gdudeman

There is so obviously competition in this market it’s astounding to me that people attribute all this malicious behavior to the model companies.

They’re growing over 10x a year. They want users and revenue. In order to get users and revenue, they want to provide the smartest models at affordable prices. If they unnecessarily burn tokens, users will get less value and switch.

This thread is filled with competing comments about their monopolistic power and how when one model provider was no longer doing a good job people switched to a different one.

The competition in this market is ferocious!

In my experience starting with Gemini 2.5 Pro, moving to 3 and 3.1, 3.5 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and finally 3.7 Flash, 3.7 Flash is just as good if not better than 3 especially on high resolution mode (same token count per page as 3.1).

I run complicated, messy PDFs through these models. 2.5 Pro required a lot of kludgy hacks to get it to fully "see," but from 3.1 pro on I've removed many of them and haven't spotted problems.

3.7 Flash scores better than 3.1 pro on most benchmarks, leading me to believe that even if your OCR requires reasoning to interpret text or data, 3.7 Flash is probably going to be better.

Yes. I have Claude route to codex all the time as part of a dev process where fable is manager and it oversees the work of sidekicks and subagents. It’s happy to comply.

Sorry - the older group has higher rates of dementia than the younger group when they reach the same age - so when they reach 75, they're more likely to have dementia.

I believe that there are studies that show that merely getting very sick increases your chance of dementia - essentially it ages you faster or brings chronic disease forward. If that's the case, vaccines for things like the flu - a disease you're likely to get - are probably good overall.

They also activate the immune system in generaly, which could probably go either way in terms of longevity.

In general I don't think vaccines are preventing so much as delaying dementia, but if they stop chronic infection they might be.

People who are immune compromised qualify for this. I'm not sure how much your insurance company would push back on that though.

Computer use is a great idea. It gets the job done when nothing else will.

If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently.

I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish their goals.

For anyone trying to figure out how to build a society where no one wants to be a criminal, I highly recommend When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark Kleiman.

There are evidence-backed ways of reducing criminality.

One counterintuitive way of reducing crime is to increase the likelihood of being caught, to have small-but-increasing consequences for committing crimes, and to increase the swiftness of sentencing.

For example, if you are caught drinking and driving, you immediately spend 1-2 days in jail.

Long sentences are not very productive at reducing crime or at least are a very inefficient way to do so.

Curious how you tested this - did you do repeated home tests to figure this out?

I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.

Is there an alternative?

We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.

I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.

Then we should work together as a society to fix the law and make sure it's applied evenly. Hard to do, but necessary.

Is there an alternative?