olalonde

I'd still buy MacBook Airs even if they cost more than the Pros. The lighter weight and the silence of having no fan are worth more to me than the extra performance to me.

Bastiat's "seen and unseen". You see the cheap-looking AI graphics. You don't see the extra rooms they could afford to build, the ticket that might be $5 cheaper, or the new haunted house in your area that only exists because a small operator can now open one without hiring a studio.

I would unironically invest.

Both Apple Pay and PayPal are disabled with a message saying: "Items in your order are not eligible for this payment method. Please select another form of payment." :(

Appreciate the sympathies, it sucks. I can only guess that I'm triggering some fraud detection system.

Thanks for the detailed write up. I did get the email saying my enrollment was accepted and I did accept the "Apple Developer Program License Agreement":

> Your enrollment request has been accepted. To complete your organization's enrollment in the Apple Developer Program, please sign in to your developer account to review and accept the Apple Developer Program License Agreement, and complete your membership purchase.

It's really only an issue when it's time to pay for the membership. I'm probably tripping some fraud detection system tied to Apple Store rather than Apple Developer. I'm traveling right now and don't have an iPhone with me but I'll try your suggestions when I get back after tomorrow.

PS: I'm getting a 404 on the telegra.ph link you shared.

The thing is I always pass the enrollment step, it's paying for the membership that blocks for some reason. I think it might be the Apple Store's fraud system that flags me for some reason, rather than an issue with Apple Developer itself. Regardless, thanks for the advice.

This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl_1upFpQo

Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...

Nope, the leak didn't show that.

The unit economics aren't what's subsidized. Inference is profitable.

Related: https://bsky.app/profile/colin-fraser.net/post/3myd3ecbxys2z

Sure, I was just pointing out why the stat is misleading. People unfamiliar with the study or the term would assume it refers to employers outright withholding agreed-upon pay.

If you only counted cases that meet the legal definition of the crime of "wage theft," the figure would much lower.

I'm saying that much of what's called "wage theft" isn't theft in any normal sense of the word. It's the equivalent of calling employees who take long bathroom breaks or slack off on the clock "wage thieves." Do employees slack off on the job? Yes. Do corporations hire contractors when labor regulations forbids them to? Yes. Is either one comparable to theft? No.

By the way, the stat you mention counts consensual arrangements as wage theft, probably the large majority of it (e.g. hiring illegal immigrants for under the minimum wage). Calling that "theft" is a rhetorical move, much like libertarians calling taxation "theft": it borrows the moral weight of stealing for something that's legally and morally quite different. If the stat had been calculated from asking workers, "does your employer owe you money that they refuse to pay?", I suspect the number would drop dramatically.

It was still worth it on the metrics most people care about: life expectancy, child mortality, poverty, food security. Cutting off cheap fossil energy decades earlier would have been far worse for humanity than the slight warming we're getting now.

And they won't do the same with Copilot tokens?

I'm so confused by your story. Why did management switch from 500 usd a month Claude usage to 600 usd a month Copilot usage? Does copilot charge less per token?

"ClaudeFlare"... nice typo.

> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights?

Maybe it's Bluesky selection bias, but it feels like are a large chunk of social science professors are essentially full-time political activists.

China is a capitalist country. In fact, more so than many Western countries.

In Meta's defense, I don't think you actually need a business' consent to scrape their website.

There are multiple satellite ISP companies and there are even Blockstream satellites that are fully dedicated to broadcasting Bitcoin blocks.

I'm not sure you really understand what a double spend is. It's not actually a big deal in the real world. An attacker capable of double spending is simply capable of reversing blocks, therefore reversing transactions.

So, for example, an attacker could buy a house with BTC, and then when the papers are signed, reverse the transaction to get their BTC back. But in the real world, the victim would just go to the police and get their house back.

The only plausible "big league" threat would be a government investing billions in ASICs to perform a 51% attack and grind the network to a halt. But the Bitcoin community would probably quickly move to a new Proof of Work algorithm and render their ASICs worthless.

You'd also need to take down fleets of satellites in space. Double-spends aren't really easy to profit from either.

Not sure about other blockchains but with Bitcoin, you only need one node to connect via satellite and the chain is good. In fact, there are satellites that broadcast blocks from space (no ISP required). [0]

[0] https://blockstream.com/satellite/

I wonder if a epoxy/resin potting would solve this sort of attack. Or active tamper response that fries the board if someone tampers with the case.

Reddit definitely relies on this. I got banned from a subreddit ages ago (can't even remember which one), and ever since, any fresh account created from the same device gets shadowbanned almost immediately. Very annoying.

Also, curious if this is intended or a bug:

> I still can’t retrieve the page from the link: the public-web reader is out of quota, and my direct fetch isn’t available in this session.

I wanted the QM agent to read my website but it says I'm out of quota. Seems a bit odd to have a quota on that. Plan usage explains that there is a quota on searches, which makes sense, but it does not mention that there is one on fetching URLs directly.

edit: Tried again but with Hermes agent and it worked. It was my first time using QM so maybe it's a capability I had to configure.

Pretty cool, trying it out. What LLM is it using in the free tier? I was surprised that it worked without supplying an API key. The model doesn't seem to know either: "This run is labeled agent37/default. That’s the configured model name I can see; it doesn’t reveal which underlying model/provider it maps to.".