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All these companies are offering quite generous subscription plans if you compare to API pricing.

There's gotta be a limit; nobody can afford to have tons of users who are losing them money every month.

Google has a library/format for that too, with FlatBuffers. Different use cases and advantages really, not clearly better/worse.

This is an extremely interesting article about game design and it's a bit silly to fixate on the title.

People really really want LLMs to output a highly reliable finished product, and I suspect we're probably never gonna get there. Lots of progress over the past couple years, but not on that.

I think it's much more interesting to focus on use cases which don't require that, where gen AI is an intermediate step, a creator of input (whether for humans or for other programs).

Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!

A ton of the early discourse about ChatGPT was as an outright Google killer. It mostly hasn't really panned out that way; there's some overlap but the web ain't dead yet. If nothing else, search is a necessary input to the machine.

Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.

Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.

It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.

It's certainly a socially weirder thing to do, but honestly I think someone playing music on their phone is probably less annoying/distracting than people having a loud conversation, which is far more common.

Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.

Apple is big and rich enough that surely it could operate its own carbon offset program, rather than simply throwing money at unreliable third parties. Buy the land, why not?

I would've thought that explicit discussion of suicide is one of those topics that chatbots will absolutely refuse to engage with. Like as soon as people started talking about using LLMs as therapists, it's really easy to see how that can go wrong.

Germany's discounters (ie, nearly all grocery stores) have long been hyper-efficient about checkouts. There is exactly one lane open until the line gets too long, then they open another. When the number of customers subsides, the second lane closes and the employee goes back to other tasks.

Only in recent years have self-checkouts started appearing in any significant number, and the formula hasn't changed. I guess theoretically stores might be able to cut back on employees, but it would be literally one or two people at most.

Good work with this, and the linked "special register groups" post.

I find myself intermittently fascinated with the origin and spread of certain ideas, which can often be hard to track. It's probably a bit simpler when it's a very specifically wrong idea.

I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society.

There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable.

All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).