For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.
And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.
If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.
Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
There should not be an HTTP header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. That puts the onus on the server to respect the header, and HTTP doesn't require any action on unrecognized headers. Also, it reveals to the server that the client's user is likely vulnerable to manipulation — exactly the opposite of what you want!
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
There could be lock levels to this. By default everything is unlocked (level = 0), but if a content provider / host receives a signal/header with lock-level > 0 they should be required to honor it. Something like this would require government which means it will probably never happen. Much more power asymmetry to just track you.
If you want to make a child-safe website that is OK, it can go be in it's walled garden g-rated brand-safe reality. But that is retarded. The rest of the internet still exists, and will not stop existing. Porn/defense distributed/much more insidious things will still exist.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
Sure, the categories can be expanded. For example, movie ratings aren't just "children" and "adults." But explaining the simple case seemed like enough for one comment.
API’s and coding standards help a bit. In one case, the AI was testing HTML-generating code with string assertions, so I had it write a test helper that makes a DOM-based testing API available and a skill telling it to write tests that way.
But you need to watch it and intervene when it starts writing code using bad patterns, because it will imitate nearby code.
From the article: “And so, this past summer, the N.B.A. announced a full revamp of the system, with a new approach that penalizes the worst teams in the league. We will see how long this remediation lasts.”
Assuming they pay their credit card bill themselves, it's effectively a volume discount for big spenders (though that "volume" goes to multiple vendors). The argument that the money "comes from" other customers is sort of like claiming that when you "save money" by buying things on sale, the money comes from other customers who paid full price. Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money.
Similarly, the "whales" in a casino get lots of "free" benefits, but only because they're losing a lot of money gambling. They paid for them.
Contrast with frequent-flier miles where businesses pay for plane tickets but the points go to individuals. That's pretty clearly siphoning off business expenses.
That is the cash purchaser paying the retailer more than they need to. There's no conservation law stating that store revenue is a constant and missed revenue from one customer must be made up for by another, nor that every additional operating cost must be directly pushed onto customers.
Similarly, we do not say that October shoppers transfer wealth to Black Friday shoppers, even though the only tangible difference from your scenario is an irrelevant temporal one.
> Actually you aren't "saving money" at all; you're spending money.
You are spending money, but you are spending far less money than the poor spend when paying for exactly the same products or services.
If I want to buy a few server CPUs or a few server computers or a few "datacenter" GPUs, I have to pay at least 2 or 3 times more than billionaires pay for them.
The same if I want to buy any other kinds of components that can be used to build things, e.g. power MOSFET transistors.
There is no "economy of scale" here, because those products are already fabricated in the high volumes that reduce their production costs.
For shipping, the costs are typically the same, regardless if the recipient is a big company or a small company or an individual, so they do not justify the price differences.
Even when the handling and shipping costs were bigger for small quantities, a small business or an individual could just pay the difference in handling and shipping prices, but that does not happen in reality, when the discounts given to the rich are many times higher than the shipping costs.
This policy of huge discounts is one of the main causes why all the markets end up in being dominated by monopolies or quasi-monopolies, because it is impossible for new entrants to compete with the incumbents, who pay much less than them for everything. Thus the biggest companies end up selling mostly between themselves, excluding any others.
Discounts on volume deals are yet another thing since a higher volume helps the business exceed the break-even threshold faster. Also, volume deals have a favorable management effort to income ratio compared to single transactions.
Huge numbers reduce manufacturing costs, but only because they justify investments that are uneconomical at lower volumes. The business would still go bankrupt if they don't read breakeven.
Economies of scale are a real thing and not just because of monopolies wanting to deny new incumbents.
The model is inverted here, though. The whales essentially get the big discounts at the expense of those who go into debt for one reason or another. That's why there's an argument of wealth transfer up. The "biggest spenders" will end up paying little or no interest
That’s because being 99.9999% good isn’t better than 98% + human does the rest + human is liable for screw ups - highly important in edge case scenario’s. It’s more economical. Technology can only generalise+verify so much.
E.g automobile production - humans do the QA / touches.
Didn't you follow the robotics advances in the Ukrainian - Russian battlefield? There is now a death zone of 50km, only controlled by drones and automatic weapons.
The drones are obviously very important but they only work in the context of everything else on and around the battlefield, especially people. You aren't holding the line with drones alone, and on the whole they are not autonomous.
They are holding the lines with drones alone nowadays. That's why it's called the deathzone, no humans survive. Some drones have FPV operators, some weapons use AI only already.
I think you're painting a slightly misleading picture. The drone AI, computer vision and autonomous fire-control systems existed (and were used in combat) before LLMs/AI was a hot topic.
There are applications of modern LLMs and recent AI advances on the front-lines, but they are not the majority contributor to enforcing the death zone. Without modern LLMs, I would bet that the frontlines would look very similar to how they are today.
I don't think that's accurate. What I've seen described is actually a surprisingly porous line: The Russians are often behind the Ukrainians and vice-versa, but it doesn't result in a break due to the transparency of the battlefield and the risk of getting killed if spotted, as well as the improvements in getting supplies to units behind 'enemy lines'. Drones shape this a lot but there's still a lot of people on the battlefield.
50km is just the "very likely to get hit" part of the gray zone
ISR drones and other tools can go as far as 200km, albeit with worsening visibility.
in most cases everything meaningful in that 200k is seen, and the only limitation is range of the drones, artillery, missiles, and potential countermeasures.
> There is now a death zone of 50km, only controlled by drones and automatic weapons.
If there would be such 50km death zone, front line would not move a nanometer in a year, would it. You yourself contradict above in your next post. No need for being too dramatic, facts are enough here.
In reality, frontline is moving constantly albeit by small chunks, russians are advancing a bit, getting beating elsewhere and so on. Automated drones are helping, but bulk of destruction is still handled by human drone operators as it should be.
There is such a thing as a No Man's Land[0]. It can move, but if you don't dare cross it for even a few days, it's very real. It doesn't have to be glacial, and it currently exists in Ukraine. Breakout pockets don't mean it is porous everywhere.
[0] Ironically, the French phrase - from ground zero for the first known No Man's Land - is "le No Man's Land".
Trends don't go on forever, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There's no good rule of thumb for this, other than maybe the Lindy effect.
I won’t presume to time it, but at this point I think anyone can see what’s coming. It’s precisely because it can’t be timed that a sane person should stand well clear.
> What’s the last major life decision you made without at least consulting an AI?
This seems like asking what's the last major decision you made without at least doing a web search. There's nothing wrong with doing a search. The trouble is when you rely too much on what you read, without checking it.
I think there is something there though. I remember life before internet and I also remember how my decision throughput increased once I realized that other people must had the same problem before me. I definitely made some decisions that weren't mine, at least in the sense that I didn't consider my opinion/emotions on the problem.
Your cheap cynicism makes OpenAI's lower prices sound like a reason to avoid using them, but that's backwards! It's a better strategy to use them now while prices are low and switch later if necessary. Nobody knows who will have the best prices later, so better to decide later.
Aware of what, though? We don't actually know OpenAI's profit margins on inference. Do we need to know?
It's enough to know that the market is competitive and new models with better prices are released often. This means you should have a way to switch models.
The entire market is subsided more than it is competitive. The market wouldn’t exist the same as it does today if it weren’t being propped up. Thats the point.
I remember the days when I had a $2000+ credit balance on Uber because I mastered their referral program. “Free” uber blacks for 2 years!
When you’re using free shit that you should probably be paying more for, it’s good to not fool yourself.
In the Uber example, the fact that Lyft also existed at the time didn’t matter to me as someone happily riding around the city in Uber Black for $0. Unfortunately Lyft’s referral program wasn’t so lucrative so I couldn’t switch…
> Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?
Are you saying these companies are operating on anything resembling a sustainable business model?
I think not!
If OpenAI needs to impose 5 hour limits during a time where they are aggressively trying to grow market share, what do you think they (or whatever the winning provider is) will do in 5 years once they IPO and need to boost margins?
They won’t be as friendly with usage caps as they’re being now.
`needs to impose 5 hour limits ` I'm no OpenAI defender but that's like saying Apple is going bankrupt because they charge for their products. Why wouldn't they do everything they can to turn $20 users into $200 users?
Exactly. It is common knowledge that all the AI companies have terrible margins. IMO tokens are the cheapest they'll ever be as these companies compete for users.
To the extent that the 3rd party inference resellers are a viable market because of Chinese/certain US AI labs (current) willingness to absorb substantial compute/R&D/data harvesting costs while releasing weights on permissive licensing terms for free, then yes, current pricing is distorted.
Openrouter is not so open as well, right? They take the middle man cut by enforcing their own limit restrictions and 429s on top of the model provided limit restrictions and what not.
Now why would I pay a middle man anything if I can get the same hosted model without their own whimsical service limits?
Aware that this is essentially a soon to be deprecated service. As any vendor you need to know the life expectancy of it, plus forecast/predict any pricing changes. You really do not want to become dependent. Even if competitors exist, there still some non trivial cost to switch
agree and underscores the idea that you should keep your setups portable between model providers by using external memory systems and connector gateways
And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.
If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.
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