dktp

Ad sales grew

The issue is getting developers to create apps for a new OS nobody uses (yet). And nobody will use it if they can't have their banking app and uber on it

This becomes even tougher if they go the Apple route and don't allow other phone manufacturers to use their OS. Alternatively, if they go down the Windows Phone route, we saw how that played out considering that Google _pays_ manufacturers to use Android

Making OS is very hard, but getting necessary adoption is likely even harder

From the outside looking in, I don't think Meta has a clear vision. I think it's a stretch to say that this one announcement makes it clear. There are AI announcements from Meta every month, recent ones more focused on coding (Muse Spark/Muse Code)

Their ads team wants AI to improve their targeting and ad creation. Some want to have frontier AI including coding. Others might want personal AI agent. Then there's the flirting with renting their compute

And I'm not even taking shots at them. I think Google is exactly the same. I think OpenAI is largely the same (though lately more following Anthropic footsteps and focusing on productivity). And I think the whole field is so new and allows change in so many places - that it's sort of normal or fine to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

But nothing as of now says to me that Meta has a clear strategy around llms

I think they're largely making fun of extremes, whether left, right or Kanye West, Disney/China, Scientology etc. (And once in a while apologize when they get it wrong, like Man Bear Pig) Lately the extremes are more extreme and powerful on the right and so more episodes target that

The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...)

They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted

I'm a big fan though

There is pretty clear return as of now. And half a trillion in backlog

Also the ~4% drop is really not a big swing for earnings. This looks like a non story

There was an interesting video by Ben Felix that makes a case that home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A

That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.

Agreed

I did the full 100. It's not even 1/4, with the harder ones when one description is significantly longer than others, it's the correct one. Even outside that 2 choices are usually some object - which I think is never the correct answer

I'd also say the toughness should be mixed up a little. The last 30 or so became a slog

Cool idea though!

That's not fully true. Lots of things get to Europe later (Gemini memories, though we have them now, Spark as latest noteworthy)

Or never. Like the majority of Pixel 10 on device AI features (image editing, magic cue).

People take pride in wearing handmade watches

As of today, I've never heard of anyone taking pride in using a SaaS or frequenting a website or an app because it was handcrafted. Maybe some day

I would guess it's purely because Grok isn't nearly in-demand enough to produce meaningful revenue. And they want to juice the numbers for IPO

And I'm sure it's a bonus point for Musk that it goes to OpenAI's most relevant competitor

Opus 4.5 became significantly cheaper directly per token

As another commenter implied, the title a reference to this - https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks. Which is an incredible read as well

It's in their ToS to allow using Copilot subscription with OpenCode - https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...

Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now

Loosely related, though I don't think Benjamin Bennett's intention was ever to improve focus/productivity

But it never ceases to amaze me the consistency and time spent sitting and smiling and other similar endeavors by Benjamin - https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminBennetttt/streams

Very interesting. It fails every single time for me. I'm in Germany, maybe Google is stricter here?

See https://imgur.com/a/77BRDQv

I don't know tbh. I've tried it on 10-20 various level of famous standups and Gemini refuses every time

Just for testing, I just tried this https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_KJdP4FLGTo/sddefault.jpg ("Redesign this image in a brutalist graphic design style"). Gemini refuses (api as well as UI), OpenAI does it

One interesting thing I found comparing OpenAI and Gemini image editing is - Gemini rejects anything involving a well known person. Anything. OpenAI is happy to edit and change every time I tried

I have a sideproject where I want to display standup comedies. I thought I could edit standup comedy posters with some AI to fit my design. Gemini straight up refuses to change any image of any standup comedy poster involving a well know human. OpenAI does not care and is happy to edit away

I think these pledges offload some of the risk onto Amazon/Oracle/etc

If Anthropic/OpenAI miss projections, infra providers can somewhat likely still turn around and sell it to the next guy or use it themselves. If they have more demand than expected (as Anthropic currently does), vcs will throw money at them and they can outbid the competition

If they built it themselves and missed projections it's a much more expensive mistake

It's just risk sharing. Infra providers take some of the risk and some of the upside

The idea is that smarter models might use fewer turns to accomplish the same task - reducing the overall token usage

Though, from my limited testing, the new model is far more token hungry overall

Opus 4.5 became significantly cheaper than Opus 4.1

From recent personal examples

We have a somewhat complicated OpenSearch reindexing logic and we had some issue where it happened more regularly than it should. I vibecoded a dashboard visualizing in a graph exactly which index gets reindexed when and into what. Code works, a little rough around the edges. But it serves the purpose and saved me a ton of time

Another example, in an internal project we made a recent change where we need to send specific headers depending on the environment. Mostly GET endpoint where my workflow is checking the API through browser. The list of headers is long, but predetermined. I vibecoded an extension that lets you pick the header and allows me to work with my regular workflow, rather than Postman or cURL or whatever. A little buggy UI, but good enough. The whole team uses it

I'm not a frontend developer and either of these would take me a lot of time to do by hand

My best guess is that Nvidia is unhappy with how OpenAI is fishing for compute with its competitors (Jensen had some opinions on the AMD-OpenAI deal when it was announced). If this actually becomes a feasible reality, it gives OpenAI (and co) negotiating power - which is bad for Nvidia

Nvidia might have wanted more exclusivity/attachment. And OpenAI still seems to have no problem raising money. So maybe there was just a commitment mismatch

Pure speculation though

I would agree. I've been using VSCode Copilot for the past (nearly) year. And it has gotten significantly better. I also use CC and Antigravity privately - and got access to Cursor (on top of VSCode) at work a month ago

CC is, imo, the best. The rest are largely on pair with each other. The benefit of VSCode and Antigravity is that they have the most generous limits. I ran through Cursor $20 limits in 3 days, where same tier VSCode subscription can last me 2+ weeks

Right. But a good portion of the world can't afford the premium and having access to these services is still valuable. For every broke student or someone from a poor background, who probably don't make any money for the company (due to not buying advertised stuff), there's someone from a well off background, who will more than subsidize it by virtue of clicking on a lawyer ad (or whatever)

Nowadays I'm happy to pay, but that wasn't always the case. And I personally think that having an ad tier and fee tier is fine. Serves everyone

From a very entertaining Matt Levine article (https://archive.is/8QYxl)

> In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!

But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads

Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)

My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on paper.

Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors that asked for more money (Anthropic)

Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a different provider.

For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual improvement

OpenAI is (was?) extremely good at making things that go viral. The successful ones for sure boost subscriber count meaningfully

Studio Ghibli, Sora app. Go viral, juice numbers then turn the knobs down on copyrighted material. Atlas I believe was a less successful than they would've hoped for.

And because of too frequent version bumps that are sometimes released as an answer to Google's launch, rather than a meaningful improvement - I believe they're also having harder time going viral that way

Overall OpenAI throws stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Most of it doesn't and gets (semi) abandoned. But some of it does and it makes for better consumer product than Gemini

It seems to have worked well so far, though I'm sceptical it will be enough for long

Deep research, from my experience, will always add lectures.

I'm trying to create a comprehensive list of English standup specials. Seems like a good fit! I've tried numerous times to prompt it "provide a comprehensive list of English standup specials released between 2000 and 2005. The output needs to be a csv of verified specials with the author, release date and special name. I do not want any other lecture or anything else. Providing anything except the csv is considered a failure". Then it creates it's own plan and I go further clarifying to explicitly make sure I don't want lectures...

It goes on to hallucinate a bunch of specials and provide a lecture on "2000 the era of X on standup comedy" (for each year)

I've tried this in 2.5 and 3. Numerous time ranges and prompts. Same result. It gets the famous specials right (usually), hallucinates some info on less famous ones (or makes them up completely) and misses anything more obscure

Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Reddit, Twitter etc all have increasingly profitable ads

I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential

I used to main Pixelbook (1st gen) for about a year. ChromeOS really is enough for the majority of day to day stuff. For development it allows you to run linux environment inside ChromeOS

I can only assume the Aluminium OS would aim to do the same