vineyardmike

Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.

I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.

But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.

They’ve claimed they’re not using the data for ads… for now

Sometimes I don’t have the text editor/IDE open, and I’m just looking at the code in a PR or similar UI.

I’d think this matches my hypothesis. I’d say that I spend more tokens rewriting and fixing things, so that contributes more.

Also, I’d imagine the token-maxed user is a programmer that lives in chat. I’ll admit to having asked the LLM to move a method up/down in a file, and watched it burn tokens for a minute thinking and executing a menial task.

There won’t be a bailout. I doubt the obligations will even amount to anything substantial anyways.

Many of these obligations are with the big clouds who don’t have capacity to serve them anyways. Google has said they have hundreds of billions in purchase obligations they can’t fill because they don’t have enough TPUs and data centers. Google gets a bigger marketing and investor headline, and there’s a queue behind Anthropic if they bail, so of course everyone would sign the commitments knowing the risks.

I’m sure AWS and Azure are on the same page.

In the worst case, many of their biggest customers have tons of GPUs (Meta, AWS), so they could always license out their raw models at steep discount to help absolve themselves of the obligations.

Finally, in the worst case scenario, even with margin compression, they pre-purchased most of the compute so there’s not enough for the open models to run on. If Opus was the same price as Kimi/GLM, I doubt many people would pick the open models.

Do you not feel we’re already transformed?

The world looks pretty different today. Even if the model maker companies go out of business (I’m skeptical), the model weights would stick around (many are open freeware already).

I know many software engineers who haven’t written code this year. AI chatbots are regularly used as alternatives to searching manually by many people. Agents are becoming a valuable new enterprise tool, and now consumers tech consumers are hopping on board.

Thanks for the links to the “completions” APIs that are common. Not the “responses” API I’m talking about, however.

> What happens when your entire day is depended on saas models

Honestly an outage on a Friday is perfect. Clean up your inbox, get to the small tasks you’ve neglected and go home early.

This feels like the far more likely option.

The Muse public APIs seem to be heavily inspired by OpenAI's, they even support the richer "responses" API. They have a similarly shaped compaction API, they have the same "encrypted" reasoning. Even the Muse harness seems heavily inspired by (open source) Codex. Considering Azure's historic involvement w/ OpenAI, it seems more plausible that Azure is used as spill-over capacity, and the same Azure infra used to encrypt GPT models encrypts Muse models.

My guess that the generally visible Anthropic/OpenAI details are leftovers from the whole meta "move fast" behavior. There are a few rough edges on the product where it leaks internal codenames (eg. signing in w/ WhatsApp required consenting to using "hatch" on one screen), so I'd believe that this was a leftover on the VM from the prototyping stage, before the Muse models were ready, or because the dev's got to benchmark against different models.

> I should murder every non healthcare professional

Crazy comparison to Walmarts lowering their own property tax because building a Walmart makes future land use less attractive.

(Same thing applies to gas stations which do literally poison their own land)

> I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.

Don’t engage that’s fine, but I gave a specific example of a common way to use land (box stores), which explicitly breaks the LVT model. People today use land for many economic activities that are expensive to repurpose, or impose negative externalities.

> actually understand that there are real negative side effects.

Everything has real negative consequences. One side does not hold the monopoly on negative side effects.

Land is not cheap to repurpose. The Georgism dream that land can be optimally used is a farce. There is significant costs to repurposing land - to make those costs worth it because of the taxes would heavily distort current society, and I think the assumption that this would be desirable compared to the status quo is unproven.

> double sales tax? Or increase income taxes?

Why not the taxes we have? Where is the presumption that taxes need to be changed at all, never mind doubled?

Even if we decide we want to raise taxes, choosing where to do so is delicate. Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.

I disagree with the fundamental premise on both parts.

> "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community.

In fact, everyone does contribute, positively or negatively, to their community. Either through involvement or absenteeism, or somewhere in between.

> Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT

The goal is obvious and not a misunderstanding. The goal is a bad goal, precisely because it punishes positive involvement in the community. To improve the community means to increase your own cost of staying.

Imagine someone wants to avoid displacement due to their taxes increasing beyond their ability to pay. I don’t know why they would want to stay in their economically “inefficient” house, but perhaps it’s because home is where the heart is and they have sentimental attachment to their home.

If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land. Box stores in America famously pay low property taxes because building a box store actually decreases property values - they’re expensive to demolish and limited in utility, while being an eye sore that makes the neighborhood higher traffic and less undesirable. Mississippi as a state is cheap because the voters used the government to destroy public services - it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.

Why is it assumed true that individuals do not contribute to the increasing appeal of their neighborhood?

What if I voted for pro-theme park politicians? Or what if I volunteered my time to clean up the community parks and shared space? What if I helped improve the reputation of my child’s school by volunteering and donating to the music department?

My taxes fund the maintenance of public infrastructure and services, and my actions support the civic good. If I vote to be cheap or generous with taxes, or choose to be lazy or ambitious in community support, that all contributes to the desirability of the land around me.

> the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home

I would argue that this is unpopular not only amongst retirees but everyone. And it would have tons of negative side effects.

Why would I fix up my house to look nice, if I’ll be displaced? Why would I invest in my child’s local school system, if we could be displaced? Why would I do any community outreach or support, or get involved in local politics? How can banks underwrite loans if the affordability can fluctuate wildly? Look at the life of people who live in mobile homes and trailer parks - they essentially rent the land, and it’s oppressive because they can’t afford to move (actually moving or repurposing land is hard) but their cost to stay is unpredictable.

The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity of the people living there and renters hoping to finally do the displacing for their own affordability.

From what I’ve heard, the issue is more that it’s harder to efficiently share the hardware across diffusion requests, so it’s more expensive to serve.

It sounds like there might be opportunities for local models (not open weight, but actually locally run) to use diffusion for faster responses on weaker hardware that doesn’t need to be shared.

But yea, it’s still a red-ish flag that big labs haven’t invested much in it. I could see Google/Apple getting value of this sort of local model, but maybe there’s enough research behind traditional models that it’s not worth the distraction at this point in time.

As someone who isn't in California, it's understandable that you might think this. It is, fortunately, wrong.

The biggest driver of costs of electricity in CA are (1) paying for damages caused by grid-initiated wildfires, and (2) paying to upgrade the grid to prevent future cases of (1).

This information comes directly from the government who approves rate increases for regulated utilities, and who has to publish their spending. PG&E, the primary power company, is also a public company and their financials are therefore public.

Rooftop solar specifically (and not general grid-scale renewables) do shift the cost balance of fixed-cost infra and consumption based usage, but the wildfire issues dwarf this.

> If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.

So I live in California where everything is famously expensive (but I hear the same of London). $225 for a concert with a famous artist on a big tour is pretty standard. Oh, and since you clearly don't go to concerts, it's pretty standard for standing tickets to be more than seated, because they're usually closer to the stage and people want to stand around and dance.

I find it useful, so here are some concrete examples from last few days.

As a baseline which many skeptics will have a hard time accepting for their own usage - I think there is a correlation between utility and trust (even which is not truly earned). If you don't let it capture memories and learn about you, and you don't connect it to external tools like email, it's less useful. But I think of it usually like a ChatGPT w/ extra tools and knowledge.

I just moved, and last night I asked my agent how to test how safe the soil in my (urban) garden was, and it found some warnings from my city government, and suggested a particular test service that is available in my area. Since it knows exactly where I live, it was able to find recent warnings of contamination in my neighborhood, and suggest specific chemicals to test for.

Additionally, I give it (read only) access to my email, and it'll ~2x a day notify me of some important email. I'm working with a contractor, and getting emails from them bumped, or getting emails about AWS usage alerts pulled out of inbox and notify me directly is super helpful for filtering the noise of my crazy email volume of 99% spam.

Also, as others have said, it's easy to take a picture of a flier, and say "add to my calendar".

What do you mean? There’s very few images of a car driving, but the roads seem to be correct. Some of the images are definitely generic marketing copy and not Singapore specific, but it seems fairly obvious which ones.

Unless you mean the steering wheel is on the wrong side, but that seems like it wouldn’t matter for an autonomous vehicle.

The global construction industry learned a lot in the last 100 years.

> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?

Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.

Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.

Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.

People actively spend lots of money to make the outside of their houses look aesthetically pleasing.

They also do this with cars, clothes, wives, phones, and their own faces.

You missed the additional feature launch where they listen to your entire life and give you transcriptions and summaries.

“Siri Recap”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/148354

> It is more effortful, more complex, and requires greater care to actually get Wifi and Bluetooth to the OFF state than ON, or ON+CONNECTED. Respectfully, that is backwards, it should be the easiest thing to turn something off.

Why?

I get you have some principled opinions or deep belief about tracking or betrayal from corporations or something. That’s nice.

But why should it be easier to do the things that people don’t want to do often instead of the things that people do want to do often?

Good UI makes repeated actions easier than rare actions. That is good UI because it makes the common action easier, conspiracy theory about tracking and fingerprinting be damned.

Yes...?

Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?

> we know better for you so we’ll adjust the behavior accordingly

9/10 times I've used this setting, what I've actually wanted was to temporarily change the behavior. This just saves me from the need to remember to undo it (which I won't remember in a timely manner).

This isn't "we know better than you" paternalistic control - the default/easy behavior should cater to the actions and situation we do regularly. I'm sure they do, in fact, know that for most of their customers, when they disable wifi it's because that user wants to temporarily disconnect from the current wifi, but will want to use wifi shortly after, but won't necessarily remember to go into settings and re-enable.

The cooler thing is that if a substantial amount of the 216M TV owners tried to arbitrate across the country/world, they'd cave so fast. Arbitration is cheaper than an individual law suit, but much much more expensive than a class-action.

Because violating the law was the prerequisite to starting their business, without it they're worth $0 and have no models. They've already survived Training on customer input may help the models but it isn't "bet the farm" helpful. Now, they have a thriving business, so they shouldn't risk their business for incremental data that they can buy.

At this point, the reputation of the business matters too. Fable explicitly didn't support zero-retention usage, and it saw significantly lower adoption vs other flagship models, and their past releases. Being caught abusing enterprise contracts is really hard to dig out of.

That's the thing though. There are very few "actual workflows" in many people's lives (especially if you exclude their job), and many many "one off (few off) workflow". That's the magic.

So many tasks I need to do once, or just a few times ever, but they build up. While I'm not sure I'd use it for immigration forms specifically, that's the kind of task that's tedious and done rarely, so a dedicated tool doesn't help because who would be familiar with that tool and have it handy?

I’ve been super pro-Luna lately. I really hope that Gemini-Flash-Lite is positioned to compete with it. We all know that Anthropic has abandoned Haiku and it would never be that cheap.

Probably shouldn’t say this here but I’ve been planning to up my $20/mo exploratory ChatGPT subscription to the $100/mo tier as soon as I hit my cap. Between the progress and quality of Luna and their continuous resets, it’s been a few months now that I’ve lived off the $20 tier, frankly waiting for the need to upgrade, credit card in hand.

I’m always trying new models, like many of us here, but the price is just so good for a well balanced, American, hosted model.