partiallypro

Tesla trades at a massive multiple, Microsoft doesn't. I think a lot of you just hate Microsoft and ignore (or rather prefer to pretend) the reality that the world runs on it.

> "GitHub Copilot had competitive pricing until yesterday when they changed from per-request to one of the most expensive per-token quotas. Seriously, take a look at their burning subreddit for some laughs"

AI is expensive and it has been heavily subsidized. I you think $20/mo for Codex/Claude flat vs a more usage based model you're in for a shock. Especially once these companies go public and have to meet investor expectations.

AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.

America is very very rich, the average person is much wealthier than the average European. 76% of Americans do not live paycheck to paycheck. That is a self reported stat and not reliable. It's a media sensationalist headline grabber which virtually every economist ignores.

People don't like saying America is rich because it defies their beliefs, but the actual stats don't lie. Every American I know that has moved to Europe (and I have lived there as well, in Munich) moved there with, shock...American money and savings. So they don't actually get the initial start many Europeans do and it clouds their view to think that's just how all Europeans live.

That doesn't guarantee that this will always be true, but given Europe's current trajectory, even with the US's many shortcomings...it's hard to say Europe will catch up anytime soon.

I read enough HN to know what it is -absolutely- true. HN comments, including this thread, often just read like BlueSky screeds half the time the US, US government or Sam Altman/Elon Musk/etc are mentioned.

They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.

It seems you or the team have culled many of them. There was one in particular that stood out but it seems to have been removed or they are heavily buried now. I just saw your post further down the thread, so you have seen them and I assume action was taken, thanks. There are still some that I find distasteful, but not as bad as what I was originally seeing towards the top.

There are people actively insinuating in this thread that Sam should be...killed, and they are still up. Very odd moderation, surely there is a better way to flag these things.

Even assuming what you're saying is correct and government spending doesn't matter (odd thing to say when you're arguing that the government has been "gutted,") your own chart is only flat over time because of USPS workers being less due to automation/retirement and there being less military recruitment (both account for about ~1.5M employees lost,) and doesn't include offloading to contractors. Underlying agencies and government is bigger than ever before. The government (federal AND state levels) itself is much larger, with more regulations, than it was even 20 years ago.

Every company has bureaucracy, but it's nothing compared to government work. Also, government has no competition, bureaucracy in big companies will eventually be punished (even if it takes a long time.) In government it is often rewarded, both internally and externally (via regulatory capture, etc.)

In any case, saying the federal government has been "gutted" is a flat lie. I don't see how people can argue otherwise. I want more money going to NASA, and more money going to civil projects like HSR, but would that magically remove 15 years of bureaucratic mess? No. More money to these projects can only happen on a large political scale if/when the bureaucratic red tape is cut to lower the costs. Adding an additional layer of bureaucrats and middle managers and pot of gold everyone can dip their hands in before it reaches the final project doesn't fix the issue.

That's per 100k (which just says it's mostly flat per 100k), net spending of the federal government is more than ever, and actual workforce is bigger than ever. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is stubbornly high despite us being in "peace time," and not recession spending.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W068RCQ027SBEA

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

If you all don't think bureaucracy is the main driver of government delays...well you clearly have never worked with or in and around government. I try to live in reality.

The politicization of everything and constant doomerish on here sure has echoes of early 2000s Slashdot. That's not a compliment. Reading the comments here is actually depressing. Human progress is never all at once, we can't even celebrate this triumph? Life is almost never "one or the other," the program could be scrapped to a junk yard and that wouldn't solve global hunger or global conflicts. Setting human eyes forward is good.

Don't confuse bureaucracy with "gutted." The federal government is bigger than at most any point in US history. Arguably that fact is -why- it's 15 years behind schedule.

The US attacking one of Russia's only remaining allies, and one of their biggest arms dealers, is a backdoor effort to help Russia? How does that even make sense? I really think people should log off for a while and actual evaluate what they are saying instead of listening to totally online grifters.

Could this help Russia in the very short term? Sure, does it mostly hurt them in the long run? Probably a lot more so, assuming the regime were to actually fall especially (feels like it's not going to at this point.)

The US not being able to control their strait also shows China just how difficult controlling the "South China Sea" would be in the event of an invasion of Taiwan. Which is just a stupid coincidence.

I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.

The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.

Isn't Toyota betting big on the Hybrid EV? To me, at least in the US, this seems like the best medium-term bet. The EV infrastructure just isn't there yet, despite there being a lot of Tesla chargers. Even with that, the charge time, etc are too long to get going again. Hybrid EV seems to resolve this, and eases the customer into an EV future. Current EVs are great for being around town, but a lot of people in the US live 45min to an hour each way just to work, have to get their kids to school or practice in the meantime. It's just added stress thinking about finding a charging station or having time constraints.

The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.

Considering the German economy has been faltering, energy prices have soared, they buy nuclear power from a neighbor, and their shortsightedness emboldened a regional enemy (Russia)... probably until I'm dead.

Maybe it will help stop other countries from making the same mistake if people don't let everyone forget.

and yet the point is still correct

It's 2026 and Germany's rich neighbor is so good at nuclear power, and logistics and storage of said waste, that it sells Germany power from their nuclear power plants.

Why is it, some always repeat the same argument without giving a single thought to the follow-up challenges and costs?

I've lived in Germany, it's always so funny seeing Germans always complaining but never taking action, or a lot of "too late for that" nonsense. Always tons of excuses for bad policy.

Maybe a short financial shot in the arm, but destroying their ability to get Shahed drones is substantial.

Now just imagine if they hadn't killed their nuclear power plants.

BlueSky is vastly worse than Twitter/X now or ever was. It was a good idea, but it ruins the "community square" aspect when BlueSky has just become a total echo chamber. Twitter is still diverse, even if voices that were once banned now have bigger platforms. Now I'd rank BlueSky has a net negative for society. It's basically a DailyKos leaning miniblog with a small userbase. Things you would just used to find in comment sections of left leaning sites.

If anyone thinks Anthropic or OpenAI are the "good guys," they've already lost the plot. If you look at additional reporting on the topic, not just the Anthropic PR spin, the disagreements were much more nuanced than it was portrayed by Anthropic. They aren't exactly a reliable narrator on the topic either. In fact it actually just seems like Amodei fumbled the deal and crashed out a bit. He's already walked back his internal memo, and is reportedly still seeking a deal with the Pentagon. I don't trust either CEO, I use their products, but if you're even leaning 51-49 on who is "less evil," I think you're giving too much slack.

I've done the same, and I tested the same prompts with Claude and Google, and they both started hallucinating my blood results and supplement stack ingredients. Hopefully this new model doesn't fall on this. Claude and Google are dangerously unusable on the subject of health, from my experience.

Just from a pure investment standpoint, while people seem to think this will take on Microsoft PCs and Google's Chromebook, to me the bigger risk is that it is going to cannibalize Air sales. Just read the comments here and elsewhere online. Sure, some people say they need more RAM, etc...but the average consumer just uses their device as a browser.

Anyhow, I do hope this wakes Microsoft up. They seem to have abandoned their consumer base, which is quite annoying. I do enjoy Windows 11, despite the hate here, but Windows PCs have a lot of catching up to do.

Nothing to do with Trump.

https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-...

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...

https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/01/03/the-poorest-us-...

I don't see how it's condescending or naive (at least anymore than the relative anti-US stuff you I was responding to,) name a large company or big innovation Europe has produced in the past 20 years? The whole continent is basically flat on growth for the past decade. It's literally in the numbers. Europe has been in denial, not the US. It has been very much left behind by China and the US. The US controls its own monetary system, European countries do not, that makes the debt issues a bit exaggerated. Not to mention China's has tremendous debt itself.

Also we do have universal social security, and while many medications are expensive at least they are available. Try getting a weeks worth of ibuprofen in Germany, it requires a doctor's appointment. I love Europe and have lived there, but talk to virtually any business person in Europe and they both envy the US and China, not themselves. If you can't see that painfully obvious reality, I don't know what to say, honestly.

I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.

Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content. Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...but the feed itself is dreadful, I never see anything from friends. It's all just slop from bigger brands/publishers. At this point, there are just chat services to me and my friends.

He has too many great films to list, but one I really like that is lesser by him known nowadays is "Secondhand Lions."

I think AGI is a long ways away, and there is a real possibility that once it arrives that it will require so much energy to maintain that humans will be cheaper.

I know OpenAI isn't a popular company here (anymore) but the doomerism in this thread seems a bit too hasty. People were just as doomy when Altman was sacked, and it turned into nothing and the industry market caps have doubled or even tripled since.