment where they called Covid (the event where many people died, had their businesses ruined, etc.) "fun" over the one that mentioned work-life balance.
The person you're replying to asked if it was fun. Consider that my sarcasm was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek and not incredibly serious, which is a very different kind of tone from other comments in this chain.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
(Planetscale employee)
This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform.
We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone.
You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug.
Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
I agree, removing the free plan was a bad move. They should have at least grandfathered existing free tier users. I was just explaining their point of view.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:
If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?
