Sony will be around a while too, but as you've just seen here, it's not about how healthy the company hosting the video files is.

You're forgetting there's a slice of people who want to "own" a movie library but don't have the technical acumen to rip and/or (more importantly) host (consider that you'd have to stand up a Jellyfin server and have a good amount of HDD space -- I personally have 50TB).

Again, it's not _that_ hard in general but daunting enough and with high enough startup costs to dissuade a lot of people.

I'm guessing probably not. If it was truly the no-brainer "cheap AND fast AND better" option everyone thinks it is, data centers would be rolling out renewables right now. They're not so dumb that they'd pass up on a superior, cheaper solution just because.

Boy, when you put it that way it makes me wonder why people didn't appreciate the genius of Trump's tarrifs.

Answer true or false. One couple+one child requires less housing (in the short-to-medium term) than one couple+one immigrant.

Let's say a couple have two children. From t=0 until approximately t=20, all four people require one housing unit.

If that same couple does not have children (guess what's happening in every single western country!) and we instead lean on migration to increase the population for them, at t=0 you have at least 2, maybe 3 housing units required for the same number of people. It's not complicated.

What great art are these folks producing since they aren't burdened by having to work to survive? Mumble rap on Soundcloud? Shitty graffiti on every building?

Well I saw $200/month and thought you were talking about a max plan, sorry. But I will say unless you're using that top end model extremely judiciously $200 for 2-4 weeks of work is similarly hard to believe (see the other poster breaking down their usage). What are you typically doing? Must be pretty hardcore stuff if you need to use the baddest available model. How many interactions per day? Care to share your token usage stats?

> $50 would be 10M input tokens, not tens of thousands.

Two things. One, input tokens are but one component, and the cheapest. Output tokens include the tens of thousands being spit out for file changes AND the thinking/crunching that you don't see. And that's the most expensive part. And remember, that's per iteration, not everything is one-shot (especially with tasks like "fix this large part of my codebase).

I think it's like that, but not quite. The people who have a subscription but barely use it were probably never doing any serious work with AI in the first place. I.e., why would they get a subscription when their one or two chat questions (or, "make a picture of me as a superhero" prompts) per day can be had for free?

Especially with Claude, I think people who subscribe skew very heavily towards people that can very easily make more than $20 worth of queries in a month. And then there's the not-insignificant number of people who are tokenmaxxing.

It's like the gym membership model except ten percent of members are able to spend 72 hours per day at the gym while the rest spend 8 IMO.

I have absolutely seen stuff like this happen. Think about it, when you point Claude at a bunch of files, it has to suck them all up (tens of thousands of tokens), spend some proportional number of tokens doing stuff, and spit them back out (tens of thousands of tokens) for each pass in the "cleanup" loop. I had a similar situation occur a few months ago. Very small "add Javadoc to these dozens of classes" scenario. Sonnet rapidly rate limited my $20 plan so I switched to extra usage. A very small (IMO) number of changes later I had spent like $7 in tokens.

The main problem is you really have no idea ahead of time just how many tokens a given task is going to take. I suggest you try spending a day running your Opus 4.8 High effort on API pricing to see just how much your $200 subscription is being subsidized before you confidently state that $50 for some TS cleanup task isn't possible.

Only on a pay-per-token basis, I think. Unless it's a very tight-knit circle of folks. Fixed monthly subscription costs I doubt would work in that model. Because you'll get the inevitable: someone pegging the service 24/7 because it's "unlimited" while everyone else suffers.

Sure, but imagine a situation where you've spent an hour going back and forth with the LLM trying to fix a problem and at the end of it you've only made minimal progress. Now you've spent an hour of your time AND $54 with little to show for it. It's a metric I don't think many people track: the cost of going in circles with an LLM for an extended period of time while burning tokens and still not resolving the problem.

Problem is you'll get some tribe coming out of the woodworks claiming whatever inaccessible area hundreds of miles from civilization is some sacred ground that can't be touched.