"According to the Government of Canada Job Bank, the median annual salary for a General Practitioner (GP) in Canada is $233,726 (CAD) as of January 23, 2024."
That's roughly $170,000 in the US. If you adjust for anything reasonable, such as GDP per capita or median income between the US & Canada, that $170k figure matches up very well with the median US general practitioner figure of around $180k-$250k (sources differ, all tend to fall within that range). The GPs in Canada may in fact be slightly better paid than in the US.
Humans are extraordinarily lazy sometimes too. A good LLM does not possess that flaw.
A doctor can also have an in-the-moment negatively impactful context: depression, exhaustion, or any number of life events going on, all of which can drastically impact their performance. Doctors get depressed like everybody else. They can care less due to something affecting them. These are not problems a good LLM has.
I mean, yeah. When people way saving the planet they mean saving humanity. That's exactly it. A barren rock does no one no good. I don't get it why people hang onto this expression, it's as if you heard that George Carlin bit and now that's your anchor to reality.
It's not like the dinosaurs had a save the earth campaign. Yet, before humans the rock had life forms that died out while the rock itself continued being a viable planet supporting life. If humans die off, the planet will continue on with life continuing in new ways.
For the past 50+ years there really has been a somewhat significant and quite influential body of people who genuinely want to preserve the planet’s ecosystem even at the expense of the people living on it.
$658 billion in op income for just six companies, growing at 10%+ per year. Maybe $8.5-$9 trillion in op income over the next decade. They have nothing else to spend it on other than over-priced share buybacks or dividends, most are under realistic anti-trust restrictions and can't freely buy major competitors. AI is an open field and they have the capital to burn.
Without all that financial firepower in the background driving everything none of it happens.
The largest resource use of AI over the next 50 years will be generating entertainment structures for humans. Productivity focused AI will be the most economically useful, however it'll be far less resource intensive than the entertainment generation (generally speaking, AI tasked with driving human pleasure).
World building alone will be at least a magnitude greater in resource use than all productivity-focused AI combined (including robotics + AI). Then throw in traditional media generation (audio, images, video, textual).
AI will be the ultimate sedative for humanity. We're going into the box and never coming back out and absolutely nothing can stop that from happening. For at least 95% of humanity the future value that AI offers in terms of bolstering pleasure-of-existence is far beyond the alternatives it's not really worth considering any other potential outcome, there will be no other outcome. Most of humanity will lose interest in the mundane garbage of dredging through day to day mediocrity (oh I know what you're thinking: but but but life isn't really that mediocre - yes, it definitely is, for the majority of the eight billion it absolutely is).
Out there is nothing, more nothing, some more nothing, a rock, some more nothing, some more of what we already know, nothing, more nothing, and a lot more nothing. In there will be anything you want. It's obvious what the masses will overwhelmingly choose.
That's what people widely claimed about Uber: it was toast once the investor subsidies stopped. Now it's quite profitable.
People will pay more. Claude Opus 4.5 is worth more than $20 per month, as is Gemini 3 Pro. These services keep getting better. Another three years of improvement, why shouldn't that command $30 or $40 instead?
$20 is ~$10 in the year 2000 per the BLS inflation calculator (or $1.25 when priced in gold). Nobody would have thought that was expensive for such utility. These are inexpensive tools at present.
At its worst, Uber had a net margin of -~60%. The AI labs are all running at least negative triple digit net margins, some running negative quadruple digit net margins. This is why AGI has been "forecasted" to death by the labs, because investors need the promise of infinite automation to stomach the losses.
Anyway, in this instance, what you received for $20 in 2025 will run you somewhere in the range of $60-$90 in 2027/2028. In the interim, you will likely see that $30-$40 of service gets you what cost $20 in 2025. The most likely avenue for this will be reduction in subscription user limits, and for API customers premiumization through substitution. The latter being a situation where what would be the next Claude Sonnet model is now sold as Claude Opus, for example.
The only way the math works for the consumer is if the user base has become dependent on the service instead of remaining in a conventional cost/benefit relationship.
I think you're ignoring that most users of AI currently aren't paying anything, nor would they. I believe the value of a Facebook user was $70 per year in 2023, for the US and Canada. Assuming that the AI companies could make twice that from ads, that's still only $10 - $12 per month, and even less in the rest of the world. Obviously there's going to be some business users as well, so they can cover some of the cost, but would also be responsible for a larger portion of the running cost.
The question should be how many free users can the AI companies convert.
The cost of an Uber has also gone way up, and they basically have a monopoly in many areas.
The cost of free users is much lower because they are served lite models, hit quota limits quickly, and can't soak up tokens by using agents. The main capacity usage is from agent loops, which is universally behind a paid tier.
So long as personal information is not collected, consent is not morally necessary.
If I collect information on how often a coin-op Street Fighter II game is played in an arcade, while collecting no personal information, consent is not needed.
You are not entitled to play the game, which is hosted on their server which requires bandwidth and other resources. In the same way that you are free to make demands about how software runs on your machine, the author is free to make demands about the use of their software.
If the data gathered is only on gameplay, and not something that can be used as PII like IP addresses or device information, then it should be fine. Gathering things like the score and time spent completing the level, isn't a problem. This could be used to rank the levels, without gathering any user information.
On the Internet: any movie I want to watch; any song I want to listen to; an endless parade of games to play via Steam et al.; about a zillion games I can play online with friends; numerous app store options, and an entire other world of smartphone games I can play alone or with friends; inexpensive LLMs I can do almost anything I want to with, wherever my imagination takes me; porn, a lot of porn; infinite social media; infinite videos on youtube; any skill I want to learn, there is - what might as well be - unlimited material on how to do it; any book I want to read; communications, email, instant messaging, tele-whatever; just about any kind of get-x-done software I could ask for, and if it doesn't exist an LLM will create it for me tonight; shopping, whatever you want to buy, you can shop for it, research it, look at it; want to start an LLC? Internet. Want to file a trademark? Internet. Want a passport? Internet. Book a flight/hotel/B&B/car rental? Internet. Plot a holiday? Internet. Have a hobby? Communities on one platform or another. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
The internet is the scaffolding/structure, the Web is what people are doing in a browser (i.e., over HTTP) in it.
Then there's also the stuff people do on the internet without a browser/HTTP. Nobody opens an IMAP/SSH/BitTorrent/IRC client or whatever and thinks of that as surfing the Web, because those aren't browsers nor are they primarily speaking HTTP.
I'm not sure, but the grand-parent might be drawing from Hakim Bey's distinction between Net and Web. This is from TAZ, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991):
We’ve spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all — so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we’ll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex — they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to define areas but to suggest tendencies.
I appreciate when "Woe is Me" style comments are knocked down a notch when they conveniently ignore half of the world. The activity surrounding the discussion is indeed using networked applications, of which the web is only one.
So I don't think they were being needlessly pedantic, nor do I think they didn't understand what the parent meant by internet in the colloquial.
Lots of different ways one could take this: maybe whom they were responding to is just being lazy, that the good parts of the internet are there for them to explore, but they are beholden to their web browser and their favorite loathed platforms that 'make the internet suck'.
Or maybe whom they were responding to really has gone the rounds and really has considered all the options and bemoans how difficult the non-web internet services are to use, and how inelegant they can be at times and what a pain they are to maintain if it isn't your full time job.
There can be so many ways to take written material on the internet; more often even pedantic comments at least let us ensure we aren't simply reaffirming our own biases.
Russia invades. Ukraine launches nukes. Every major city in Ukraine is ash. Several major cities in Russia are ash. Millions die plausibly.
That scenario is not what would happen from an invasion.
Zelensky would not have used nukes to prompt the death of millions instantly. He would have proceeded with the same defensive war.
The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? Obviously not what the masses would have chosen (just look at what they did choose to do while living under Russian occupation - how many gave up their lives to fight back?). It's fundamentally why nuclear weapons as deterrant is largely fraudulent. They're solely viable as a last option against total oblivion at the hands of an enemy: it entails everyone dies, which means there has to be a good enough reason for everyone to die to justify use.
This isn’t how nukes would get used. They wouldn’t just fire them at cities to start with. It would most likely be something tactical, but perhaps end up escalating to insanity anyway
You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass. All leaving additional escalation on the table does is make sure that you don't make good on your word to make everyone lose too.
> You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass
Tactical nukes are in ambiguous territory. Russia launching a blizzard of nukes at Ukraine is difficult to distinguish from Russia nuking NATO. To turn Ukraine into glass, Russia would need to gamble that Washington and France trust it.
Sure, but that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do, then most of NATO sitting at DEFCON 1 and being ready to respond the instant any Russian missiles look like they're not going towards Ukraine. NATO has no reason to inject themselves into a nuclear exchange more than diplomatically, and has the ability to respond well after they know where Russian missiles are going to land.
> that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do
Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike. Russia glassing Ukraine is about as rational as it launching a first strike. So serious people would have to weigh–based on incomplete information–whether Putin is still in charge and if tens of millions of lives might be saved if we neutralise their silos first.
Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)
> Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike.
It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going. All NATO needs is enough time to respond, and they absolutely have that.
> Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)
If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike. India for instance has officially said they "will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail". https://web.archive.org/web/20091205231912/http://www.indian... That's diplomatic speak for 'we reserve the right to glass you after any nuclear strikes in our territory'.
> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going
What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads.
Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea?
> All NATO needs is enough time to respond
This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written.
Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey.
> If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike
I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalising nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.
> What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads.
> Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea?
Because while you can't tell how far a missile is going to go, you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable of tracking that a missile has gone past what would make sense for a Russian strike on Ukraine.
And you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not. Orbital mechanics and the burn patterns of ICBMs don't really let you redirect at the last minute, and the trajectory wouldn't really make sense.
> This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written.
> Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey.
Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left. It's all either airborne or submarine delivery these days.
In this scenario the weapons are all already in the air, or on submarines where they've been as safe as they always are.
> I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalizing nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.
Once again, the context here is a Ukrainian nuclear (even if tactical) first strike, and the subsequent Russian retaliation. "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized. Which is why a "tactical" nuclear strike would never make sense.
> you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable of tracking that a missile has gone past what would make sense for a Russian strike on Ukraine
Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)
> you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not
At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.
> Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left
I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.
> "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized
Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.
Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.
> Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)
I already said they'd be at DEFCON 1.
> At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.
Waiting might also keep you out of a nuclear war. They know exactly how long they can wait.
> I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.
Convential forces are inconsequential wrt a full nuclear strike.
> Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.
I already quoted you the exact policy from one of your examples.
> Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.
If you were retaliating because NK had already set off a tactical nuke in your territory? Once again, the orbital mechanics don't work like that. Looking at it, the only thing you could hit from US silos launched so that they look like they're hitting North Korea would maybe be Hong Kong. Which once those missiles go past North Korea, China is already considering it a first strike and retaliating, so you didn't really gain anything.
Your comment highlights some tensions in deterrence theory, but it also oversimplifies over a few things.
If you notice, most countries with nuclear weapons also have published and publicized nuclear use policies. These documents usually highlight lines and conditions under which they will consider the use of nuclear weapons. This is by design. Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation. Of course, you don't want complete certainty, lest you risk your enemy push right up to your line and no further; you want your lines defined, but a little blurry, so that the enemy is afraid to approach, much less cross. This is called strategic ambiguity. This is why Russia has been criticized a lot by policy experts for their repeated nuclear saber-rattling. They're making the line too blurry, and so Ukraine and their allies risk crossing that line accidentally, triggering something nobody truly wants to trigger.
In the case of a nuclear-armed Ukraine, given Russia's tendency to like to take over neighboring countries, they could include "threats to territorial integrity" as a threshold for going nuclear. They could also be a little more 'reasonable' and include "existential threat to the state" - which the initial 2022 invasion very much would fit.
What this looks like in practice is that Russia, in their calculations, would factor in the risk of triggering a nuclear response if they tried to take Ukrainian territory. Now, they may believe, as you seem to, that Ukraine would not risk the annihilation of its people over Crimea/Donbas. At which point, Russia would invade, and then Ukraine would have to decide. If Ukraine does not escalate, then they will lose deterrence and credibility for any future conflicts, assuming they survive as a state. If Ukraine does escalate, announces to Russia they will launch a nuclear attack to establish deterrence (reducing ambiguity that this is a full nuclear exchange), and then launches a single low-yield nuke at Russian invading troops, they place the ball back in Russia's court: Ukraine is clearly willing to employ nukes in this war - do you believe they won't escalate further, or do you believe they will launch their full arsenal if you continue?
This is essentially a simplified version of deterrence theory. The idea is to give the other side all possible opportunities to de-escalate and prevent a full nuclear exchange. If you do not back up your policy with actual teeth - by using nukes when you said you would - you're signalling something very dangerous.
This is also why nuclear-armed states do not tend to rely solely on their nuclear deterrence. They want a solid layer of conventional capabilities before they have to resort to their proverbial nuclear button. A strong conventional force keeps conflicts below the nuclear threshold, where deterrence theory tends to get very dangerous, very fast.
>The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
You have to assume everyone is willing to die over every single thing short of obliteration.
So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides. Please, explain that laughable premise. Everyone in Venezuela dies for Maduro? Go on, explain it, I'll wait.
Back in reality: Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela shakes its fists at the sky, threatens nuclear hell fire. Nothing happens. Why? The remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro.
> So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides.
US attacks, Maduro threatens to launch nuke(s) ... then what? Do you call bluff?
Maduro was capture in a militair base (as he did a Saddam, switching sleeping locations), he almost made it into a safe room. What if he had nukes and made it to the safe room. You know the expression "Cornered rat"... For all he knew, the US was there to kill him. The US killed his 30 Cuban bodyguards so high change Maduro thought its his end.
> "Cornered rat" refers to the idiom that even weak individuals become desperate and dangerous when given no escape, often applied to intense political or military pressure.
The scenario that you called, that nobody wants to die for Maduro, is you gambling that nobody want to die for him or not follow the chain of command! Do you want to risk it? No matter how many precaution you take, are you really sure that not one or more nukes go to Texas or Miami?
This is why Nukes are so powerful, even in the hands of weaker countries. It gives a weaker country a weapon that may inflict untold dead to the more powerful country (let alone the political impact). Its a weapon that influences decision making, even in the most powerful countries.
Are you trying to argue that M.A.D. hasn't been an effective deterrent to violence for decades?
Do you think the US and EU would have hesitated to send enough arms to keep Ukraine comfortably fending off Russia if they weren't afraid of the nuclear threat that Russia kept toying with?
"According to the Government of Canada Job Bank, the median annual salary for a General Practitioner (GP) in Canada is $233,726 (CAD) as of January 23, 2024."
That's roughly $170,000 in the US. If you adjust for anything reasonable, such as GDP per capita or median income between the US & Canada, that $170k figure matches up very well with the median US general practitioner figure of around $180k-$250k (sources differ, all tend to fall within that range). The GPs in Canada may in fact be slightly better paid than in the US.
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