rrrrrrrrrrrryan

OpenAI has already started degrading their $20/month tier by automatically routing most of the requests to the lightest free-tier models.

We're very clearly heading toward a future where there will be a heavily ad-supported free tier, a cheaper (~$20/month) consumer tier with no ads or very few ads, and a business tier ($200-$1000/month) that can actually access state of the art models.

Like Spotify, the free tier will operate at a loss and act as a marketing funnel to the consumer tier, the consumer tier will operate at a narrow profit, and the business tier for the best models will have wide profit margins.

Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.

"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.

People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.

> the longer battery life is simply from less full time services

I imagine the transfective screen tech helps quite a bit too. Not having to max out the backlight's brightness to compete with the brightness of the sun has to help.

It's funny - I watched the Shawshank Redemption for the first time a couple years ago, after hearing forever about what a great film it is, and thought it was so lackluster I wasn't sure if I was missing something.

"Did he die in the end? Was it a dream sequence?" But no, both the intention of the creators, and by far the most common interpretation from viewers, is that it's all literal.

I tried watching Groundhog Day just once, and couldn't make it though it because (I assumed) it had aged so terribly.

Your comment made me reevaluate this though. I assumed the main appeal of these gonna was just nostalgia, and I've missed a key window, but perhaps it's the repeat viewings and predictability that make these films comfort food.

Slightly more efficient, with less waste.

> everyone can be a broadcaster

The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.

The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.

> our people

Do you think Black Americans, or native Americans feel shame when visiting these museums?

Or are they not "our people" to you?

People have speculated that the main thing that sets the human mind apart from the minds of all other animals is its capacity for recursive thought. A handful of animals have been observed to use tools, but humans are the only species ever observed to use a tool to create another tool. This recursion created all of civilization.

But that recursive thought has a limit. For example: You can think about yourself thinking. With a little effort, you can probably also think about yourself thinking about yourself thinking. But you can't go much deeper.

With the advent of modern computing, we (as a species) have finally created a tool that can "think" recursively, to arbitrary levels of depth. If we ever do create a superintelligent AGI, I'd wager that its brilliance will be attributable to its ability to loop much deeper than humans can.

Right now about 45% of the market is passively invested, and economists estimate you'd need 80%+ passive investments for active investors to reliably beat the market. We're not close to it yet.

There's also so much road noise.

They designed the car bodies to be light for battery-related reasons, but in doing so, the cabins of even their luxury cars sound like budget economy vehicles.

People grow almonds in the desert specifically because they have access to artificially cheap water. In the U.S. lots of land comes with water rights: e.g. if a river or creek passes through your land you can use x% of the water to irregate your crops. Some of these water rights date back to the 1800s and they're locked in.

The water rights can be clawed back a couple ways: if they're unused for X years, or in times of drought.

There's an exception for droughts though: farmers with trees (that would die if unwatered) still get priority, while people that grow crops that replenish each season (like wheat) don't.

So this leads to perverse incentives where these farmers need to find a way to use ALL of their water, every year, or they'll lose access to their absurd water rights from the 1800s, and they need to use it on trees so it doesn't get clawed back during a multi year drought.

So, they end up planting the most water-hungry trees they can grow on their land (almonds), then they get to sell them to the world at artificially low prices because the water that was used to grow them is almost free.

It'll burst in the same way crypto burst. The NFTs and the shitcoins and the grifters and the bandwagon hoppers all got washed out, but Bitcoin is still hitting record highs today.

All the smaller AI companies will have to quickly figure out a way to make a profit, or die.

The behemoths and the ones backed by behemoths (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI, Meta, Amazon/Anthropic) will take a good hit but will power through.

I think this is mostly true, but when it gets cheaper and faster, it will be able to complete much larger tasks unsupervised.

larger != more complex

The widespread adoption of cheap agentic AI will absolutely be an economic revolution. Millions of customer support jobs will be completely eliminated in the next few years, and that's just the beginning.

Soon it'll be easy to give an AI all the same things you give a new employee: an email address, a slack username, a web browser, access to the company intranet, a GitHub account, a virtual machine with mouse and keyboard control, etc. and you'll be able to swap it out one-for-one with pretty much any low-level employee.

> a huge amount of the public was taking stimulants regularly

Anecdotally, 100mg of caffeine combined with 200mg of L-theanine makes me maybe 25% as productive as I am on 5mg of Adderall, which is actually enough for me to function most days.

Yes - to enter most houses you needed to be a member of the club, or know the owner, have an invitation, etc.

Some houses were open to the public ("public houses," "pubs") where anyone could walk in and grab a drink and a bite, and usually even a bed for the night.

I suspect the vast majority of OpenAI's users are only using ChatGPT, and the vast majority of those ChatGPT users are only using the free tier.

For all of them, getting access to full-blown GPT-5 will probably be mind-blowing, even if it's severely rate-limited. OpenAI's previous/current generation of models haven't really been ergonomic enough (with the clunky model pickers) to be fully appreciated by less tech-savvy users, and its full capabilities have been behind a paywall.

I think that's why they're making this launch is a big deal. It's just an incremental upgrade for the power users and the people that are paying money, but it'll be a step-change in capability to everyone else.

It makes a little sense, but I'm not sure it's good for your eyes.

My eye doctor had me come in first thing in the morning, then again the next day at the end of the day, after my workday, and my vision had degraded about -0.25 to -0.5 over the course of the day, which is apparently pretty typical. If your prescription is just a little bit off, your eye muscles will work a little harder to hold things in focus, but over the course of the day, they get strained and tired, and at the end of the day they can't do it anymore.

I can imagine if you really strength-trained those muscles, you could hold things in focus for longer, more comfortably, and inversely, I could imagine if you never really worked those muscles they'd atrophy somewhat.

But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term. It would be like sitting on a wooden stool all day during your workday and saying "all you need to do is keep your core muscles strong by doing x/y/z workout a couple times a day," versus just getting a decent ergonomic chair.

Nothing wrong with a workout or keeping your muscles strong, but in order to last a full lifetime, your muscles need lots of rest too, and I imagine getting proper glasses definitely helps.

This is hilarious

I remember there was a time years back when there were "light" variants of apps, usually intended for underpowered or older Android phones, but that also came in handy if you were in a situation where you had shitty cell service, or if you needed to preserve your battery. You could run the Opera Mini browser on a trash phone and it was blazing fast without wrecking your battery. Maybe 5% of sites would have a rendering issue, but you could always switch back to your main browser if you needed to use it.

Nowadays, I think the trend is more toward putting a battery-saver or data-saver mode inside an existing app, rather than creating an entirely new app, and I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do something like this in Safari if they wanted to.

It seems like a big part of GPT-5 will be that it will be able to intelligently route your request to the appropriate model variant.

Normally they're accurate enough, and the revisions/refinements are small.

The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify.

I've imagined for a long time that eventually we'll shift the bulk of our heavy computation closer to the poles, and use those data centers to power our society. You either use solar power and shift the computation from north pole to south pole seasonally depending on which place is in eternal sunshine, or, since these places are so far away from major population centers, you could just plop down a bunch of giant nuclear reactors without too much resistance.

Yep - it's not too difficult to coax a thing to grow. Life, uh, finds a way.

Gardening is often much more about preventing the stuff that you don't want to grow from growing, whether that's weeds, microbes, fungus, insects, critters, etc.

I thought it was a little tougher than that? I know it costs at least a few hundred bucks and takes a day or two to ozone a small apartment, which would roughly line up with the $500 fine this hotel charges.

That's pretty standard in American hotels these days though. You don't touch anything you don't intend to pay for. It's to prevent people from drinking the booze and refilling it with water.

There are always signs, but if you goof they'll always take the charge off, but you do have to be upfront about it and tell them before checking out, otherwise you'll be charged.

I hung out with some (Vietnamese Zen) buddhist monks at their monastery for a bit, and it was really interesting how they really strive to limit sensory indulgences that take their awareness away from what's happening right here, right now.

They didn't just cut out the obviously mindless things like television and social media, but music, small talk, and even books were considered things to be consumed in moderation, because they were striving to spend as much time as possible each day really focused on the present moment.

Eh there's more nuance.

When people outside of LA say "Los Angeles", they're almost always referring to the county. The city of LA is actually quite small.

For "San Diego", it's precisely the opposite - a giant portion of San Diego County is comprised of the city of San Diego, and they're almost always just referring to the city.

And for "San Francisco," the city and the county are basically the same entity and thus have the same borders.

On Android phone, the equivalent voice assistant (Gemini) handles the question gracefully. Regardless of what you think about Google, having a single-button LLM-powered voice assistant, deeply integrated into the phone's OS, is a very useful feature, and Apple is quite far away from developing a competing version of this. They'll have to buy it or go without.

We had a few dozen customers, and "percent of wallet" (figuring out how much money they walk into the casino with vs. how much they leave with) is a standard metric in casino marketing everywhere. You can figure out their paycheck based on them coming the same day of the week and losing the same amount multiple times, and market to then to ensure they lose their whole paycheck more often.

It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.

The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.

It's not indifference, it's much more comically evil. Like, they're using software to identify gambling addicts on fixed incomes, to figure out how big retirees' social security checks are, and to ensure they lose the entire thing at the casino each week. They bonus out their marketing team for doing this successfully. They're using software to make sure that when a casino host's patron runs out of money and kills themselves, the casino host is not penalized but rewarded for a job well done.

At 8am every morning, the executives walk across the casino floor on their way to the board room, past the depressed people who have been there gambling by themselves the entire night, seeing their faces, then they go into a boardroom to strategize ways to get them those people to gamble even harder. They brag about it. It's absolute pure villainy.