The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.

I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

So, here is my question to the community: what is the play here?

I don't buy the money angle, since they're about to be bleeding subscribers. I hardly can justify paying for Max anymore and switched to Codex at work first time in months after I spent 4 very frustrating hours trying to get the model to fix the code to my liking.

I also don't buy the corporate angle. Models are part of infrastructure, like APIs and the same rule apply to them. Mostly: don't break the integrations. Since new generation of models can completely break output expectations, deploying them becomes organizational effort and support for older ones is abysmal. At some point those organizations will get tired of "adapting" all the time.

So what's the play here?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854309

Points: 10

# Comments: 8

It's resource curse on steroids.

Unless of course everybody is forced to buy your currency to get an essential resource. This causes: - the currency to maintain value better - puts you in position of other countries having to maintain a trade surplus with you so they can actually purchase said resource - the oil producers end up with great amounts of your currency, which they have to spend, getting a political foothold in your country.

Petrodollar almost certainly was devastating to US economy. And like most resource curses, it's like a drug - you need to stop taking it to get better, but it will hurt as hell.

And since when murdering the leaders repeatedly is a valid war strategy?

Not even mentioning that Chamenei was killed together with a daughter, son in law and a grandson. But who cares about accidental casualties, right? Just one more kid.

We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.

It's certainly helpful, but has a tendency to go for very non idiomatic patterns (like using exceptions for control flow).

Plus, it has issues which I assume are the effect of reinforcement learning - it struggles with letting things crash and tends to silence things that should never fail silently.

Static allocation requires you to explicitly handle overflows, but also by centralizing them, you probably need not to have as many handlers.

Technically, all of this can happen as well in language with allocations. It’s just that you can’t force the behavior.

We used to have very little memory, so we developed many tricks to handle it.

Now we have all the memory we need, but tricks remained. They are now more harmful than helpful.

Interestingly, embedded programming has a reputation for stability and AFAIK game development is also more and more about avoiding dynamic allocation.

It’s actually quite tricky though. The allocation still happens and it’s not limited to, so you could plausibly argue both ways.