The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.

This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.

We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5

Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.

Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.

Good examples.

When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)

Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.

Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.

I normally can't start apps from spotlight. It literally has forgotten that the applications folder exists, so I have to open it up in finder and scroll to the app to start it.

> Cocaine and pot are horrible

citation needed

>Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ---Robin Williams

>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...

David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips, Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis, The Lancet, 2010.

https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...

Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.

Note that this study is now over 15 years old.

You are doing it right now by naming the event after the victim, not the perpetrator. Call it the OpenAI attack on HF.

I don't even notice the LLM speed or latency. I think we are as far apart in technique as it gets.

What is your workflow?

Funny that so many people in this thread are arguing that a bad idea should also be engineered well. It was already a bad idea, so no it won't be. They are a package deal.

I don't think this is a good argument to make in general, as the contrapositive is that if it has good engineering, it was a good idea to build.

For example, nuclear weapons are certainly well-engineered, but I think it's reasonable to disagree on if they were a good idea or not.

When someone else controls distribution, they also control the spark, each request could serve up a different payload. So innocuous images could encode ids, tracking receivers as well as originators.

I would score this as an own goal.

You can't compare if you don't know the cost, if you can't compare it is hard for the invisible hand to price the market.

Price transparency makes more efficient markets.

Seattle should do restaurants next, the number of places with %fees tacked on that aren't tips and aren't optional, just so they don't end up having $20+ entrees on the menu is growing steadily.

I liked reading "the rational optimist" by matt ridley

One point I remember is that with trust, trade is infinite.

This completely follows in my life.

I trust costco, and I buy stuff there without doing any calculus.

I don't trust apps on the apple store, I basically don't buy any of them (even/especially the free ones). Even the phone itself has about 10,000 pages of privacy policy.

GOG sells games without DRM that you can download and played offline, forever. I don't worry about buying any game.

It's amazing how people neglect this basic fact. Free markets already often don't work in practice. But they don't even work in theory if both parties do not have at the very least the same information in order to base their decisions. These sort of scam tactics (like dynamic pricing) are simply fraud, much like hiding problems in a car or a house you sell.

This issue exists everywhere in the USA.

Go check the price for a movie ticket. At the end they slap on an additional fee. Why can't they show the fee included in the main price?

I went to the Verde Canyon Railroad, when gas prices were really low. Still a fee for higher gas prices on the receipt...

That isn't humanly possible, you will blow out your neurotransmitters and not be able to think. Only being semi serious, but we can't make that many decisions a day.

Right, but you can imagine eg a hierarchy, in which case you might only talk with -say- 10 reports directly.

That isn't typically how abstraction is tallied. The ceo doesn't say they use 15k employees, or the programmer uses 30B transistors. Or the director uses 120 workers. You enumerate what you actually interact with.

Tics, tropes are worn out predictable plot devices

Too late

https://tropes.fyi/