So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.

I downloaded the app to listen and write constructive notes for people, but I can’t enter the app until I’ve given microphone access and recorded a 30s clip. I’m on the bus, and can’t provide that audio now, and I’ll almost certainly forget about the app before I get 30 free seconds this evening. I think you’ll drop a lot of first time users here.

I do a bunch of work in remote areas with low-ping/low-bandwidth networks. The “hold on a skimmer while we round trip to Google” dark pattern makes the service unusable for me when I’m on-location.

Vulcan Materials Company has produced some of the strongest and most resilient economic gains for investors at around 25% gross margins for 50 years.

Vulcan’s business is crushing rocks, and then driving those rocks to where people need crushed rocks.

I mention it because Vulcan isn’t a sophisticated business at its core, but its economic returns are exceptional, because they do their unsophisticated work exceptionally well, and exceptionally efficiently.

Across the economy, most economic gains are created by companies like Vulcan, who do boring repetitive work exceptionally well and efficiently.

I expect this to hold true into the era of AI. Most stuff probably doesn’t need an exceptional model, and paying for an exceptional model to do unsophisticated work will leave your business vulnerable to competitors who take time to find the most efficient model for the task, and undercut you.

I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.

I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.

I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.

Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.

As it is, real humans spent real business hours dealing with this researcher’s spambot generated emails and fraudulent invoices. Individual recipients reported feeling harassed.

This isn’t a good benchmark. It’s a series of socially destructive crimes committed by the researchers and then documented and published on the internet.

There's lots of competing definitions of art, but I don't think the article has reasonably linked programming to any of them. Maybe there's a thin & stretched link to the concept of a starving artist.

Looking at the wayback machine, the site was first published in January 2026 with no blog. Then in Feb, the site was updated with a blog archive, including posts from 2025, before the site's blog functionality was active.

The blog post ends:

>I don’t use AI when writing. It produces soulless, bland text. AI slop that no one wants to read

But if you look back through earlier essays you see stuff like this:

>Technology evolves. Complacency endures. Building something means taking responsibility for its survival. It’s respect for time that can never be regained

Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).

I don’t think it’d be a slam-dunk by any means, but a reasonably competent legal team should be able to establish a case around malicious data interference at the least. There’s certainly enough merit to the idea that OpenAI would be better off settling it as a civil matter early.

If your task is "write a function to sort a list of 1mn entries alphabetically", a small coding model will exactly match the performance of a frontier model (it'll 1-shot it, with 100% accuracy). So the only differentiator is cost, and the frontier model will cost orders of magnitude more than the specialised model.

For most intelligence based tasks, you don't (and never have) needed the tool which "performs best at all tasks". You need the cheapest one which performs adequately for your immediate task.

This doesn't mean the bitter lesson is incorrect. At the frontier, it's still correct. It means that it's not applicable at all to lots of tasks.

Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.

Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.

Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.

The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.

I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".

The models you can run on a high-spec laptop today are approximately where frontier models were 12-18mo ago (albeit at a lower tok/s rate). If you scan back through hn comments from that era, you’ll find plenty of people saying “this is powerful enough to massively increase my productivity”.