Man, I'm not asking for a lot, just technology that's almost 200 years old, is super efficient at moving people and things even over long distances, and that can also be very lucrative. You don't need to invent shit, just lay the track down and run some goddamn trains like we used to.

Don't forget, Tesla approved a pay package for Elon Musk that is worth ALL THE PROFITS they've ever made.

I don't know why you think this. What is the path to profitability? OpenAI is chucking money out the window SO FAST right now. They lose money on their TWO-HUNDRED dollar a MONTH subscription. They lost 5 billion on 3.7 billion in revenue. Where is the path to profitability, ESPECIALLY if energy prices increase?

Either they have to cut costs or raise prices, but if they can't make money on their $200/month tier, every lifting of prices is a drop in the bucket, because there are a lot of people using it for free.

I suspect that they WILL come through this (or be acquired) but there are lots of AI startups right now and zero companies are a lock. As of right now, you cannot rely on any of these companies to be there. You cannot rely on any code that's been written for you if you haven't audited it yourself (and there is plenty of evidence that unaudited code is making it into production all over the place).

This is not a prediction that the industry is going to collapse, it's that you still have to be aware of the risks. Google and Facebook weren't funded by VC in any way close to the same degree as OpenAI is right now, and just because a bunch of companies survived and prospered doesn't undo the fact that HUGE numbers of companies failed. I don't know the future and neither do you, so be careful; it is almost certain that the next several years will see a lot of upheaval.

A reminder that LLM-hawking companies are deeply, comically unprofitable right now. They're giant pits where money goes to be redistributed to NVidia and power companies, as well as huge signing bonuses for individual programmers.

Do not base your workflow or any part of your organization on anything that assumes that LLMs will be there, even on a free tier. If you can't build or maintain it yourself, it's a liability. At these rates, SOMEONE will have to pull back at some point, there's just no choice.

It's not anything to do with political correctness, though I agree with everything else.

Movies throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s had the messages "be nice to people, don't be racist and sexist" all the time.

The problem is that they're recycling our childhoods back to us and they're doing a worse job of it. A New Hope didn't actually need an update to the special effects, and it definitely doesn't need any more modifications.

Honestly, the problem might be the LACK of real political message. Remember Indiana Jones? Nazis bad, kill nazis? We need more movies like that. Stop dressing up the fascists as aliens and just kill the fascists.

Oh, it's really simple: the majority of the stock market is owned by rich people. Moreover, the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 are worth about 40% of the index? So when Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and a few others go up, the whole index goes up. Who's Nvidia selling GPUs to? All the other companies at the top of the index. The AI hype is pumping billions into the top end of the market.

It's worth remembering that the stock market is not the economy, and certainly the S&P 500 is not the economy, and the top 10 companies of the S&P 500 are not the economy. So inflation and joblessness are rising because they're the ACTUAL economy and nobody has any fucking money.

The fundamentals aren't really in line with any of this. The price-to-earnings ratio of these companies is insanely high, even accounting for how much money they're making. And people all over the world see Nvidia is doing well, so they dump money into the stock. And then people see the stock is going up, so they dump more money into the stock! And that's actually gone very well, but who knows how long it'll last.

tl;dr the stock market is a weird collective fever dream that doesn't necessarily (and never has) reflect reality.

I don't think that's it, honestly. 75% of truck owners never tow anything.

The cybertruck is bad at literally everything. It failed because it's (probably unintentionally) designed to fail. They made it out of the wrong parts, with the wrong specs, with the wrong intent. It's trash.

This is neither for the nation NOR the individual. Or rather, not good for individuals in general, just the few at the top of AI companies.

I'm all for a more communitarian society, but these AI companies give back NOTHING to the community. They're not co-owned, they're not nationalized. They manage to make a mockery of all possible institutions simultaneously.

It's great. It's everything Firefox is supposed to be. It's free, they don't accept donations because they don't need funding. It comes with UBlock Origin, it works with Firefox extensions, it's fast, it's light. It'll even sync with your old Firefox stuff if that's what you want.

I heard about it yesterday, installed it, and now I'm all in, man. It's even better than Safari on my Mac. (The caveat is obviously that maybe after a day of use I don't know how broken it is, but I've got some hope that it will continue to be good!)

I installed LibreWolf yesterday and it's *amazing*. I hadn't even heard of it until yesterday and it's faster and cleaner than both Safari (on MacOS) and Firefox. Firefox plugins still work (which is great because I love TreeStyle Tabs and the YouTube plugins), and it comes with UBlock Origin by default. Seriously, I think it'll fit your bill.

It IS worth noting that he did not once insult the programmer, he kept his opinion strictly to the code and its lack of quality. That's a big (and meaningful) step! And honestly, it looks like it worked.

It WAS garbage code. Even good programmers/people write bad code sometimes, and I'd rather someone tell me that the code is bad than not so I can fix it.

If they can't figure out a way to pay people for their work, why should they be allowed to have it? They're just impoverishing people that actually spent time and energy and their own money to make things, and they're saying they should get it 'because'.

Is your problem with people doing it on an individual basis that the crime is too small, or?

They didn't even pay for the value of a single book before slurping it up. They scrape videos and obviously never watch any ads or would even need any of the products if they did. They're undermining everything to sell your own creativeness back to you. It's gross.

This isn't the same as the early days of the internet where people downloading musing were shown to, on balance, buy MORE music than average. There's no argument that it's actually good advertising or disseminating work to the public so it can be discovered. They're just taking it, and they reap all the profits. (Or, more likely, they raise billions in venture capital, never make a profit, and stay alive because billionaires have nothing else to spend their money on while the rest of us eat dirt.)

Net News Wire on the Mac, Fiery Feeds on iOS.

I also use Tapestry on iOS. It can pull in RSS feeds, but critically, it can also be configured to pull in things that refuse to have RSS feeds, like GoComics. It can also do things like Tumblr or Bluesky social feeds if you want to read the posts from one person but don't actually want to participate (good for things like news/announcement accounts).

Also, the reporting type news still needs someone to go out and get the news. Where do we think the news comes from? Sports reports, sure. 90% of it can just be pooped out by some LLM (the really good stuff will always belong to humans with insight into the sports; I don't even want to hear non-cyclists report on the Tour de France, let alone a device that's never actually played any sports at all). Some kinds of weather and financial reporting, maybe. Also some political reporting as well. But reporting involves people going places and asking questions.

And particularly as LLMs lower the difficulty of FAKING news, I think we'll want MORE people that were verifiably AT places. I've been floating the idea for years that Fox, NBC and CNN (or whomever) should be sending reporters to major events together to confirm that they actually happened. They can still report on them with whatever bias suits them, but together they can all confirm that all the things that were said on tape were actually heard by several different humans. It would be a selling point for all of them.

Yes, the Sears catalogue type of model will almost certainly disappear. And some types of conventional model will disappear.

But have you ever heard of the OKCupid study that said that people that have more polarizing looks tended to get more messages than people that everyone agrees are hot? It's not that I don't think that AI can replicate whoever is considered attractive at the time, it's that I think AI is a *trailing indicator* of attractiveness.

So AI has a good sense of what's attractive right now, but new people will crop up now and then and dazzle us with novelty--something different from everything we've been inundated with, and AI will move to that spot, but our quest for novelty won't be easily satisfied. I think just the existence of internet porn is evidence of that. Surely by this time, the permutations are mostly covered, but there's still a market for a new face doing all the things you saw the last person do.