It's always very surprising to me, that when companies insist their workers can be replaced with AI - it never seems to be senior management roles they replace. Why can't the CEO be replaced by a chat bot? After all, CEOs don't do much but churn out bland boilerplate corporate text, they never deviate from the mean or do anything particularly surprising, they just copy what every other silicon valley CEO is doing that month - the human role seems completely redundant when you could so easily ask a LLM to do the job.

The fun part of this, is this is written as if OpenAI's "400 million" numbers are in any way credible and believable. OpenAI are not very *open* about how they calculate that number, how they determine unique vs repeat uses, API calls verses an actual human directly using ChatGPT.

I hate to break it to them, but as someone who manages research assistants with PhDs, I can tell you research assistants with PhDs cost significantly less to hire than $20,000 a month.

Also, laughing at $4 billion in annual "revenue" rather than profits from OpenAI. They spent $9 billion to get that $4 billion in revenue. Absolutely setting fire to cash, which isn't surprising since they aren't going to get any customers who want to pay 4x the asking price for research assistants.

Is there a reason the utterances of scammers like Sam Altman deserve all this attention? The cycle is well established; OpenAI is bleeding money, their products are unprofitable and not meeting expectations, roll Sam out to make more bizarre, unfounded claims, media reports on it, rinse, repeat.

A professional is someone who works the damn hours they are *paid to work*. Someone who works for free outside those hours isn't a professional, they're a schmuck.

I feel this was probably a legitimate thing to worry about 10 years ago, but batteries and phones have improved across the board so much that it feels kind of pointless to care this much. I've always just...plugged my phones in whenever they were low, not worrying about if it's a fast charger, or if it's already at 90%, or anything else, and it's been fine! My current phone, a cheap Motorola that I've just plugged into fast charging and relied on the default settings to manage that, has been going strong for 2 years now and I haven't noticed any battery degradation worth worrying about, certainly nothing physical like swelling. The charging port is going to break or the screen crack before the battery causes me any problems. Life's too short to get paranoid about charging your phone above 85% and whether changing that to 80% is better or worse...

It's cool how in a few short years the internet has gone from "information wants to be free, man!" to reinventing copyright from scratch except now it kills the planet with a pointless blockchain at the same time.

Yep. I like functional programming, but it's a tool. But then OO is just a tool as well. It's not suitable for everything, and attempting to apply OO principles to problems that don't really need them is just a waste of everyone's time, just as being forced into a functional pattern when it's not necessary is useless.

I'm mostly familiar with functional programming in R, where it's an extremely useful part of the language, but you don't have to use it. But once you get used to it, loops end up looking like ugly, clunky constructions when you could just apply a function of a vector. Once you're in this mind-space, going back to language that actually require you to nest loops to get anything done feels annoying as hell.

So here's a of income inequality in the United States over the last few decades. The "progressive taxation" that you seem to think is killing the country, by definition, takes more money away from rich people than poor people. Yet rich people are getting richer, and poor people are getting poorer. The economic conditions you seem to be so worried about, the taxation regime you're complaining about, is one that's making the rich richer and the poor poorer, so clearly progressive taxation isn't doing shit.

That graph shows, simply, that the rich are earning more and contributing less. Seriously, how the fuck can you look at a graph like that and say, yes we need to vote for the bankrupt orange fascist rapist and tax the rich less! That will solve all our problems! It beggars belief. Good luck.

Yes, I have noticed this. I've got an iPhone 5. And I've installed the Swype keyboard, which is pretty fantastic, but yep, it does feel a bit clunky. It takes a noticable amount of time for the keyboard to display on screen, and the visuals as display elements move around and adjust is definately a weird thing to see on iOS. I've noticed, for example, when turning the phone sideways, weird stretched graphics for a fraction of a second. And in other apps I've noticed some curious typographical anomalies - fonts in the app sitting just a little too close to the fonts in the status bar.

However, the extra features in iOS 8 do make up for this weirdness. It's stil usable, it just seems *slightly* imperfect, but I think that's to be expected for such a major change in the OS, particularly when it comes to the keyboard feature. I'm just going to have to assume that iOS 8.1 will iron out some of these kinks.

Heh, it's not even "customers" they're denying a download to - if you follow the nomenclature of Kickstarter, then it's *investors*! Evidence, if you needed it, that you're not really an investor when you get involved in Kickstarter, you're just paying a premium to pre-order something, and praying you won't get screwed over.

It is a bit disingenuous to state that "web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable". I, for one, am tunneling my web traffic via SSH to a server overseas, so they won't be monitoring my URLs ;)

I agree that there are probably higher priorities, but I think it's fair to say that this is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century.

Think of what it might enable for example - want to cut greenhouse gas emissions? How about installing the infrastructure that will make it much much easier for a significant proportion of the population to "telecommute" and work from home. And once people no-longer have to live near their workplaces, and with high-speed internet access being ubiquitous, they might move to regional centers, improving rural economies and taking pressure off the resources in our cities.

Okay, that might be a bit of wishful thinking, but it's certainly the direction we need to be heading in.

As for what you have...luxury. I live in a suburb of Hobart - 15 minutes drive from the CBD. I have no cable in the area, no ADSL since I'm too far from the exchange - my bloody dial-up modem would only connect at 28.8k because of the shitty phoneline - the ONLY solution for "broadband" (in the loosest possible sense of the word) is wireless 3G, which I pay Virgin $50 a month for 5GB, which sometimes gets whopping download speeds of 400kbps, but is usually closer to 120kbps. I could have paid much more to go with Telstra's NextG, but I generally don't like being raped by them.

Some places in Australia do have usable broadband. A lot of places still don't. And I measure "usable broadband" by the criteria of being able to watch a video on YouTube without having to press pause first and let the whole thing buffer...