>Doctors warn that such life-threatening cases are becoming more common.
I go on r/hinge where moderators require people to post how many likes/matches they are receiving per week for a profile review and it looks bad out there for young men. Some of these lads don't even seem bad looking but claim to only get a dribble of attention. Self-esteem must be at quite a low point for a lot of men. This obviously won't help though.
People keep saying this like it makes it better... If I knew my partner was a serial philanderer it wouldn't make me feel great, even if said partner was worth billions.
A lot of marriages are purely for superficial image. Many people also fall out of love but stay together legally for various reasons.
Many ultra high net worth people are married purely for financial reasons. The wife gets whatever she wants but now they don't need to worry about losing control of their company, etc.
This is to say nothing of the biological differences either. Menopause hits some women extremely hard and libido is completely gone. Rather than divorce or mutually suffer, they open up the marriage.
No new frontier (Astra / Fable) releases in a while. Actually none since the “pacing the frontier” post. Safety maxxers might cause an AI winter if this is what’s holding them back.
Leaks, for what they're worth, indicate that the next GPT model is soon (tomorrow rumored), and that Fable 5.5 is already ready-to-go. That said Fable is likely being held to drown out said GPT release, since Anthropic is already ahead w/ Opus 5.5.
even if frontier AI development stops where it is today, i would have a hard time calling this an AI winter. I cant imagine AI wont be a major part of my dayjob for the forseeable future
I think you are over-indexing on the word alien. What matters here is how scalable the technique is and the fact that it is autonomous. This can be a breakthrough for continual learning if it can be trained to work at scale.
Anthropic can remove all access to their LLMs and start replicating entire software companies. Anyone relying on open weight models is at risk of a security breach from even slightly better models. It is ironic when people think Anthropic is the one without moat while they give all their data away.
There's a stock market truism that anyone that has real alpha doesn't sell it or give it away. I feel like there's an analogue here, that if it was just that easy for them to pack up their toys and go conquer the world, I can't imagine they would have been in the business of selling tokens at this point
IMO if llms keep improving, there's just not going to be a business in most of software anymore. It wouldn't matter if Anthropic tried to replicate all the saas companies because the category is soon to be dead. Why would you pay for someone else's software when you can prompt your own to your tastes? Every bit of software would just have one user
The end goal for Anthropic is AGI not beating Adobe. Having your models used at scale and receiving feedback and training data is valuable towards that goal.
For big ones it’s often network effects and/or friction. Those can be pretty good moats even with LLMs. These models are also nowhere near the point where they can actually reverse engineer complex products.
Network effects have subsequently been; shown to be logarithmic. You’re not getting 100x the benefit from 10x the users. You’re lucky to be getting 12x the benefit and you also have logarithmic increases in costs because there’s no such thing as economies of scale in software. You pay for every order of magnitude in hardware or software development costs.
If you want to save money, you either buy from a domestic brand or a used Toyota Yaris and squeeze out as many miles from it as you can while having the option to use a local mechanic. Electric cars still make up a small minority of the market.
In the US sure, thanks to laws preventing Chinese EVs. But look around at other countries.
In Australia, EVs are now 25% of the new car market, that's far from a small minority.
And sure a used Toyota Yaris might be cheaper for now but it won't be for long. A new Yaris starts from around $30k, you can buy multiple new EVs for cheaper than that. Which has caused downward prices on used EVs, you can buy a 2nd hand Nissan leaf for $6500.
And due to our abundance of rooftop solar much of Australia have access to domestic electricity plans that have hours of free usage a day, meaning if you can charge at home you can charge for free which really pushes the value proposition further
As you look at those other countries (Australia) flooded with subsidised to below cost-to-make EVs, note how they are killing any chance of a sustainable local EV industry. It is a total governmental derreliction of duty to see how cheap Chinese imports played out with solar panels (and many other industries before that), and still welcome cheap EVs instead of attempting to kick start (or protect) a local option.
There is no local car industry to protect in Australia, and Chinese cars here are more expensive than they are in China. That's why Chinese automakers are flocking overseas, the margins are much better, no subsidies needed.
Correct, the local car industry couldn't compete with cheap imports and was allowed to die a long time ago. Fast forward to today, and there is 0 potential of an ev car industry starting in these conditions.
>the margins are much better, no subsidies needed
Ask your chat bot of choice. BYD received significant direct government subsidies, with direct grants still touching ~26% of their income (ignoring the many years the government kept the unprofitable BYD alive). Beyond direct cash grants, they also got cheap land grants, public procurement policies, subsidized raw materials (such as battery metals), and low-cost financing from state-owned banks.
They've banned EV imports in everything but name - yet why do we not see their EV industry taking off? Are US-made EV exports taking off? And do we see any of these low cost EVs being made domestically?
Last time I checked, they were doubling down on fossil fuel subsidies, and encouraging ICE cars. So I would argue this entire "dumping" argument was a Trump-induced fallacy to justify fossil fuel handouts.
Or for another example - has that local iPhone or Mac Pro production taken off, since China are supposedly "dumping" iPhones at below cost?
Shame on people falling for this protectionist stuff, again and again. I'm not saying that China isn't helping their renewal industries - but it's like US agricultural subsidies - every country does it, but people can't seem to accept that some countries do have a comparative advantage in certain industries.
The average American could save a couple thousand dollars per year in fuel costs by driving an electric car. Over 12 years that could pay for a cheap electric car. If you drive a lot more than average, you would save even more money.
Americans are paying on average $50K for a new ICE car, gas prices are at an all time high, insurance premiums at an all time high, car service costs at an all time high, interest rates at an all time high, and they still think they're making a good deal. This is what I call financial illiteracy.
That's not only the new car that matters. The average car on the road in America is 12 years old, which means there's a lot of people who are not buying those brand new cars for $50,000. They're buying something older, more economical, and they're the ones who are going to start driving the demand for EVs. Either they will start paying a premium for the used EVs that do come available to them because it's worth it or they're going to start buying the cheap EVs if there are any on the market.
While, trucks are popular. They're not that popular. The average American is not driving one. The average American is driving a smaller SUV which, while not as fuel efficient as the Yaris, is still fairly fuel efficient and is only sightly, efficient than a similar sized sedan
That offer was substantially different, for example it included 5 years of COBRA including 1 year of paid COBRA, and it was intended for those near retirement. This current offer is only slightly better terms than an involuntary layoff, and includes only standard 18 months of COBRA, only 6 months paid.
What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA? It seems like it would cost the company nothing (besides maybe needing to help you submit a change of address or something periodically) when you’re paying the full premium, and it makes your group slightly bigger anyway (though I assume not enough that it matters).
> What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA?
Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.
First of all, it is not cheaper. It may be cheaper for young people because ACA marketplace rates are age dependent while COBRA rates are not. It is not cheaper if you are over a certain age, it is significantly more expensive.
Secondly, many ACA marketplace plans have narrower networks. (Which doctors are in-network doesn't only dependent on the insurance company, it also depends on the network, and insurance companies have multiple networks.) In WA, check out Regence's network for ACA plans--most hospitals are excluded, while their regular plans include them.
Unlike COBRA which almost always includes out-of-state doctors and hospitals, ACA networks don't. If you get a rare disease for which the expert doctor is in another state over you're out of luck.
And lastly, ACA rates just went up 20% in many states. If you are a couple in your 60's, you will pay nearly $45,000 for health insurance and then pay $7,000 each in deductible before insurance kicks in. At these rates, most healthy people will decide to forgo insurance. Which will reduce insurance company profits, who will then raise rates even more. This is a death spiral, and ACA will collapse (which is a desirable outcome as far as the current admin is concerned).
Having been briefly on an ACA plan, it's not ideal because those plans tend to be worse by any metric. Acceptance rate (size of network), copays, covered services, deductibles, etc.
ACA is sometimes cheaper though! Depending on your age, and your income, and whatever politicians in your state are doing to throw sticks in the spokes (not that the ACA really needs any help to collapse, given what an intentionally-compromised, politicized mess it's been from the beginning).
I just wish that we could do a full redo of health-insurance portability with these simple changes: COBRA with zero time limits, and you can choose to apply whatever number of dollars the government(s) would use to subsidize an ACA plan for you, towards COBRA premiums instead. Next, allow employers to offer you pretax premium subsidies to use to pay for COBRA insurance from your former job so that if you take a new job you don't have to change insurance unless you want to.
I'm assuming health insurers would deeply hate all of that, since the upshot from all that is they'd have to compete with each other in the consumer market! They do compete today of course -- to get contracts from employers, but employers have far different interests than humans do.
Large employers are usually self-insured. The insurance company just manages the plan, but the employer actually pays the medical claims out of pocket.
Offering indefinite COBRA means absorbing massive medical risk for people who no longer work for you and aren't providing value. Healthy ex-employees leave COBRA quickly for cheaper coverage, while those with heavy medical expenses stay as long as possible—so the company gets stuck paying for high-cost claims while only collecting basic premiums.
While some companies let retirees buy into a group plan, that's an earned perk to reward long tenure. Indefinite COBRA would give that same lifetime benefit to anyone, even if they worked there for only six months.
some corporations do provide "unlimited cobra" to retirees (not cobra, but effectively the same thing, allowing retirees to remain part of the group plan), as its considered a form of deferred compensation the employee is vested into.
Makes me nostalgic for when I read Coupland's Microserfs in the bookstore the month it came out and thought, this... finally, people I could feel less awkward working and being myself around, weirdness and all.
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
I go on r/hinge where moderators require people to post how many likes/matches they are receiving per week for a profile review and it looks bad out there for young men. Some of these lads don't even seem bad looking but claim to only get a dribble of attention. Self-esteem must be at quite a low point for a lot of men. This obviously won't help though.
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