PayPal doesn't cost significantly more than what a small online place can get from other payment processors. It's something like 3% + $0.50. That's also not much more than what a small business can usually get for in person credit cards.

This site does use buymeacoffee.com, which appears to be a dedicated payment platform. Its transaction fee is apparently 5%, which is steeper, but better for these small donations because of the lack of a fixed fee.

Bard came out shortly after ChatGPT as a prototype of what would become Gemini-the-chatbot.

There were other, less-available prototypes prior to that.

It's MIT-licensed, so they don't have to share their changes. That'll make it harder to take their changes.

Let them keep it. Refusing to share kills their open washing as well. Everyone will see them for what they are.

The term blog existed in 1999, and "weblog" in 97.

Thank you - I started my diary in Oct 2000 and I didn't hear the term until after then. Or I chose to ignore it, it's that long ago I can't recall :) I have updated my comment above.

Google doesn't demand your signing keys, and transforming your app in that way is easily detectable by the developer.

It is desired enough that plenty of developers license third party libraries that roll their own device attestation, instead of or in addition to Play Integrity.

This was their lead product for a while. I think it had one customer.

Not sure how they're doing post-layoffs.

Thanks for the info!

Yeah, it seems a bit niche to me. Could be that there might be one or two large clients.

Director is what, L8? There's a ton of those.

Photos, Gmail, and Ads use Spanner, not Cloud Spanner.

Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.