I get you have to change limits, but reducing limits in a way which both applies retroactively and has a really long reset period is just infuriating. If they'd applied the new limits more gently or at the next billing period I'd probably have continued paying.

I don't mind paying a fair price for a service that provides value, but I really hate having a service I think I'm paying for rug-pulled with no clear justification.

The internet now truly has turned to shit!

Useful = able to be used for practical purposes.

As an extreme example, most effective weapons are useful to the person using them, but aren't necessarily a net benefit.

Is AI going to make life meaningfully better for most people? That's uncertain. Is it useful for the tasks in front of me today? Yes, definitely.

I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.

But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.

The cats out the bag though. What can we do?

Surely you can't argue in good faith today that LLMs aren't useful? It was a valid argument a year ago, but the latest models are absolutely useful at solving whole classes of problems.

They're not perfect, need to be carefully monitored, can cause weird gambling like dopamine rushes and can cause lazy development habits to creep in. But none of those things negate the fact that, in many situations, they are useful.

Whether it succeeds now depends a lot on the rate of improvement of model architecture. They're betting on model design and capability improvements slowing down - and then wiping the floor with everyone else with their inference economics.

Objectively if no-one has kids then there will be no more humans. I guess you could consider that an ecological win. If you don't, then someone has to have kids.

I look at the life my kids live, and it's not so different to my childhood. The toys are similar, their housing is similar. Probably the biggest difference is the availability of content on demand rather than much more fixed TV schedules.

The big difference in the last 30 years hasn't so much been in the kind of middle class life you can live, but the number of people who live that kind of life. In the 90s 40% of people globally were living in extreme poverty. Now its under 10%. The kinds of lives the middle class live in China and Vietnam are closer to those of Europeans today, when even 30 years ago most people in those countries were living much closer to the way your dad grew up.

I wonder if AI will result in a step change of living standards? Perhaps along with robotics we'll finally get to do nothing at all at home? I'm not convinced it'll be quick though. Maybe another 30 years.

Stuff like this:

> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.

And the headings starting with "The"

AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!

None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.

Western democracies don't have that problem. Yes, they have other problems. Many problems which are hard to solve. But if you live in a western democracy you can freely criticise those in power without fear of retribution.

What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

Ask your local model a verifiable question - for example a list of tallest buildings in Europe. I did it with Gemma on my laptop, and after the top 3 they were all fake. I just tried that again with Gemma-4 on my iphone, and it did even worse - the 3 tallest buildings in Europe are apparently the Burj Khalifa, the Torre Glories and the Shanghai Tower.

I wouldn't call that effective compression of information.

Early heat seeking missiles would use a single IR sensor with mechanical scanning.

Thermal imaging and machine vision, of the kind you can now do cheaply, isn't 80s tech. It's probably late-90s tech for advanced western states. And now it's starting to be ubiquitous cheap tech too. You can buy a thermal imaging camera with 20k pixels for a few hundred dollars now. Combine that with some image processing and you've got a very robust target detection pipeline.

I'm pretty sure I could buy everything I'd need to build a thermal imaging tracker for a few hundred dollars. So perhaps not surprising that Iran did the same.

The bell can be useful as a more general "I'm here" warning. But if there's any actual risk of a collision, yelling and braking are far more effective.