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EmiDub

30 karma · joined July 30, 2025

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EmiDub··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
> When using the Colours window, if you're the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system, and you've got no choice but to force a restart.

I cannot reproduce this on 27. I think writers should undertake some degree of wider research before making strong, universal claims.

EmiDub··on ChatGPT Images 2.5
Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy and is widely misused online.

If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.

EmiDub··on OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
> Cost of revenue is lower than revenue.

I’m not sure how people are looking at numbers that show, even if we wipe off the enormous R&D expenditures, they are still in the red for inference + sales/marketing + admin and responding “this seems positive”.

It’s like being a sold a car and being told “well if you ignore the fact it has no engine it’s a good buy” yet it also has no wheels.

> Unless there's an assumption that R&D costs have to forever go up in order to increase revenue, I feel like this shows that the AI industry is actually on a path to profitability in the long term.

There are three futures right, I’ll rank them in order of fantasy -

1. Someone achieves AGI. At that point the economics of an individual company don’t even matter.

2. R&D costs do have to forever continue, because LLMs can be continually iteratively improved. Much like chip development, there is no end in sight, at least not on a near term timescale. If you are not continually at the frontier, customers will use a competitor or open/local alternatives.

3. LLMs reach a plateau of functionality. Further gains are minimal, quality reaches the apex of what the technology permits. In this scenario the hyperscalers have no business because open/local models will rapidly reach that same plateau as well.

EmiDub··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
Right, but unlike with social products (where the network of users is essential) or transportation/food delivery (where providers will follow the user volume) I just don’t see any stickiness benefit for OpenAI. A user’s conversation history is the only potentially valuable bit, but I think most users treat their ChatGPT history like their Google search history; disposable.
EmiDub··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
A moat defends your business, if you lose more money the more users you have, the number of users is not a moat.
EmiDub··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
Not according to the FT and Ed Zitron:

https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

EmiDub··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
How is the number of users a moat when you are losing money on every user?
EmiDub··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
Can someone give me an explanation for why Mike Cardwell, who lives in the UK, blocks Iranian IPs for “your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.” but does not block US or UK IPs for their decision to arm Israel?

The answer would seem to me to be racism – he values Ukrainian lives more than Palestinians and considers non-white citizens in non-democratic countries responsible for their country’s actions, but white citizens of democracies innocent.

EmiDub··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
Why do we keep having these LLM studies that are completely unsurprising. Yes, the probabilistic text generator is more likely to output a correct answer when the input more closely matches its training sources than when you add random noise to the prompt. They don’t actually “understand” maths. It’s worrying how much research seems to operate from the premise that they do.