As an example interaction, recently I sent ChatGPT a picture of my soldering station and say I'm having trouble with it being slow to melt and it says "well these are your upgrade options but really all you need is a chunkier tip with more thermal mass, he's a link to a tip set you could try" but then the link is dead and I'm able to google my own similar set and just buy it (it worked great).

Another one was wanting a U-shaped bracket to mount a riser on my desk, and the only ones I could find at the building supply store are L-shaped. I asked Chat about this and it said it's just too niche of an item to be mass produced but suggested I buy from someone doing semi-custom fabrication on etsy. Sure enough... another dead link, but I google it and find the store, and order.

Two cases where I didn't really know what I actually wanted/needed, and Chat successfully filled the gap with information I was able to independently verify afterward, but also Chat missed out on the opportunity to get a referral fee out of my eventual spend.

I expect some or all of the items I've been shown did exist for sale at some point in the past and information about them was in the training data.

I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.

It's more than just what is syntax or a language feature, for example RPython provides nts classes, but only very limited multiple inheritance; all the MRO stuff is implemented using RPython for PyPy itself.

I would say that the mainstream Canadian view is the opposite of this. We expect healthcare funding and many are supportive of the strikes when it gets cut, but we are much more likely to treat military budget as the purchase of a lot of unnecessary toys.

My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.

It's got to be desperately frustrating trying to fight this kind of thinking when you've got whole communities who have never even thought to question it.

My main hope at this point is with bottom-up type efforts. Let Mamdani show people that an effective city government can fill potholes and operate a few at-cost supermarkets. Let that be the start of citizens expecting more than chainsaw-waving and twitter meltdowns for their tax dollars.

Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if at least part of it is the attitude that investments in these areas are "welfare" and not simply a part of the portfolio of essential services that are delivered by the state to citizens?

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...

[2]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

Going big-name doesn't even help you here. It's the same story with Nvidia's Jetson platforms; they show up, then within 2-3 years they're abandonware, trapped on an ancient kernel and EOL Ubuntu distro.

You can't build a product on this kind of support timeline.

Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWV8irg64oM

One minor nuisance that can come up with GitHub in particular when using a short reference like #123 is that that link breaks if the repo is forked or merged into something else. For that reason, I try to give full-url references at least when I'm manually inserting them, and I wish GitHub would do the same. Or perhaps add some hidden metadata to the merge commit saying "hey btw that #123 refers to <https://github.com/fancy-org/omg-project/issues/123>"