* - not while any of us reading this are under 65.

First, obviously everyone involved understands that someone has to pay to provide a free service. Everyone involved also knows that this sometimes makes sense as a business strategy (I have not paid to ship anything from Amazon for close to two decades).

Second, OpenRouter's business model specifically does not require them to run all (any?) of the models available through the platform. Provider is one of the choices when you choose a model, and each provider can have separate pricing.

The link you posted shows only one provider, Crucible. That may/may not be affiliated with OpenRouter? Even assuming an affiliation, it's opaque who is subsidizing this usage. Is it OpenRouter or Crucible?

All of this is somewhat of a distraction. Even if someone gave search away for free (like Google), it would still be an accomplishment to get to half a percent of Google's volume. Or to sell half a percent of the volume of Android phones. Or whatever.

Kudos to the OpenRouter team!

> Gemini is processing 746T per week

I read this totally differently. A startup nobody really knows is doing half a percent of Google on a commodity task?!? Google, which puts Gemini on billions of devices by default, without the user asking? Google, which is distributing Gemini to users who are unaware they are even using it?

Versus a startup that does not even have a login button on its homepage?

This is astonishing.

Even if you set your dividends to automatically reinvest via a DRIP program, you still pay taxes on dividends in the year in which they are issued. This reduces the effect of compounding.

> plus the stock

The key point in a buyback is that each share of stock becomes worth more because the company is divided into fewer units. So each share is worth more than it would be had the case instead been used to pay dividends.

DropBox & Box have both moved in this direction, but perhaps not aggressively enough? I'm thinking in particular about e-signing, where DocuSign has a market cap roughly equal to the sum of DropBox & Box. Both have e-sign products; I am fairly certain that I have never encountered either in the wild despite routinely being sent other e-sign links.

AI is perhaps another emerging opportunity. Instead of uploading documents to a dumb pipe, let me have the pipe do things to them. Dumb, simple example would be I can put PDFs in a folder and after a one-time setup, I can share an API link that lets my users extract specified data from those PDFs via secure JSON API. Or simple CMS instead of WordPress. Or analyze documents flowing through a folder for x, y, z anomalies and alert me.

2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.

Wait, do people consider xAI a frontier AI lab?

> Starlink seems to be a real cash machine

It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink.

The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.

Quick note -- Reddit went public in 2024, so Condé Nast is no longer their owner.

From most perspectives (civilian, political, financial), the "better" military is the one that wins. Your'e arguing that a navy can be a shadow of its former glory and still also be what is understood as "better" by most people. This doesn't make sense.

phil21 makes a relevant point that navies are used for different purposes, and the current US Navy is tuned for a different task than that which it currently faces in the Gulf.

This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?

Using conventional weapons only, what prior year's US Navy could beat the 2026 US Navy in combat?

Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.

1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

Pendulums swing. Anyone advocating for the development of more advanced technologies should be in favor of a system of fair laws enforced robustly. One need only look to countries that lack this foundation to understand why.

I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM