That may just be regulatory inertia keeping you safe.
Most people aren't building insanely stupid and dangerous homes because in most places they legally can't, and very few work specifically just in your county, so they just do what they mostly do, which is mostly safe and up to code. Maybe they cut a few corners. Probably a few weirdos doing entirely their own thing.
By the same token, if your weird neck of the woods made seatbelts non mandatory, it wouldn't mean everyone takes them off as they drive through, so the subsequent maintained levels of vehicular loss of life would say nothing about the increase of safety seatbelts provide. A few weirdos might be taking the belt off, though!
Still, it'd only take one weirdo's entirely preventable and lethal to their kids house fire/car crash to prove them idiotic and probably get the law changed.
Many people and kids die from effects of homelessness yet regulations that make houses less accessible persist, so I'm not confident of your thesis people will fix the laws to save the kids.
I would posit one of the best things we could do to save children would be to completely deregulate the housing industry and eliminate trades licensing. This would not only enable housing accessibility but more money for education, healthcare, and good food for kids.
As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.
Google has killed so many amazing businesses -- entire industries, even, by giving people something expensive for free until the competition dies, and then they enshittify hard.
It's cool to have access to it, but please be careful not to mistake corporate loss leaders for authentic products.
It's not free. And it's legit one of the best models. And it was a Google employee who was among the authors of the paper that's most recognized as kicking all this off. They give somewhat limited access in AIStudio (I have only hit the limits via API access, so I don't know what the chat UI limits are.) Don't they all do this? Maybe harder limits and no free API access. But I think most people don't even know about AIStudio.
True. They are ONLY good when they have competition. The sense of complacency that creeps in is so obvious as a customer.
To this day, the Google Home (or is it called Nest now?) speaker is the only physical product i've ever owned where it lost features over time. I used to be able to play the audio of a Youtube video (like a podcast) through it, but then Google decided that it was very very important that I only be able to play a Youtube video through a device with a screen, because it is imperative that I see a still image when I play a longform history podcast.
Obviously, this is a silly and highly specific example, but it is emblematic of how they neglect or enshittify massive swathes of their products as soon as the executive team loses interest and puts their A team on some shiny new object.
The experience on Sonos is terrible. There are countless examples of people sinking 1000s of dollars into Sonos ecosystem, and the new app update has rendered them useless.
I'm experiencing the same problem with my Google Home ecosystem. One day I can turn off the living room lights with the simple phrase "Turn off Living Room Lights," and then randomly for two straight days it doesn't understand my command
Preach it my friend. For years on the Google Home Hub (or Nest Hub or whatever) I could tell it to "favorite my photo" of what is on the screen. This allowed me to incrementally build a great list of my favorite photos on Google Photos and added a ton of value to my life. At some point that broke, and now it just says, "Sorry, I can't do that yet". Infuriating
The usage limit for experimental gets used up pretty fast in a vibe-coding situation. I found myself setting up an API account with billing enabled just to keep going.
How would I know if it’s useful to me without being able to trial it?
Googles previous approach (Pro models available only to Gemini Advanced subscribers, and Advanced trials can’t be stacked with Google One paid storage, or rather they convert the already paid storage portion to a paid, much shorter Advanced subscription!) was mind-bogglingly stupid.
Having a free tier on all models is the reasonable option here.
In this case, Google is a large investor in Anthropic.
I agree that giving away access to expensive models long term is not a good idea on several fronts. Personally, I subscribe to Gemini Advanced and I pay for using the Gemini APIs.
EDIT: a very good deal, at $10/month is https://apps.abacus.ai/chatllm/ that gives you access to almost all commercial models as well as the best open weight models. I have never come close at all to using my monthly credits with them. If you like to experiment with many models the service is a lot of fun.
The problem with tools like this is that somewhere in the chain between you and the LLM are token reducing “features”. Whether it’s the system prompt, a cheaper LLM middleman, or some other cost saving measure.
You’ll never know what that something is. For me, I can’t help but think that I’m getting an inferior service.
You can self host something like https://big-agi.com/ and grab your own keys from various providers. You end up with the above, but without the pitfalls you mentioned.
BIG-AI does look cool, and supports a different use case. ABACUS.AI takes your $10/month and gives you credits that go towards their costs of using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc. Use of smaller open models use very few credits.
The also support an application development framework that looks interesting but I have never used it.
You might be correct about cost savings techniques in their processing pipeline. But they also add functionality: they bake web search into all models which is convenient. I have no affiliation with ABACUS.AI, I am just a happy customer. They currently let me play with 25 models.
Just look at Chrome to see the bard/gemini's future. HN folks didn't care about Chrome then but cry about Google's increasingly hostile development of Chrome.
Look at Android.
HN behaviour is more like a kid who sees the candy, wants the candy and eats as much as it can without worrying about the damaging effect that sugar will have on their health. Then, the diabetes diagnosis arrives and they complain
If you have any links or book recommendations to share on that history, I for one would love to know them.
I find the history of the interactions of SF authors strangely compelling -- e.g. the book "Hell's Cartographers" is a personal favourite, and it's just a set of autobiographical essays from NY 40s-70s SF authors talking about their time in the scene.
You guys are all talking about a national average number of unhealthy fine particulate pollution days like it's a) the only metric of pollution and b) driven directly and deterministically by just US federal policy. You're also all acting like COVID was just a giant switch that turned on and then off again.
None of this is valid analysis. None of this is meaningful -- this is just a pile of snide bullshitting on the back of a random article.
What about forest fires in the years measured? Hurricane activity? Humidity and wind patterns? What was the data like in Chicago vs Seattle vs Houston, what were the state and municipal policies?
> What about forest fires in the years measured? Hurricane activity? Humidity and wind patterns? What was the data like in Chicago vs Seattle vs Houston, what were the state and municipal policies?
Yeah, exactly! I’m not saying Biden caused air quality to get worse in 2023. That was probably the Canadian forest fires that year. My point is that the reporting on this is bullshit. Lots of outlets ran stories about the 5% increase from 2016 to 2018 in this air quality metric. But then they ignored the much bigger fluctuations that came after.
I’m not saying the opposite happened, my point is that you cant trust the media any farther than you can throw it.
> personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.
What, exactly, about Rumeysa Ozturk's student newspaper contributions[1] could possibly justify the notion that her _residence in America_ is compromising a compelling US foreign policy interest?
The clear purpose of that statute including a long list of properties which would not normally be grounds for exclusion is to set a reasonably high bar for the Secretary of State's 'personal opinion' about a compromising admission. If the intent were to grant a broad, beyond question license to deport Fulbright scholars for _engagement in society_, it would just say they can do whatever the fuck they want and skip the salad.
...do you mean per capita? because all of latin america has north of 600 million people, versus (at the time of the famine) ireland's ~7 million, so "more" would in strict terms be very unsurprising. Like it would basically be a given that a whole continent contributes far more immigrants than a small country.
Google's automated result on "irish immigration to america during the potato famine" suggests ~1.5 million Irish folks resettled in America during the famine, though the first source I checked[1] claimed ~2M. No automated google result came back for "total latin american immigration to america 2015-2025", but this article[2] claims that the immigrant latin american population was ~2.73M in 2010 and ~3.91M in 2020, an increase of 1.2M people over 12 years. That feels like it could be low, so a second check over on Wikipedia[3] claims that total immigration from "the americas", including Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc., totaled ~4.22 M from 2012-2022, the most recently included year. Technically that is more in absolute numbers, if you also stretch the definition of Latin America, I guess?
So, what the heck are you talking about? Can you back those claims up?
> He said that it could come to American shores - the bite, the cyberwar, the nukes - not necessarily only the army.
> You think Russia is going to nuke America if Ukraine loses the war?
jump right to the most extreme possible claim to pull from the above and _strrrretch_ it -- impeccable form! It's not even a logical fallacy, it's just lying about what the person before you said, presented as though they look foolish for saying it. Smooth, hollow, soulless stuff.
Most people aren't building insanely stupid and dangerous homes because in most places they legally can't, and very few work specifically just in your county, so they just do what they mostly do, which is mostly safe and up to code. Maybe they cut a few corners. Probably a few weirdos doing entirely their own thing.
By the same token, if your weird neck of the woods made seatbelts non mandatory, it wouldn't mean everyone takes them off as they drive through, so the subsequent maintained levels of vehicular loss of life would say nothing about the increase of safety seatbelts provide. A few weirdos might be taking the belt off, though!
Still, it'd only take one weirdo's entirely preventable and lethal to their kids house fire/car crash to prove them idiotic and probably get the law changed.