mehlmao
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
Every week, you would get a lottery ticket for every $25 in your account. In July 2020, expected value for a ticket was $.0227 ($.0157 if you exclude the jackpot, Tesla, and other top prizes that you were statistically unlikely to ever win). They also paid out a base APY of .20%, which was higher than savings accounts at a lot of big banks.
Adding those together, the APY came between 3.51% and 5.02%, which was good compared to most banks at the time. Over time they made changes which decreased the expected value of each ticket, I closed my account in 2021 when the rate was no longer competitive. Looks like I quit at the right time.
The PS5 was sold at a slight loss at launch, Sony got production costs down enough to be profitable about a year later (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/sony-rais...).
I'm less sure about Microsoft, my understanding is that the Series X is profitable and the Series S is a loss leader. However, both of them can be put into a developer mode and you can run your own (or other people's) code.
It's possible to imagine LLMs implemented responsibly, but our ruling class has decided against that.