IDK, but that sounds like something that would be better implemented with an open-source library to which providers supply support patches. Why do I need a company to act as a proxy and not just run a relatively simple shim layer on my machine?
I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?
A library with a bunch of different providers doesn’t solve the payment/billing problem (which is one of the main openrouter benefits). IMO being able to buy credits and not have them locked to one provider is worth the 5% to me.
AI likely won't replace all jobs though. Hey, the progress in robots is great, but we're decades away from a robot HVAC tech who can crawl on an unfamiliar roof and maintain a patched-together system from 20 years ago. So like, there's that.
Then the other half of the puzzle is just techofetishists having a broken world model. If you replace even 25% of the jobs you will find AI companies taxed into the dirt to pay for UBI or social services. The government will step in and manufacture jobs. The techbros can clutch their Ayn Rand books until their fingers bleed but their fantasy land of the unfettered ubermensch is simply delusional.
I spent my 30s playing "this old house" when I could have made significant amounts of money just working more consulting hours. Yeah, I enjoy some home improvement and maintenance tasks, but I also enjoy financial security and pain-free joints. The tools and things required to maintain a home also take space you could use for hobbies or simply downsize. Home maintenance makes sense for folks with lower value skills and less means to side hustle though.
The markets with rent control have astronomical increases in rent when compared to markets without rent control. Also, you lose supply when there is a unit that it doesn't make sense to renovate because the future rent won't be high enough to cover it. So it remains unrented instead.
I mean, I would argue that's why rent control exists in the first place: Because there is a market with astronomical increases in rent (not the other way around, like you are suggesting)
I made plenty of money (and still do) holding US treasuries and other safe investments. You don't need to gamble on stocks to have income from cash which offsets rent.
For most of my life, fixed income was outperformed by inflation. Indexed funds returned double fixed income over that entire period. Either you are in your 20s or you aren't nearly as good at investing as you think.
I'm fine with keeping most of my post-tax cash pile in cash equivalents. I don't think you understand investing if your only measuring stick is returns. You do sound like a finance bro though given you took time out of your day to trash talk someone for something they didn't even claim.
If your investment return is less than the rate of inflation, you are literally getting poorer. Sort of defeats the purpose of an investment. It isn't much better than literally keeping it in your mattress. Just because you don't understand that, doesn't make it not true. And software I wrote probably has managed or touched your money at some point.
Ok, and? You don't manage money. You don't seem to understand risk tolerance and opportunity cost. You're also comparing near-inflation returns with cash at zero pct return.
I can see why you only write software and don't actually get to touch other folks' money. Good luck buddy.
Except in my experience the lack of upkeep doesn't actually affect the value all that much. In many places the vast majority of the price is the land and people seem less interested in valuing based on the condition of the structure. It may affect time to sell, but that seems about it. Sure some credits might be offered during escrow for some repairs, but again often the money is insufficient or the seller simply says no.
That depends on the market and how much deferred maintenance we're talking about.
In some places buyers will bulldoze perfectly good homes just to build a different one, just because the land is so valuable.
In other places, there are abandoned homes that municipalities can't even give away because the cost to bulldoze is more than the land is worth.
If the place you're in looks more like the former, maintenance doesn't matter as much. If it looks more like the latter, maintenance is going to be more important to your sale price.
At least where I'm from, the cost of a property with a burned-out unusable house on it is always a shit-ton more than land value, since running utilities to a house site, dealing with the paperwork, etc. is way more expensive and precarious than the cost to bulldoze. If there was a house there you can just raze to foundation and rebuild it without having to trigger a clusterfuck with the utility company or septic re-evaluation.
Also if the house is at least mortgagable by someone then buyers will still bid the price up to infinity on debt even if the house is only usable for bulldozing. The land value itself is also way lower for places without a house since the land value is loanable in one case and not the other.
This. Most value is location location location. It does not cost that much relative to price to reno when you want to sell. Space is the premium, not trendy open concepts.
Why don't we say this about other expenditures? Am I throwing my money away when I buy dinner and not a cow? Did I throw my money away by buying a carrot and not farmland? I don't think the statement is true or false, it's just meaningless.
You somehow missed the second part of that sentence: "No, the statement is completely true: 100% of your rent money goes to someone else, and you also don't get any asset to sell later on."
The oft-repeated statement that "renting is throwing your money" is an implicit contrast to owning a home, where the mortgage payment "builds equity" in your asset that can be sold later.
"Throwing money away" means you don't get to own something that can be sold for money later on. That's why we "throw money away" on gasoline, but not "throw money away" in a savings account.
The second part of my argument is that throwing money away isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the alternative (such as paying to own something) can end up being more expensive and being a worse deal financially.
No, I read that part of the sentence. I don't know why you'd assume I didn't. Should I claim you didn't even read my entire response?
I've never heard someone claim I am throwing away money when I buy something consumable except rent. It's a stupid statement that doesn't convey any useful information.
OMG...the phrase probably comes from some real estate agent. Truth is, 50 years ago investing in US real estate was such a good investment that if you could own you did. Today, so much "value" has been squeezed out of the housing market that owning is very very difficult. Most people under 40 who own, are now all in on an investment in both the housing and interest rate markets that could either crush them or be their best lifetime investment. Its very hard to argue at this point that making such bets is a good idea for most people. The worst part is that this was all unnecessarily engineered by people who believed Disney movies accurately portrayed public policy.
That’s not what that expression means though. Wikitionary has it as “To spend money foolishly or indiscriminately; to waste money without regard of the consequences.” Which sounds about right.
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding.
Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
> despite his lack of engineering or technical skills
At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford.
I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
> and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less
I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school.
Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
Yes that's why I said it matters less. Musk represents it as a BSc because it sounds more impressive even if it doesn't matter in his case which one it is. It's still something he misrepresents for clout though.
Presumably (hopefully) you don't stop learning when you leave school, though. A physics degree has always been viewed as a good basis for advanced engineering.
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit.
Chronic over-promise, underdelivery.
Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country?
But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online.
He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
People fuck up. I fucked up three things yesterday. Fortunately I am not as known as Musk, so no one tears into me at Hacker News and my fuckups remain hidden.
Nevertheless...
"underdelivery."
Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
Unelected cronies arbitrarily slash and burn programs that are supposed to require congressional approval (aka representatives of the people) to enact and remove, likely resulting in millions of preventable deaths:
"Tee hee he just made a silly oopsie poopsie just like me when I take down prod for a few minutes"
Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense.
I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded.
The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
Not getting invited to the EV summit would have pissed me off if I were in his place. The Trump thing; it sounds like the government was going to go after him for various violations, and hitching his wagon to Trump was his way of getting out of that jam.
I don't really care about what motivated him to behave this way if I'm being honest. He has poor impulse control and terrible social/political values. The damage and chaos he brought to the federal government is nearly impossible to overstate. Two of my family members lost their jobs for nothing because of their wild cutting, and they didn't even work for the federal government. A good friend lost a million dollar AI research grant because they had the word "accessibility" in their initial proposal (accommodating screen readers on computers, how woke and awful!) That's how far reaching his farcical "efficiency" endeavor was.
He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
> Before he bought Twitter, you could be banned from essentially all the big social networks for bullshit such as "misgendering"
If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass.
You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.
I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?
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