iteratethis

My father gifted me 35 year old speakers he had stored in his attic.

I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K.

My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set.

I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.

Cut sugar, sauce and highly processed food.

I know they have a fatal attraction, quite literally. But if you manage to get rid of all that junk, you can pretty much eat what you want from the selection of real foods like whole wheat bread, fruits and vegetables, eggs, meats. Mix and match a reasonable balance between those, and you strike a good balance.

But to start with: sugar is your enemy.

I don't think there's a need to cause a stir and generate hate for either Web Components or React.

We should hate both equally.

Either approach is frankly an embarrassing way to build complex interactive applications. Web tech is just way too low level, batteries not included. We've added mountain of complexity to deal with it but it doesn't hide that the fundamentals are broken and that productivity is low.

The handful of trillion dollar companies have a problem that is unique: virtually all projects and innovation are not interesting enough even when successful. Only big bets remain.

Google pulled in 280 billion $ last year.

Now imagine a nice little side project within Google making it into market success with a 100m$ annual revenue.

That's basically useless to Google. A line item that doesn't move the needle and adds weight to the company. Yet to any other company it would be an extraordinary success.

If I'd arbitrarily say that 10% of annual revenue is "moving the needle" that means you need to innovate a new product raking in 30 billion a year. Good luck with that.

And it would require to be entangled with the unique ecosystem benefits of Google, because a stand-alone product would easily be countered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. So the bottom line is that your new product needs to be of the monopoly-type, a new money printer. Anything less than that is not worthwhile.

That's why Meta's big bet on the Metaverse wasn't as crazy as reported. When you make this much revenue yet social networking has peaked, you need to differentiate by adding a new revenue stream, and it would need to bring in a billion a month. You can only achieve that by building a brand new ecosystem and being the first at it.

The trajectory is 2.5C or even more.

People will resist draconian measures because most won't be alive to witness the worst of it anyway. Behavioral changes as well as tax/cost increases will not get us where we want to be with any speed.

Our only hope is technology and exponential progress. Many models assume a linear progress in their calculations, but sometimes a fly-wheel occurs where all of a sudden, everything happens all at once.

In my town (population: 10K), 10 years ago nobody had solar. 5 years ago, 5% had it. Now you won't see a roof without it. It's contagious. We need to make this go viral in a way that does not belittle or stress people, it should be seen as beneficial to the individual.

Please stop. No employee is loyal to any CEO based on some higher order matter. They just want to get their big pay day and will follow whoever makes that possible.

Really? It's well documented and even admitted that Apple has a set of Apple-friendly media partners.

Apparently he has a massive role in VC, and since this community, tech twitter, etc. all circle around that, he is unconditionally praised.

Further, the current tech wave is all about AI, where there's a massive community of basically "OpenAI wrapper" grifters trying to ride the wave.

The shorter answer is: money.

Sam's power was tested and turned out to be absolute.

Sam was doing whatever he wanted, got caught, and now can continue to do what he wants with even more backing.

You'll then switch to Firefox or Brave, if not done already. Which Google will then try to detect on their services (Search, Youtube, etc) and block or hamper.

Well, at least ad blocking works on services not controlled by them? Even this is under threat if they get their way with their "genuine web client" tech.

Do not underestimate how far Google has gone and will go to create an inescapable ad viewing network.

Imagine how that feels for the tens of thousands of MS employees laid off recently. "Had to be done", according to 2.7T$ company.

Followed by: "Hey guys, we don't know exactly what you do but do join us by the several hundreds and don't you worry about compensation, we pretty much have unlimited money to throw at this."

And then they say people are too cynical of tech.

A percentage-based fee on services like this is criminal.

Spotify's value, and the actual stuff people pay for, is music streaming from Spotify towards consumers. Apple nor the app store plays any part in this. Apple faces exactly zero costs to enable the actual streaming of value itself, yet just grabs 30% of it.

A flat fee to cover the cost of running an app store? Fine, and fair. Robbing businesses of enormous segments of their revenue: criminal.

I wish we could all just admit that this is a capital run, rather than some moralistic crusade.

The employees want to get their big payday, so will follow Altman wherever he goes. Which is the smart thing to do anyway as he runs half the valley. The public discourse in which Sam is the hero is further cemented by the tech ecosystem, which nowadays is circling around AI. Those in the "OpenAI wrapper" game.

Nobody has any interest in safety, openness, what AI does for humanity. It's greed all the way down. Siding with the likely winner. Which is rational self-interest, not some "higher cause".

The first word in their company name.

No, and they won't pay. They'll just hit "accept tracking" and carry on.

And that's exactly the point the EU is making: it's not truly free consent.

Because the mission is visibly abandoned. There's nothing "open" about OpenAI. We may not know how the mission was abandoned but we know Sam was CEO, hence responsible.

What is unclear to me is what Microsoft has access to and can use from OpenAI.

If OpenAI implodes or somehow survives independently, would this mean that the former employees that are now at Microsoft have to re-implement everything?

Clearly Microsoft has a massive financial stake in OpenAI, but do they own IP? The software? The product? The service? Can they simply "fork" OpenAI as a whole, or are there limitations?

Privacy is not a belief, it is law.

Many people here are conflating the idea of paying versus ads, whilst the discussion is about privacy instead.

There's nothing wrong with charging money for a service or alternatively let them watch ads. The problem is that the ads are tracking ads. If they would be simple contextual ads (dynamic based on surrounding content), there would be no privacy violation and thus no issue.

I believe the EU direction is that when you decline tracking, it should have no meaningful impact on your experience. Because if that would be the case, there's no real "free consent". Again, declining tracking is not the same as declining ads. Privacy should not cost money to secure, it should be a default and is a basic human right.

Facebook obviously disagrees.

So we have OpenAI, Microsoft, a whole bunch of capital, and a few "rock stars" moving. And it's these people holding the keys to the AI kingdom where they go to work to achieve AGI.

Finally they got rid of this pesky idea of "safety". We're back in "break things" mode.

Does nobody recognize the stakes here? AGI, which soon would accelerate into something far more capable, ends civilization. I'm not saying it would kill us, I'm saying it makes us cognitively obsolete and all meaning is lost.

AI Safety isn't a micro bias in the training set. It's existential at planetary scale. Yet we let a bunch of cowboys just go "let's see what happens" with zero meaningful regulation in sight. And we applaud them.

I know AGI isn't here yet. I know Microsoft would not allow for zero safety. I'm just saying that on the road to AGI, about two dozen people are deciding on our collective faith. With as ultimate chief the guy behind shit coin "world coin".

For what it's worth: I'm from the Netherlands, generally considered a very high tax country. I've only recently learned about US property taxes and I'm shocked.

We too have such a thing, in a much more complicated way, but it's a mere fraction of what you pay.

On average, a dutch household that owns a home pays 851€ per year in municipality taxes, which includes property tax, waste/garbage services and sewage rights. Pure property tax may be as low as 50€ per month.

The idea behind it is very simple: you can't eat a home. A home you occupy does not generate any immediate income. Further, a home owner has little influence on the value of its property. When it rises in value that might be great, but your income, whichever it is, does not rise along with it. Finally, one can effectively never retire in their own bloody home with such a scheme.

Property tax is deeply unethical and cruel. Astonishing how the ultimate capitalist country allows for it.

The demographic collapse has little to do with housing. Even people with zero financial obstacles want 1-2 children at best.

People that can't afford things tend to pay little tax, if any. They are net receivers. And how are people that bought something with their own money subsidized?

Owning land is not a birth right.

Funny thing is that Apple could export this dominance across the world if only they would produce ever cheaper iPhones.

There's genuine Android fans, but also a lot of people buying them for the sole reason of them being cheaper.

Similarly, if they put their mind to it, Apple could conquer vastly more of the PC world.

Customization and differentiation is over-rated and can even be a downside. Just grab an iPhone, buy a cover for your "unique" expression, and change the wallpaper. What else is there to customize?

Same for "replaceable batteries". An iPhone battery has solid performance for about 1,000 charges, or 3 years. That's when people buy a new one anyway, if not earlier.

The things you want to be true are not necessarily actually true.

The small website problem is not too different from the small social media account problem. Most people on social media get zero traction. Barely any views, likes, engagement. Almost all traffic goes to a very small group, and not just that, the big account has a snowball effect. They are ranked higher, thus seen more, thus followed more, and so on.

The algorithm is basically incorrect in that it keeps rewarding something that was already rewarded. You can't say that this channel deserved it most for the simple reason that the rest wasn't even seen at all.

In fact, even if you'd list 3 accounts below each other that we hypothetically consider to be of identical value, the one on the top will get 80% of the followers/engagement.

And that's why blogrolls and link directories also do not help.

I'm from the Netherlands and once visited our Brazil office.

One of my colleagues there seemed to be having a pretty bad cold so he exited our meeting. One hour later he was back, said he took antibiotics, and felt fine now.

My jaw dropped. Dutch doctors are the opposite, as expats commonly complain about. Our first method of treatment (for various symptoms) is to send you back home and sit it out for a few days. Or just take some aspirins.

The idea being that your body will heal itself over various ills, and that this is the preferred way.

My mind was also blown when I heard that in many countries, people have medical cabinets at home. It being common that the typical non-senior adult has a stock with a wide array of medicines.

I was raised on zero medicines, unless there's something critically wrong. Even taking an aspirin makes you a bit of a wimp.

Cultural differences I guess.

It's a clever model from OpenAI.

Developers will be rushing to create GPTs, after which OpenAI will get a huge amount of ideas and creativity for free. And might integrate the top 1% directly into the core engine. Similar to how Apple regularly destroys app developers by adding the features of popular apps into iOS, and how Amazon makes a rip-off product of popular 3rd party sellers.

And, if you upload custom data, I imagine it leaks into the larger model. This way their core engine discovering data it had not seen before. Similar to how we've all voluntarily have given up our data to Google.

And, underlying terms and pricing can change at anytime. And you'll have nowhere else to go as this will be the world's one and only engine.

You'd do great in prison.

All of them, as statistics show how they spend hours of their leisure time on TV and their phone.