dcre

$200 a month is what people pay for morning coffee in the Bay Area.

What is stopping anyone from finding the value they would have found before?

Worth noting they claim they did not choose the line of attack. Of course we don’t know whether that is true.

“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.”

AAUGH IT BURNS

Here's the post that made it click for me. It works through a practical example in both git and jj.

https://lottia.net/notes/0013-git-jujutsu-miniature.html

I also used to use a GUI (https://gitup.co/) for that reason, and jj has completely replaced it for me.

It's great to use what you prefer, but I don't think most people would see that and think "ooh, convenient!"

The CNBC report I linked, which appears to be the primary source, mentions growth in the second paragraph. It is the main characterization of what Friar said.

“In an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, finance chief Sarah Friar and board chair Bret Taylor touted OpenAI’s revenue growth and addressed competition with Anthropic, CNBC has learned.”

A few advantages for me, even for the same 5 commands I use over and over:

- undo

- shuffling commits around with squash, split, and rebase is much better than git’s interactive rebase

- make commits without having to come up with a branch name (I might make three versions of the same change in parallel to see how they compare)

I see git is working on adding some of this under the history command. The revset language is really not esoteric: @ is head, @—- is two behind head. That’s about it.

Part of it is that the sorts of shuffling I used to avoid because they were a pain in git (so I didn’t feel I needed them improved) are so easy in jj that I do them all the time.

Completely agree there.

But you are using the misquote to do the thing Zitron does that you hate! I don't get it!

She, and we do not have the direct quote. It's a paraphrase, and the report can't seem to decide whether they're talking about revenue or growth. If she was talking about growth, "the ARR growth in July exceeded the ARR growth of Q2" is perfectly coherent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-tells...

OP is way overinterpreting something we don't even have verbatim in a way that unfortunately resembles what they're rightly accusing Zitron of.

You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated.

No, you can't. The numbers are genuinely confusing, and Zitron actively works to make them more confusing rather than explaining what they mean because he needs them to sound as bad as possible. He also buries the numbers in thousands of words of prose!

Yes, and his post about the exact same data was noticeably more confusing and less illuminating than theirs because he was primarily concerned to point to whatever the biggest number was and go "Ooh, big number!"

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb... (https://archive.ph/pAIEa)

Macrofinance expert Nathan Tankus has an excellent post on why the financing situation around the AI boom is just not big enough to mess up the financial system.

https://www.crisesnotes.com/sigh-no-ed-zitron-ai-bond-issuan...

Generating alt text for images in social media posts.

No.

Their quarterly revenue looks exactly the same. It's literally the same data. Annualized revenue can be gamed when it is fluctuating. It can't really be gamed when it is growing exponentially for three years straight. There's nothing to cherry-pick.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/15/anthropic-revenue-jumps-to-o...

It's hard for me to imagine how you could define "killer product" to exclude something that takes you from $9B to $65B ARR in 8 months.

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-companies?view=graph&tab=revenue

I have seen people suggest we will figure out how to prevent all infectious disease.

Because it’s a web site.

This example disproves your point. And LLMs do not just do what we tell them to do. They are perfectly capable of asking “are you sure? this has X, Y, Z consequences you may not like.” They do it all the time.

Didn’t read the whole thing, but it starts out a lot better than I expected. Most critics are in denial about the state and trajectory of the technology. This critic is not, he just thinks it’s bad.

Ha! I have a heterodox view on the taste thing, which is that it’s mostly cope: the models apply something like taste in nearly everything they do, and these taste posts will disappear as that becomes more obvious. However, besides the substantive disagreement, I think your post is fine since it appears to be your actual point of view, written down by hand. It’s not particularly novel or insightful (most of these takes are basically “there are still some things the models can’t do” — no shit!) but it’s measured and reasonable. Fine.

No! It’s garbage!

Heh whoops. I thought my other comment didn’t post so I wrote this one instead.

This post is awful! Annoyingly written and zero insight. Most posts about this taste concept are bad (and there have been so many), but this is below average.

This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.

I feel like we need a name for this error. Pretraining fallacy? Coding ability is all about RL.