For a consumer service, absolutely. That’s too much money for a household to ignore and they are actually paying attention.

For a business user? Quite possible. My company bought subscription to one of the providers for every single employee, no matter the role. A large number don’t use it at all (if they do anything, it’s using a chat that’s either free or included with something else), and most of the rest use it lightly. We have only a handful of folks trying to use it as much as possible. Companies frequently just buy for everyone instead of micromanaging who needs or doesn’t need a service.

Points for a non-AI fix.

I did recall vaguely something like that, but couldn’t remember what it was, thanks for that.

But absolutely, especially if you had something like a 4.5 foot bed normally, but between frunk pass through and tailgate with load stop you could carry some 16 foot long planks… Something you might rarely need to do and not with a lot of planks, so a huge bed is pointless most of the time.

Funny. I was thinking how cool it would be if an EV truck with a frunk had a midgate, fold down front passenger seat, and ability to open the dash somehow to pass though very long things into trunk area.

Wow, a “kids these days are just lame” sentiment, which is as tired and old as we have been writing it down. Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses. They were plucky, hard working, courageous, but kids these days seem to never share those same traits.

I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.

The challenge is the consolidation of the power, they can’t realistically expect to actually shape how it will be used, but they have plenty of material and evidence of who actually does get to shape it and how it’s going to go. The biggest sociopathic, out of touch jerks are the ones cheering the hardest, and that is a very bad sign. They are cheering about software without developers, music without musicians, art without artists, and so on. They offer no appreciation for the people graduating at their own graduation and instead see it as a platform to talk up AI instead. It’s a gigantic “fuck you” to the graduates to leverage their commencement in such a way.

We have AI companies running ads about how someone was going to do comp sci, but since that can’t work out, they are going to do dance. Which we are to take as inspirational, but the practical reality to this scenario is no livelihood available. No vision for livelihoods, just elimination of opportunity. Plus they actually have used the damn stuff, they know the disconnect between promise and reality, but they are still stuck competing with it, which is also insulting as folks have no more confidence in grads than generative AI.

We have comments like this, making it plainly clear exactly what sort of structure they have in mind, from Larry Ellison: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."

Note he didn’t say “our best behavior”, it is “their best behavior”. He isn’t included, he isn’t a part of it. The rabble are to be managed and he is to continue to enjoy being “One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison”.

Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.

This was expected by everyone, I recall Eric Schmidt himself talking about how disappointed he was that students were booing but he would turn the students around at his speech.

From there the article roughly seems to be roughly dismissive of the students and pretty bullish about AI anyway. Real Skinner “no, it’s the children who are wrong” energy wrapped up in way too many words.

Lot’s of peaple slamming its use…

There’s a difference.

When Daren goes 80 in a 30, they actually might be punished as that abuse is recognized and penalized.

With LLMs, there’s no such thing as consequences for the bad uses, only rewards.

Internet video feeds are chock full of slop now because that is rewarded. Video platforms are even making “AI remix” buttons to accelerate taking an actual video with thought and effort behind it into uninspired slop. People are making knockoffs left and right but the courts are largely ruling that AI is ‘transformative’ so those knockoffs that a human would get sued over are getting passes. Managers are micromanaging worker use of AI in hopes that maybe they can prove they can fire most of them.

LLMs enable the worst users more than they enable good users. In software development, the responsible operation of an LLM might speed up a developer 20-50%, depending on the context. An irresponsible one that just assumes the output is good will post a whole lot of crap. Same for all fronts, prose, video production, music. People who care about the medium can get some speedups, but people who are just lazy, uninspired, but see an opportunity can drown out the quality content.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stupidity at the concept.

If I recall, his rationalization was that a particular company was backordered on parts to build natural gas generators until 2030… So naturally it’s so much easier to get to hundreds of starship launches a month and all the attendant solar and radiators and crap…

So I thought I had that setup, but it so happens that I ended up with two 401ks at the exact same provider via two different companies, and there are different options between the employers.

I don’t see a particular pattern as to why one would be different from the other, but they are…

Because Elon said so, and a lot of these people are playing with other people’s money, so it’s worth a shot.

Elon says:

• SpaceX is really about xAI, and look how well regarded Anthropic is, we’ll be even better than Anthropic because, welll I’m Elon and I said so!
• All this AI stuff has to go to space because some company that makes a part for natural gas generators is backordered a few years, so we’ll start having hundreds of Starship launches a month.

Yes, he claimed that hundreds of Starship launches a month is a more realistic thing to pull off than making some parts of natural gas turbines…

Remember, Musk also proposes a combination. That AI will, for whatever stupid ass reason, become predominantly space based and that they would be having hundreds of Starship launches a month…

YouTube started in 2005, but was not really a “streaming service”, it hosted random internet posted videos. The concept of engaging with the big content rights holders wasn’t remotely in sight back then.

Hulu came out a year after Netflix started streaming, by about a year. Hulu was inspired by Netflix’s move to have actual traditional media content as a streaming service instead of ad-hoc video uploads like youtube.

RealPlayer offered technology for websites to provide videos, they themselves I don’t recall being a streaming platform in and of itself.

Whatever one may say about Netflix, they were right there in the beginning with streaming traditional, professional media content. Yes, video playback over the internet wasn’t new, but that’s a technical detail that enables, but is not the core of the “streaming service” business model.

The thing is this really depends on the speed of some financial events, not some technical failing.

Notably, if OpenAI has to cancel any of their commitments to buy hardware because they find they have neither the money nor can secure even more debt to cover, that event would potentially cause the bubble to pop, even for hypothetical companies that may have been more responsible and might have a viable business approach. Those commitments are coming up, and a lot of analysis struggles to see how they will fund those commitments.

The thing with this bubble is that the investors don’t get the nuance and will flee at signs of trouble in any of OpenAI, Anthropic, or a handful of others, and Altman’s leadership has made trouble at OpenAI very likely, but the investors don’t believe it and won’t believe it’s unique to OpenAI, even if it would be.

Google is only worse by virtue of their reach. OpenAI and Anthropic don’t have the reach yet, but they absolutely will get there given the chance.

Before Google had the reach it has now, it was widely regarded as a comparitive ‘good guy’ and people believed in the “don’t be evil”. Lo and behold once they got going, “don’t be evil” went away.

Plus they have a hook with the common folk, the phone steers you toward Gemini (Android phones, obviously, and Apple currently partners with Google for Gemini for iPhone…).

For Claude and OpenAI, you have to explicitly want to go out of your way to use them, or use them indirectly through another service that has a hook.

Claude seems to have some software developers explicitly preferring them, though a alot of the corporate money is on Microsoft and Microsoft leveraged Visual Studio and Github to become the business-friendly frontend, and sure, you can use Anthropic models too… Though Microsoft ultimately has control of what is reasonably available and how much each one costs. Anthropic has a shot but I could see Microsoft pivot to really mess with Anthropic. The one gap in Microsoft strategy is the “native AI” workflow where Claude Code has won hearts and minds, but it uses massively more tokens for frankly marginal or sometimes negative value compared to a more curated use in-editor.

OpenAI I see as the most exposed. Lot’s of data showing they are suffering from people being over the fad of going out of their way to use ChatGPT, especially since their phones have started embracing ‘default’ Chatbot. Software developers that are inclined to use LLM are also inclined to be pretty dismissive of anything other than either Anthropic or open weight models, depending on their inclination. Also Altman seemed the most agressive in committing to spending money they didn’t have, though all of them exhibit this to some extent.

I predict Microsoft ultimately pivots to in-house models and convinces the businesses to go that way. Apple may continue with Gemini or roll their own eventually. Anthropic currently has the stronger position between OpenAI and them, but I think you are right that both have risk of just being left behind.

They would be happy to have a ‘low volume, high value economy’. Only trinkets for them to trade among themselves at relatively high price, while they have no use for and therefore no interest in the bulk of the population. There is a reason they are very keen on surveillance and “law enforcement” because they think that might keep the rabble away from them cheaper than trying to appease the rabble.

Hell, they would be even happier to ignore the ‘rabble’ altogether. You at least had to keep the slaves vaguely alive.

There’s a reason Larry Ellison said "“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”, they want to contain the “unwanted” and keep them from being a risk while excluding them from the ‘economy’ to the extent feasible

Sure, those are premium things, but don’t actually drive the manufacturer’s cost as those come mostly for free.

So it drives bigger margin for them instead, but at the expense of people perceiving EV as somehow fundamentally too expensive.

You have a rough point, but a $20k delta is too much. Thankfully, the comparison is between a “special” car and a boring workhorse, so the price delta isn’t reflective of the practical choices. 7-passenger PV5 looks to be about $50k, so less than $10k delta between a Sienna and a comparable EV van. Still a pretty big gap, especially to take up front, but closer to reasonable given your reasons. We are seeing the gap close more aggressively in the 5-passenger segment, but 3-row still has been focused on EV only for ‘premium’ experience.