Really depends on your use case. For low value tasks this is way too expensive. But for context, let’s say a court opinion is an average of 6000 words. Let’s say i want to analyze 10 court opinions and pull some information out that’s relevant to my case. That will run about $1.80 per document or $18 total. I wouldn’t pay that just to edify myself, but i can think of many use cases where it’s still a negligible cost, even if it only does 5% better than the 30x cheaper model.
You’re also insane if you’re a lawyer trusting gen AI for that. Set aside the fact that people are being caught doing it and judges are clearly getting sick of it (so, it’s a threat to your license). You also have an ethical duty to your client. I really don’t understand lawyers who can sign off on papers without themselves having reviewed the material they’re basing it on. Wild.
I do the same thing as you but with owning the root domain, so no need for a +. In other words, I would use spectrum@example.com for this (i have a catchall rule so it forwards to the same place). I’ve never had an email validation issue and this actually makes more things validate, since some websites require you to enter a “business email” and this passes that (I think they basically filter out Gmail and others).
The price is fine. Maybe low. The real question is can you find users? There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of products out there that would improve my life that I have never heard of. There are many I have heard of that I’m too lazy or busy to try.
Your user is the type of person who obsessively checks their stripe account. They log in multiple times per day. Most people aren’t like that, but some are. Of those people, a small subset are early adopters and into trying new things. The real problem is how to find those people. Once you do, I’d suggest charging more. Once I’m getting my credit card out, I’m probably not paying attention to the difference between $19 and $19/yr. It either has to be so cheap (<$4) that the price feels negligible and I’ll buy on a whim or just charge more.
The biggest hurdle is between $0 and $0.01, because that’s the difference between pulling out my credit card or not.
Nice! You should check out a free chrome plugin that I wrote for this called revision history. It’s organically grown to 140k users, so the problem obviously resonates (revisionhistory.com).
From my experience, this is not necessarily true. Some companies might have the budget to pay at the 50th percentile in New York, or the 95th percentile somewhere else, and would prefer to do the latter
To be fair, many many people die in car accidents every day. Yes, self driving car crashes are still newsworthy but you are up against a baseline that’s pretty bad.
On the other hand, virtually no one dies from laundry, that I’m aware of. So the reaction to a single accident might be quite different.
I’ve had many times where a restaurant is officially booked online but I call them and say “hey, we’re looking for a table of two, we can come in right now and we promise to eat quickly and have the table turned around in 45 minutes”. Determining whether to allow that is very hard for an algorithm to do.
This is an interesting use case. I don't know if it's a deal breaker though, because most restaurants today don't accommodate this either, unless you're already there in-person.
Letting customers do this on the phone is a risk to the restaurant, because it relies on two things being true: (1) that you'll show up. Showing up in person is a big one -- many diners in urban areas game reservation slots by overbooking, so no-shows are fact of life; (2) that you will not take more than 45 minutes (or whatever duration that doesn't eat into reservation slots).
If you're already there in-person, it's less risky on the restaurant. Then it falls on staff's knowledge of average dining time (accounting for factors like group size, kitchen turnaround time, etc.). This can be codified in an statistical model, but if you're already there in-person, staff can make a call on whether they can fit you in.
For (1), humans can't make a good decision either, unless you're a regular and staff knows you. In theory, a machine can tap into OpenTable or Tock databases to check your no-show rate, but that data is often noisy and spotty.
That said, a restaurant reservation system only has limited degrees of freedom, so if this is a common exception use case, the algorithm can recognize it and escalate to human to resolve.
If restaurants let you do this today, it's likely that they're doing a coin-flip, knowing that they might lose the bet. If that's the case, algorithms can do slightly better than random -- there are reinforcement learning algorithms that can learn about the flakiness of their clientele over time.
Another way around this is selling tickets or taking reservation deposits, like what Alinea in Chicago does -- a $xx ticket to hold the spot which goes toward the cost of the meal. Nick Kokonas (co-owner of Alinea) did a podcast on this where he said that as soon as they did this, the rate of no-shows fell.
Israel’s pager attacks did not change the world. They merely alerted the world to the possibility of everyday devices being compromised. What is true today was still true yesterday, it just wasn’t top of mind: we have to be very careful with what we allow our adversaries to sell to us.
Did 9/11 not change the world because the idea had been made in fiction beforehand?
The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
> the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
This is the most worrying part: Do we really need to normalize the idea of governments sending little bombs out into the civilian population and detonating them, hoping that they actually hit their targets? This is not how legitimate warfighting is done.
That’s what I’ve been fearing, too. It’s like dressing up as medical workers or using chemical weapons: no matter the legitimacy of the current target, it’s virtually certain that someone else will cite that as a justification for why they’re doing something similar. This seems especially dicey in the generative AI era where it’d be increasingly cheap for some government to “prove” that the people they just bombed were Hezbollah-level threats.
Legitimate warfighting is where sensible pacifist civilians have a sufficient notice and a chance to leave the intended warzone with their belongings before the war starts. It is also where military, industrial, and infrastructural targets are the only targets, where reasonable efforts are made to avoid targeting civilians. Legitimate warfighting brings freedom in the end, whereas illegitimate warfighting takes it away.
What percentage of wars are fought with the intention to bring freedom in the end? A lot of wars are just the result of imperialism. I think that definition is somewhat artificial.
If a bomb went off next to me in Safeway, I'd consider the people who did that to be my enemy for life. This was an attack on civilians, civilian infrastructure and the general population of the world who now has to worry about being murdered by their devices.
I would definitely be radicalized and take up arms. Hell, I'm not even there and it's radicalizing me! I know a lot of people who are making significant life changes in the US based on what Israel and its supporters are doing.
I think it's a myth that you can "demoralize" people by killing their friends and family and terrorizing the public. That doesn't work and never has.
Israel has been trying this strategy since the inception of Zionism and not only has it not worked, it's created a massive amount of armed resistance. Sure enough, massive waves of rocket attacks have been coming from Lebanon since Israel's terrorist pager attack.
It sounds like you're around Zionists, no one I've spoken to has anything but deep resentment toward Israel and that spans many different demographics.
Yea, I mean sure it's better than firing a missile at an apartment building full of families because there are a few terrorists hiding in it. But that's a pretty low bar. We are also just taking their word for it that it was a carefully chosen shipment (this time) and that it went out specifically to actual Bad Guys™ (this time). With only "Trust Us, Bro" as assurance. It's a bad precedent to normalize.
Strictly speaking, yes, I’ll concede that this changed the world if you are part of a military group and your foe is Israel or another highly advanced adversary. But no, I don’t think that this changes the world in the way that the article implies.
9/11 changed the world because it started two major wars in the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It set the stage for world politics for the next few decades.
The reality of this attack is that it really won’t affect people’s lives in any meaningful way. Maybe a few people will be wary of using beepers for the next few months but I don’t see many people thinking of giving up their smartphones over this. Or perhaps I’m wrong and this foreshadows many similar supply chain bomb attacks in the future… I don’t know, but neither does Bruce Schneier and it’s too early to say definitively what the effect of this will be.
It changed the world because now "regular" people are looking to divest of Israeli tech as fast as possible. They turned consumer devices into bombs and made everyone in the world less safe. It will be seen as the biggest strategic misstep in Israeli economic history. Quite a dumb move given that their economy is already on the ropes.
It used to be a possibility. Now is a reality, and done not by a minor unorganized player (like a small group of people breaking things) but by a major power. Even if they stop doing it right now, and not escalate it to i.e. phones, it has set up a dangerous precedent.
It seems like a stretch to argue that a world in which thousands of people are simultaneously injured or killed by an electronic device they had no reason to fear is not meaningfully changed by said event.
The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change.
ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.
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