Plenty of people have a reason why they can’t do it, but plenty do it and are happier for finding their community IRL.

It aligns the incentives for faster, cheaper, terse and more reliable models, because the model providers pay the wasted tokens and electricity costs.

Cars are obviously useful at moving things around places (eg. Taxis are great, Fedex would never make sense as a service with public transit), but shaping our civic society around them have been terrible for the humans within it.

AI is obviously useful, and has proven clear use-cases that generate value. I think it'll be terrible if we make civic society for it like we did the car.

Additionally, the value generated by the best models with high-thinking and lots of context window is way higher than the cheap and tiny models, so you need to provide a "gateway drug" that lets people experience the best you offer.

The research seems to always get (intentionally?) misconstrued at headlines that LLM is “bad for you” as opposed to more mundanely stealing opportunities for exercise and practice of mental activities if you let it.

Honestly, it probably led to long conversations. The tokens/GPU time for one long conversation is more expensive than multiple short conversations. They’re trying to shore up their finances, and they’re moving away from the consumer market and towards enterprise, and students were probably a bad demographic to sell to.

Doesn’t seem too crazy for a generic react native app but of course coming from the official US government, it’s pretty wide open to supply chain attacks. Oh and no one should be continually giving the government their location. Pretty crazy that the official government is injecting JavaScript into web views to override the cookie banners and consent forms - it is often part of providing legal consent to the website TOS. But legal consent is not their strong suit I guess.

First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?

Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).

Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.

Wow NGL this sounds great if you ignore the reality that it'll be used as a partisan backdoor to enriching the administration.

Pragmatically, even basic words from your voice can be used to estimate your age, gender, and geographic region (local accents).

But also read other comments, people are saying they answer their phone by stating their name, so plenty clearly use it as a greeting.

It doesn't share my voice (for fingerprinting, demographic leak, etc, smh).

Also works as a bot filter - Humans tend to start with a "hello..?" because they're not sure anyone is there, while robots use the non-zero audio as a signal to start talking with full confidence.

The effort being discussed is a volunteer effort among a community of tech enthusiasts, who are disproportionately privacy-oriented vs the average person. This will undoubtable skew towards middle-aged male audiences, and will be extra-selective against children. It's a best-effort collection, they're probably not turning anyone away, and it's only what they can get, they're (AFAIK) not paying anyone to collect underrepresented demographics.

Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.

It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.

Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.

We could start today, but sweat shops and factories dominate the items on our shelves.

But I’m sure people will draw the line at human made software…/s

There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.

If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.