>The business modelling behind it must be quite intense, I hope this doesn't blow up in JetBrains' face
Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...
If necessary they'll add an anti-abuse policy or whatnot to mitigate the heavy users.
The sophisticated modeling is basically "just get going" with a guesstimate and adjust if needed.
I doubt that pricing structure will sink any ships. It's going to be about utility.
> Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...
One difference I see: storage capacity and compute performance aren't increasing like they had in the past, so companies can't rely on these costs to dramatically drop in the future to offset bleeding cash initially to gain market share.
The cost of inference[0] for the same quality has been dropping by nearly 10x year over year. I’m not sure when that trend will slow down, but there’s still been a lot of low-hanging fruit around algorithmic efficiency.
Sure. I agree that usage/demand is likely to outgrow compute performance.
But.. a lot of the other dynamics that make this game winnable still stand. Maybe they will need to go with a meter eventually or some other pricing structure... but it will work out.
Google search (and online direct marketing broadly) have pretty direct impact on sales. It's true that they held up well, relative to "traditional advertising" in recent downturn.
However... there are a lot of money losing campaigns out there. A lot of that relates to economic buoyancy. Startups showing growth for the next round. But also established companies getting into new sectors, defending market share, etc.
We are still, I think, in a "greed mode" economy. Fear hasn't really shown it's face yet. If that switch flips... I suspect meta/alphabet will be impacted this time.
I do agree, Google and probably Meta even more so are likely to be impacted now just because they've become so overwhelmingly dominant. There's nowhere else left to cut for a lot of brands.
What will be more interesting though is if that money comes back to Meta or Google, or if people will find new, better opportunities while they pull back (eg. what happened to TV in 08).
I think your point about dominance is a main player. I can make a dozen cases for LLMs as world of opportunity and compliments for both of these companies.
It takes a lot of opportunity/gain to hedge against the risk of losing 20% of search or social media revenue.
If you already have the whole market, losing share is easier than gaining.
But to a dominant incumbent..."threat" just tends to come with bigger multiplier.
So generally speaking, advertising is not resilient to downturn.
In 2008, there was an expectation of revenue loss. But because Google "direct advertising" directly affects sales... it was more like "sales" than traditional "marketing" in this respect.
In 2025, it may be different. We shall see.
I don't think much online ad revenue is related to physical products. The margin available for ad spend on physical goods is much slimmer. But... it's hard to predict 3rd order effects.
> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.
So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term.
Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.
Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.
At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.
The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.
> No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here...
I don't understand this sentiment at all. The business model writes itself (so to speak). This is the company that perfected the art of serving up micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem. Just swap the search box for a chat bot.
For a while they'll keep the ads off to the side, but over time the ads will become harder and harder to distinguish from the chat bot content. One day, they'll dissapear altogether and companies will pay to subtly bias the AI towards their products and services. It will be subtle--undetectable by end users--but easily quantified and monetized by Google.
Companies will also pay to integrate their products and services into Google's agents. When you ask Gemini for a ride, does Uber or Lyft send a car? (Trick question. Waymo does, of course.) When you ask for a pasta bowl, does Grubhub or Doordash fill the order?
When Gemini writes a boutique CRM for your vegan catering service, what service does it use for seamless biometric authentication, for payment processing, for SMS and email marketing? What payroll service does it suggest could be added on in a couple seconds of auto-generated code?
AI allows Google to continue it's existing business model while opening up new, lucrative opportunities.
I don’t think it works. Search is the perfect place for ads for exactly the reasons you state: people have high intent.
But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.
Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment. I don’t think ads work well in the latter , perhaps some subset, like the task is really complicated or the AI can tell the user is failing to achieve it. But I don’t think it’s nearly as could have a fit as search.
It doesn't have to be high intent all the time though. Chrome itself is "free" and isn't the actual technical thing serving me ads (the individual websites / ad platforms do that regardless of which browser I'm using), but it keeps me in the Google ecosystem and indirectly supports both data gathering (better ad targeting, profitable) and those actual ad services (sometimes subtly, sometimes in heavy-handed ways like via ad blocker restrictions). Similar arguments to be made with most of the free services like Calendar, Photos, Drive, etc - they drive some subscriptions (just like chatbots), but they're mostly supporting the ads indirectly.
Many of my Google searches aren't high intent, or any purchase intent at all ("how to spell ___" an embarrassing number of times), but it's profitable for Google as a whole to keep those pieces working for me so that the ads do their thing the rest of the time. There's no reason chatbots can't/won't eventually follow similar models. Whether that's enough to be profitable remains to be seen.
> Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment.
Same outcome, different intermediate steps. I'm usually searching for information so that I can do something, build something, acquire something, achieve something. Sell me a product for the right price that accomplishes my end goal, and I'm a satisfied customer. How many ads for app builders / coding tools have you seen today? :)
I have shifted the majority of my search for products to ChatGPT. In the past my starting point would have been Amazon or Google. It’s just so much easier to describe what I’m looking for and ask for recommendations that fit my parameters. If I could buy directly from the ChatGPT, I probably would. It’s just as much or more high intent as search.
> And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.
You may not even notice it when AI does a product placement when it's done opportunistically in creative writing (see Hollywood). There also are plenty of high-intent assistant-type AI tasks.
Obviously, an LLM is in a perfect position to decide whether an add can be "injected" into the current conversation. If you're using it for creative writing it will be add free. But chances are you will also use it to solve real world problems where relevant adds can be injected via product or service suggestions.
Re "going to be annoyed" there is definitely a spectrum starting at benign and culminating to the point of where you switch.
Photopea, for example, seems to be successful and ads displayed on the free tier lets me think that they feel at least these users are willing to see ads while they go about their workflow.
Chatgpt is effectively a functional search engine for a lot of people. Searching for the answer "how do i braid my daughter's hair?", or, "how do i bake a cake for a birthday party?" can be resolved via tradtitional search and finding a video or blog post, or simply read the result from an LLM. LLM has a lot more functionality overall, but ChatGPT and it's competitors are absolutely an existential threat to Google, as (in my opinion) it's a superior service because it just gives you the best answer, rather than feeding you into whatever 10 blog services that utilize google ads the most this month. Right now ChatGPT doesn't even serve up ads, which is great. I'm almost certain they're selling my info though, as specific one-off stuff I ask ChatGPT about, ends up as ads in Meta social medias the next day.
The intent will be obvious from the prompt and context. The AI will behave differently when called from a Doc about the yearly sales strategy vs consumer search app.
Just because the first LLM product people paid for was a chatbot does not mean that chat will be the dominant commercial use of AI.
And if the dominant use is agents that replace knowledge workers, then they'll cost closer to $2000 per month than $20 or free, and an ad-based business model won't work.
The actual business models and revenue sources are still unknown. Consumer subscriptions happens to be the first major model. Ads still aren't. Many other models could dwarf either of these.
I still think it's pretty clear. Google doesn't have to get a new business off the ground, just keep improving the integration into Workspace, Gmail, Cloud, Android etc. I don't see users paying for ChatGPT and then copy/pasting into those other places even if the model is slightly better. Google will just slowly roll out premium plans that include access to AI features.
And as far as selling pickaxes go, GCP is in a far better position to serve the top of market than OpenAI. Some companies will wire together multiple point solutions but large enterprises will want a consolidated complete stack. GCP already offers you compute clusters and BigQuery and all the rest.
Perhaps... but perhaps not. A chatbot instead of a search box may not be how the future looks. Also... a chatbot prompt may not (probably won't) translate from search query smoothly... in a Way That keep ad markets intact.
That "perfected art" of search advertising is highly optimized. You (probably) loose all of that in transition. Any new advertising products will be intrepid territory.
You could not have predicted in advance that search advertising would dwarf video (yourube) advertising as a segment.
Meanwhile... they need to keep their market share at 90%.
I imagine it would be easy for them to do similar to the TV guides of yesteryear(the company that owned it used it primarily for self promotion with just enough competitor promotion to fly under the radar and still seem useful), where it gives good recommendations sure, but 60-70% of those recommendations are the paid ones or the ones you own for you custom LLM.
LLM based advertising has amazing potential when you consider that you can train them to try to persuade people to buy the advertised products and services.
That seems like a recipe for class action false advertising lawsuits. The AI is extremely likely to make materially false claims, and if this text is an advertisement, whoever placed it is legally liable for that.
I don't think we should expect that risk to dissuade these companies. They will plow ahead, fight for years in court, then slightly change the product if forced to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A friend of mine works in advertising/marketing guy at the director level (Career ad guy), for big brands like nationwide cell carriers, big box stores etc, but mostly telcom stuff I think, and he uses it every day; he calls it "my second brain". LLM are great at riffing on ideas and brainstorming sessions.
I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?
I agree the market for 10% better AI isn’t that great but the cost to get there is. An 80% as good model at 10% or even 5% the cost will win every time in the current environment. Most businesses don’t even have a clear use case for AI they just use it because the competition is and there is a FOMO effect
According to the linked Wikipedia article, he did not go broke from the gold rush. He went broke because he invested the pickaxe windfall in land, and when his wife divorced him, the judge ruled he had to pay her 50%, but since he was 100% in land he had to sell it. (The article is not clear why he couldn't deed her 50% of it, or only sell 50%. Maybe it happened during a bad market, he had a deadline, etc.)
So maybe if the AI pickaxe sellers get divorced it could lead to poor financial results, but I'm not sure his story is applicable otherwise.
Basically every tech company likes to say they are selling pickaxes, but basically no VC funded company matches that model. To actually come out ahead selling pickaxes you had to pocket a profit on each one you sold.
If you sell your pickaxes at a loss to gain market share, or pour all of your revenue into rapid pickaxe store expansion, you’re going to be just as broke as prospectors when the boom goes bust.
There are two perspectives on this. What you said is definitely a good one if you're a business planning to add AI to whatever you're selling. But personally, as a user, I want the opposite to happen - I want AI to be the product that takes all the current products and turns them into tools it can use.
I agree, I want a more intelligent voice assistant similar to Siri as a product, and all my apps to be add-ons the voice assistant could integrate with.
Great Wells Fargo has an "agent" ... and every one else is talking about how to make their products available for agent based AI.
People don't want 47 different agents to talk to, then want a single end point, they want a "personal assistant" in digital form, a virtual concierge...
And we can't have this, because the open web has been dead for more than a decade.
If there were 2 other Amazons all with similar products and the same ease of shipping would you care where you purchased? Amazon is simply the best UX for online ordering. If anything else matched it I’d shop platform agnostic.
Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.
Sure, but they were making tons of money elsewhere. OpenAI has no source of revenue anywhere big enough to cover its expenses, it's just burning investor cash at the moment.
Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that.
Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best.
>in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre.
Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.
I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.
And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.
It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.
(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)
>I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.
OK? That's fine. I don't think I ever claimed you were a WAU
>And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty.
So you are not a weekly active user then. Maybe not even a monthly active one.
>Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service.
Maybe[1], but you didn't. And I doubt your wife needs a new logo every week so again not a weekly active user.
>ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators)but have no essential need for whatsoever.
You visit the same exact meme generator or finance site every week? If so, then that site is pretty important to you. If not, then again you're not a weekly active user to it.
If you visit a (but not the same) meme generator every week then clearly creating memes is important to you because I've never visited one in my life.
>And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.
There are well funded alternatives to Google Search too but how many use anything else? Rarely does any valuable niche have no competition.
>It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.
Yeah it is and so far, you've not actually said anything to indicate the contrary.
[1]ChatGPT had an image generation update recently that made it capable of doing things other services can't. Good chance you could not in fact do what you did (to the same satisfaction) elsewhere. But that's beside my point.
Yes corporate leaders do chase hype and they also believe in magic.
I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.
A case can be made for diversity, but the fact that all the big companies were adopting DEI at the same time made it hype.
I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too.
AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia.
I think many were rightly adopting DEI initiatives in an environment post me-too and post George Floyd. I don’t think it was driven by hype but more a reaction to the environment which heightened awareness of societal injustices. Awareness led to all sorts of things - conversation, compassion, attempts to do better in society and the workplace, and probably law suits. You can question how motivated corporations were to adopt DEI initiatives but I think it’d be wrong to say it was driven by hype.
I’m not sure companies are “abandoning DEI” so much as realizing that it’s often only a vocal minority that cares about DEI reports and scores and you don’t actually need a VP and diversity office to do some outreach and tally internal metrics.
The climate has changed. Some of that is economic at big tech companies. But it’s also a ramping down of a variety of things most employers probably didn’t support but kept their mouths shut about.
It does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.
Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread
My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
For many, this stuff is mostly about copilot being shoved down everyone's throats via ms office obnoxious ads and distractions, and I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. We are now years into this, so my bets are on the thing fading away slowly and becoming a taboo at Microsoft.
Many recent HN articles about how middle managers are already becoming addicted and forcing it on their peons. One was about the game dev industry in particular.
In my work I see semi-technical people (like basic python ability) wiring together some workflows and doing fairly interesting analytical things that do solve real problems. They are things that could have been done with regular code already but weren't worth the engineering investment.
In the "real world" I see people generating crummy movies and textbooks now. There is a certain type of person it definitely appeals to.
what I'm not so sure about is how much that generalises beyond the HN/tech-workers bubble (I don't think "people" in OP's comment is as broad and numerous as they think it is).
As much as you may make fun of my anecdotal observation, your comment doesn't add anything of value, in particular to substantiate that "people [are] becoming addicted to LLMs". I stand behind my comment that the vast majority of non-tech worker are exposed to them via Copilot in MS Office, and if you want to come to its rescue and pretend it's not a disaster, by all means :-)
Uber is a profitable company both in 2023 and - to the tune of billions of dollars - in 2024. Please read their financials if you doubt this statement.
I assume they mean the profits in the past couple years are dwarfed by the losses that came before. Looking at the company's entire history, instead of a single FY.
Seems like the difference between a profitable investment and a profitable company.
They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the form of debt which must be serviced out of the current profits. Not that I'm stating that taking on debt is wrong or anything.
To the extent that their past spending was debt, interest on that debt that should already be accounted for in calculating their net income.
But the way it usually works for Silicon Valley companies and other startups is that instead of taking on debt they raise money through selling equity. This is money that doesn't have to be paid back, but it means investors own a large portion of this now-profitable company.
I'm surprised. They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi at least here in Spain.
The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.
> They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it.
I keep hearing this online, but every time I’ve used an Uber recently it’s driven by someone who says they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Seems clear to me that it is worth it for some, but not worth it if you have other better job options or don’t need the marginal income.
> but not worth it if you have other better job options
Pretty much any service job, really...
When I had occasion to take a ride share in Phoenix I'd interrogate the driver about how much they were getting paid because I drove cabs for years and knew how much I would have gotten paid for the same trip.
Let's just say they were getting paid significantly less than I used to for the same work. If you calculated in the expenses of maintaining a car vs. leasing a cab I expect the difference is even greater.
There were a few times where I had just enough money to take public transportation down to get a cab and then snag a couple cash calls to be able to put gas in the car and eat. Then I could start working on paying off the lease and go home at the end of the day with some cash in my pocket -- there were times (not counting when the Super Bowl was in town) where I made my rent in a single day.
PS: I know that in Romania it's the opposite. Uber is kinda like a luxury taxi there. Normal taxis have standard rates, but these days it's hardly enough to cover rising fuel prices. So cars are ancient and un a bad state of repair, drivers often trick foreigners. A colleague was even robbed by one. Uber is much more expensive but much safer (and still cheap by western standards).
They're usually a bit more expensive here than a taxi. It can be beneficial because sometimes they have deals, and I sometimes take one when I have to book it in advance or when I'm afraid there will be delays with a corrsponding high cost. Though Uber tend to hit me with congestion charges then too. At least with a taxi I can ask them to take a different route. The problem with the uber drivers is that they don't know any of the street names here, they just follow the app's navigation. Whereas taxi drivers tend to be much more aware and know the streets and often come up with suggestions.
This also means that they sometimes fleece tourists but when they figure you know the city well they don't dare :) Often if they take one wrong turn I make a scene about frowning and looking out of the window and then they quickly get back on track. Of course that's another usecase where uber would be better, if you don't know the city you're in.
yeah thanks no, I'm paying for an Uber. For all the complaints over Ubers business practices, it's hard not to forget how bad taxis were. Regulatory capture is a clear failure mode of capitalism and the free market and that is no more shown than by the taxis cab industry.
Taxis aren't so bad in most countries. Here in Spain they are plentiful and fine. The same in most other countries I've been to. Only in the Netherlands they are horrible, they are ridiculously expensive because they all drive Mercedeses. As a result nobody uses them because they can't afford them. They're more like a limousine service, not like real taxis.
One time I told one of my Dutch friends I often take a cab to work here in Spain when I'm running late. He thought i was being pompous and showy. But here it's super normal.
Uber (Or cabify which is a local clone and much more popular) here on the other hand is terrible if you don't book it in advance. When I'm standing here on the street it takes 7-10 minutes for them to arrive while I see several taxis passing every minute. So there is just no point. Probably a factor of being unpopular too so the density is low.
I also prefer my money to end up with local people instead of a huge American corporation.
I think Uber in the US is a very different beast. But also because the outlook on life is so different there. I recently agreed with an American visitor that we'd go somewhere and we agreed to go by public transport. When I got there he wanted to get an Uber :') Here in Europe public transport is a very different thing. In many cases the metro is even faster than getting a taxi.
PS: What bothers me the most about Uber and Cabify is that they "estimate" that it will take 2 minutes to get a car to you, and then when I try and book one I get a driver that's 10 minutes away :( :( Then I cancel the trip and the drivers are pissed off. I had one time where I got the same driver I cancelled on earlier and he complained a lot even though I cancelled within 10 seconds when I saw how far away he was.
Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services, I only use them to go to the airport now when I can book it in advance. And never Uber anymore, only Cabify.
> Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services
For me, and a majority where I live, this is applicable to taxis. Which were known for being dirty, late, expensive, prone to attempting to rip you off, if they turned up at all, etc.
Outside of surge charging (in which they are more expensive) ubers are by and large either cheaper, or the same price. With the difference being that 99% of the time if you request one, its going to turn up. And when it does turn up, you know what your going to pay, not have them take a wrong turn at some point and by "mistake" and decide to charge you double. Or tell you they take card and then start making claims about how suddenly they can't etc.
Sounds like europe gets the bad end of the stick in this regard.
Yeah here in Spain the taxis are great. They're plentiful, cheap and efficient. The city is kinda a mess and the rideshare drivers have to drive a route mapped out by the app which often is not optimal. The real taxis know the city well. I think this is why the rideshares are unpopular and thus there's not many of them leading to the long waiting times. They're also spread between different providers, Uber is popular with the tourists only and the locals mostly use Cabify (a local company).
However in Romania on the other hand many taxi drivers are scammers or even criminals (one of my colleagues was robbed by one of them). It's also because the maximum taxi fares are too low to actually make a wage so I can kinda understand so I always tip really well (like double the fare or more which is still nothing). Though if they try to scam me they don't get a cent of course.
"A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors."
I doubt the depiction implied by "surprising number". Marketing types and CEO's who would love 100% profit and only paying the electricity bill for an all AI workforce would believe that. Most people, especially most technical people would not believe that there is a "surprising number" of saps paying for so-called AI.
Google aren’t interested in <1bn USD businesses, so it’s hard for them to build anything new as it’s pretty guaranteed to be smaller than that at first. The business equivalent of the danger of a comfortable salaried job.
Google is very good at recognizing existential threats. iOS were that to them and they built Android, including hardware, a novelty for them, even faster than mobile incumbents at the time.
They're more than willing to expand their moat around AI even if that means multiple unprofitable business for years.
Mobile is still nearly everything. Google continues to develop and improve Android in substantial ways. Android is also counted on by numerous third-party OEMs.
If you are a business customer of Google or pay attention to things like Cloud Next that just happened, it is very clear that Google is building heavily in this area. Your statement has already been disproven.
'Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."' ¹
Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.²
Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.
This is incorrect. There are millions of companies in the world that exist to accomplish things other than making a profit, and are also not charities.
99.9% of the time, it's an investment hoping to make a profit in the future. And we still call those businesses, even if they're losing money like most businesses do at first.
>Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.
It's funny how the vibe of HN along with real world 's political spectrum have shifted together.
We can now discuss Ads on HN while still being number 1 and number 2 post. Extremism still exists, but it is retreating.
Absolutely agree Microsoft is better there - maybe that's why Google hired someone from Microsoft for their AI stuff. A few people I think.
I also agree the business models aren't known. That's part of any hype cycle. I think those in the best position here are those with an existing product(s) and user base to capitalize on the auto complete on crack kinda feature. It will become so cheap to operate and so ubiquitous in the near future that it absolutely will be seen as a table stakes feature. Yes, commodities.
> At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such
I don't understand why people believe this: by settling on "unstructured chat" as the API, it means the switching costs are essentially zero. The models may give different results, but as far a plugging a different one in to your app, it's frictionless. I can switch everything to DeepSeek this afternoon.
"The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known."
"AI" sounds like a great investment. Why waste time investing in businesses when one can invest in something that might become a business. CEOs and employees can accumulate personal weath without any need for the company to be become profitable and succeed.
The business model question applies to all of these companies, not just Google.
A lack of workable business model is probably good for Google (bad for the rest of the world) since it means AI has not done anything economically useful and Google's Search product remains a huge cash cow.
Contextual advertising is a known ad business model that commands higher rates and is an ideal fit for LLMs. Plus ChatGPT has a lot of volume. If there’s anyone who should be worried about pulling that off it’s Perplexity and every other small to mid-sized player.
That's like asking a McDonald's employee if they own Burger King stock and making market assumptions on that. The best people have already left is such a common trope.
Modern cloud computing is more than just having a scalable infrastructure of servers, it was a paradigm shift to having elastic demand, utility style pricing, being completely API driven, etc. Amazon were not only the first to market but pioneers in this space. Nothing came close at that time.
AWS had a cleaner host-guest abstraction (the VM) that makes it easier to reason about security, and likely had a much bigger gap between their own usage peaks and troughs.
Yep. Google offered app engine which was good for fairly stateless simple apps in an old limited version of python, like a photo gallery or email client. For anything else is waa dismal. Amazon offered VMs. Useful stuff for a lot more platforms.
> Just like healthcare, US justice is only for people with money.
In most times and places, this is true. Ancient times, recent history, autocracies, democracies...
Justice is expensive.
Justice, and the legal college as an ideal often specifically negates this. Equality before the law. Blind justice, etc.
That said... justice is inevitably ridden with contradiction, hypocrisy and whatnot. That's what justice is.
Degrees vary, but the structure is usually constant.
Say you are a ceo, fund manager or whatnot. You are in dispute with your employer over $10m of compensation. Your bonus, performance-based compensation.
Now imagine that you are a normie, with a dispute over $10k.
Those to legal processes are entirely dissimilar. One will have teams of lawyers, many proceedings. Completely different aspects of justice will come into play. It's a different justice.
I don't think that is necessarily true. But the system favors the rich and powerful, and that has been true of legal systems throughout history, which means that those with the capacity to make the system more fair are incentivized to maintain the status quo, or at least not change it too much.
> those with the capacity to make the system more fair are incentivized to maintain the status quo
Often true... but networks of incentives are subtle in how they build up. It's rarely just macro, societal-level incentives.
Anyway... one major aspect is that lawyers do law for a living. It's an industry. An industry that thrives, and has thrived since at least antiquity, by representing the interests of well paying clients.
Besides that... formal truth is expensive. It's expensive to have a procedurally validated scientific truth (eg drug testing). It's expensive to create a judicial truth via trial. Very expensive. That's why we do so little of it, even though judicial (and scientific) ideals demand quite a lot of it.
Most legal matters are settled by lawyers negotiating. Courts are a rubber stamp, and (usually) theoretical last resort. Most (vast majority) criminal convictions involve a confession. In Medieval Europe they would publicly torture convicts, obtain a confession and then hang them. These days, you can confess and serve 2 years in prison... or contest and serve 12.
Otherwise, courts could not handle the volume.
The problem here is high standards. People know about the ideals of justice. Expect justice to live up to these standards. IRL it never has. Not close. Justice is an institution of society that exists to solve problems. Often sticky, ugly problems. The ideals play a role, in keeping that institution balanced... but the ideals are not the balance.
> Nitpick: Process is expensive. Process does not yield justice by itself. It (assuming it's crafted right) just makes the outcomes more consistent.
While I agree, and it's an important distinction, I think it's probably true conversely that the chances of justice for the average person are increased by the imposition of "good" due process.
The weasel word "good" there means that I can disagree with any specific instance, but I mean to say that I don't think process is inherently bad. Bureaucracy is definitely a bane of most of our lives, but the obvious alternative, a greased-wheels process where somebody makes decisions quickly and without significant accountability, is great only if the decision maker is on your side, and terrible otherwise.
Thankfully most of the instances of it not being true exist right now. Let's stay grounded in current reality or just agree not to discuss the topic. Saying "welp what do you expect" is downright worse than ignoring it entirely.
Wherever people think their justice system hasn't failed them so completely. So, this includes many people in the developed world. Approximation of justice was always a matter of degree, not a boolean.
People think their justice system sucks or is wonderful, because the king is from their tribe. Or... when media fashion is to venerate rather than critique. Or when religious attitudes preference one or the other position.
It can (usually does) have nothing to do with how well the justice system works, or whether it favors those who can afford a good lawyer.
Anyway... name a country. Where's this country with just justice?
Small claims works (arbitration too), it should be used more. (But people somehow think that arbitration is fake, but of course ignore all the downsides of the public courts. And of course what people who have given it a few minutes of thought usually don't like is that there's no way to do class-action arbitration. But that's not set in stone.)
In God's system (Mosaic law), they would go before the judges, plead their case, bring evidence (eg witnesses), and something would be decided. The U.S. was originally based on Jethro and Moses' method. Over time, the self-centered and godless people did to it what the Pharisees did to the other system. It was no longer about what's good or even doable for human beings.
I also like that the Biblical law, from commands to its case law, is the size of a small paperback. Much of that is redundant or case specific, too. One person could learn it in a few months of study. Whereas, there's no hope of ever knowing if you're breaking some law in this country.
Joshua and the other judges were chiefs. They lead armies, built alters, pronounced judgements and whatnot. Often advised by prophets.
Mosaic Law, the scrolls of the torah, dod not exist at this point. Not even according to the bible. This came later, during the time of kings.
The stuff quickly scribbled on rocks by The Almighty so that Rabbi Moses could go deal with that whole mess down below... it's sparse. It's got a list of things god likes to eat. A recipe you are not allowed to make.
It doesn't even tell you what to do when a Midian Schiester sells you a faulty woman. Not one word on right to representation, if you can believe it.
American' legal system is based on a mostly illiterate culture's legal tradition, form the black sea. It's very good at dealing with disputes involving fish, pillage and private property.
Also... who ya'callin godless. Get your own god. You can go back to Thor if you don't like what you got here.
Originally, they just followed God, His basic design, and loved each other. Later, God made a covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and eventually everyone who repents and believes via Jesus Christ. Each time, someone wrote them down later on under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Mosaic Covenant was special. God delivered them from Egypt using mighty works that showed each Egyption god was fake. Even pagans, like Rahab, knew the Hebrew God had real power but worshiped fake ones that let them sin (subjectivism/hedonism). Then, Israelites saw God manifest in storms, vocally, fire in the sky, manna from heaven, and so on. That proved for them the Mosaic Covenant was from a real God.
The Mosaic Covenant (Torah) itself had a test in it in blessings and curses section. If they followed God, He caused specific benefits. If they turned to idols and unrepentant sin, God would curse them in specific ways. The former prophets record how that indeed happened over and over with latter prophets formally accusing Israel, citing Mosaic Law, like God's prosecutors.
The Law itself only required and banned a small number of things. It gave examples of a broad array of topics including marriage, violence, contracts, negligence, health inspectors, and even building codes. Past that, they didnt have to add to it. Just do the best they could in a given situation.
The Pharisees extended the laws in so many ways that the burden was too heavy to carry. They also didn't care about human beings at all, only their own power, shown by how they negatively responded to Jesus supernaturally healing people on the Sabbath. They'd rather punish someone for a prayer or picking up their mat because that broke their man-made rules about the Sabbath. They also kept trying to force Jesus, God in the flesh, to conform to them instead of the other way around.
Jesus said the Sabbath, like God's laws, were made for man's benefit. He said his yoke and burden is light, unlike man's. He also simplied the Ten Commandments to love God first and your neighbor as yourself. One simply has to interpret new situations based on these principles. God will bless that. If they were confused, Israel also had the ability to pray and receive answers from God in various ways.
American System
Now, the American legal system is far from that easy. I've seen cases that could take one day without specialists cost $50k-$100k over a year because the system is designed for lawyers' and judges' benefit more than ours. Yet, it originally was built on Biblical principles for Christians as argued in this ahort video:
Dropping the worldview behind this caused it to support all kinds of sin and nonsense. One example is a corporation being treated like a person under law but not having that level of accountability (eg prison or death). Another is hurting the poor. Another is treating people differently based on race.
Returning to Jesus' teachings, the New Covenant, will prevent most of the worst problems. It will support correcting the rest.
Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in.
From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot.
Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dream. Empathy is increasingly trivial.
So Siri.. and voice UIs generally. The bottlenecks have been in unexpected places.
In general, we just don't have very good UI paradigms for voice. Voice recognition is finally good. LLMs theoretically add a lot of capability. But... there just isn't a great UI.
It's like trying to use a smartphone with a nipple mouse instead of touch. You can slowly hack your way to making specific tasks/features work... but there is no radiation event where lots of tasks become possible.
The thing is though, nothing progressed in Siri since the original demo in 2011. Despite boasting desktop-level CPUs and never-before-seen dedicated "neural engine" co-processors.
It has only become worse in the past couple of years.
The inability to know that bedroom means bedroom [1], or the impossible task of adding several items to a list [2], or failing to answer what the current month is [3] have nothing to do with slow progress or UI.
Siri's voice recognition has gone down a lot over the last 5 years actually, it used to be far more accurate, its speech has certainly improved to be more natural sounding. Its capabilities though... yikes
They spent more time polishing voices than they did on actual features, if anything, regressing them to the stone ages in terms of its primitive form.
Plus, there’s no more humor. Trying to crack jokes at it used to give funny responses. Even old things like “I need to hide a body” — “I don’t know how to respond to that”. Insult it and it’s a “I won’t respond to that”. Lots of old funnies are now gone and stripped away.
Siri wasn’t great but it was way, way more usable before the “machine learning” update whenever that was. Before it was a verbal command line, but at least you could learn some commands.
I think the problem is adding on to a clunky paradigm.
It wasn't a good verbal command line. It was usable because even an imperfect command line UI is inherently usable if use cases are limited. Building on to that though... you always overreach.
Personally, I always thought voice+screen interface was an under-explored. That (for example) would let you go from command line to command line navigator... a natural progression.
Voice UI kind of needs to be "one shot" to be pleasant: Play "Fortunate Son." Once you have to go back and forth, listen to list of options... it's no fun anymore. The Windows/Mac/Xerox GUI paradigm required a mouse, keyboard & screen. Voice only is limiting... perhaps.
All of them feel to me like they went backwards. In the beginning you could say you killed someone and it'd show you the nearest park/forest to bury them in. Now you can't even get them to play X on Spotify half the time.
I guess development is driven by military and commercial needs, rather than altruistic needs.
The futuristic ads were made for the consumer to feel safe and sound.
The actual money flowing went into military applications (drones, guidance systems, etc) and commercial applications (car factories)
For the above systems, they don't have to be physically capable, just have a restricted set of actions / outcomes, for example, flying a missile. But, they need to be mentally strong, to take decisions at split seconds.
I was unaware of Apple’s military drone and missile programs. Could you point me to more information on those? I’m having trouble even imagining what an Apple drone would cost.
> The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised...
There was a time when rock and roll was going to "change the world." Like jazz and beat poetry before it, it was defining the vanguard of youth culture. Creating the values, taste, language and culture of a generation.
Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
There's a difference between steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past.
If the author is saying that there is nothing wrong with like steam engines in 2025... then I agree. Steam engines are awesome.
If this is about recapturing what the web was, culturally, circa 1995-2005... that's a different sort of judgement.
In any case, the indieweb.org has a lot of value statements. Principles. I suspect these are aesthetic values. Important to the internal integrity if the art form, rather than their external affects.
I think you underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have. I am not sure about indieweb in particular, but there are many niche groups that had much longer-term impact than more mainstream movements. In music this is often expressed as your artists favorite artist. For me Captain Beefheart (influencing Beck and Tom Waits), Death Grips (influenced Björk and David Bowie) come to mind, but there are probably more niche groups that I don't know.
In economics the Chicago school had a outsized impact considering they how fringe they seemed in the world of academia. Nowadays I would say that George Mason is the new Chicago school, and for similar reasons.
I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon if anyone else has any.
> underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have [...] I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon
I wasn't alive at the time, so I don't know how small/fringe the lisp community was at the time, but your comment made me think of how lisp "invented" things like if-then-else, recursion, garbage collection, first-class functions and more, which we more or less take for granted in every programming language today (at least some of those features), although lisp and lisp-likes remain fringe today.
The same pattern seems to be repeating even in modern times where things like React/Redux/hot code reloading were heavily inspired by what the ClojureScript (a lisp-like compile-to-JS language) community was experimenting with at the time, if I remember correctly.
Sorry for the confusion, but I was just trying to add additional examples since parent said "love to get more examples of this phenomenon", I wasn't trying to make any argument for one side or the other.
I think the Beat Generation (and mid-century Mississippi blues) from my earlier comment are also examples. Niche in their time. Automobile enthusiasts were a niche group. Early web forum users, IRC, ICQ... Predecessors of modern social media culture.
For an even more "on the nose" example would be the Homebrew Computer Club, Altair programmers and whatnot. I think we're all familiar with "disruption theory" by this point on HN.
The point is... is this a vanguard or a rear guard? Both have value. But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.
I see what you mean. And yes I don't think it defines the future any longer. Unfortunately. But we passed that fork in the road a long time ago.
Most people are happy to store all their data with big tech and get snoothly marketed content designed to extract as much value as possible from themselves for corporate benefit. It is what it is.
I'm just happy it still exists and it doesn't have to take off for me either. It's similar to Linux. If it ever would take off on the desktop, it would be so corrupted that it wouldn't be Linux as we know it. So it would be the worst thing that could happen for me.
Perfectly reasonable take. "Taking off" is, I agree, a misguided expectation within this frame.
Desktop Linux (year of) is a great analogy. Had it happened, Linux would not have remained Linux as we know it. Differences would likely not to the liking of desktop Linux users irl.
Otoh... had Linux desktop really "taken off" circa 2008... it would have had a major impact on personal computing.
These are two, usually distinct desires. "Indie" generally goes with the niche, principled ethos.
> Most people are happy to store all their data with big tech and get snoothly marketed content designed to extract as much value as possible from themselves for corporate benefit.
Is this even a thought on people's mind? I don't think it's a choice people are explicitly making in their mind, but it's more like water and electricity that just takes the path of least resistance. It happens to be that centralized services are easy to join and get started with, and non-centralized services were harder to join, case in point being Mastodon where you need to first chose what server you want to join, then you can join the network itself. Same goes for IRC, torrents and a bunch of other things, it tends to just be harder to get into less centralized things, for better and worse.
But I still have the belief that we can figure out the UX to making it easier. Bluesky/ATProto is a step in the right direction, although it isn't 100% self-hostable and decentralized today, the foundation is there and the UX seems simple enough that when people have the choice, both paths have about the same friction today.
The ideas have always been very simple. Own your own data, scratch your own itch, build things and share them.
"Take off," "Get Big," "Stay Small," "Change the World," "Be Retro," "Be Art," none of this was ever the point, it's always just been, go build something on the web you have some ownership over and share it with whoever may be interested.
Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
> Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
Unfortunately, many people see doing things yourself as an amateur—like cooking a meal, fixing a car, or hosting a personal website—as a low-status activity. The modern way of life is to pay for everything; only losers spend their precious time on those boring tasks. And they always trying to find a way to justify it.
I think the stakes are higher, and the IndieWeb movement is about the future, and it's not just an aesthetic.
Allow me a metaphor. Many years ago humans wandered the Earth, hunted and gathered and lived where they wished. Then came along civilisation, and with it, a normalisation not just of trade, but of property. Some people realised that they could "own" the best land, and make people pay a "rent" to use it. And so was born, The Law. The Law was used for a long time in a way that meant people were born into a system where they just accepted there were Lords of the land and those who worked it for an existence. Eventually, people asked important questions, some set out for a New World, others in the Establishment sought to impose The Law in new lands, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. After a long, long time, we came to a place in society where we accepted personal property - particularly personal ownership of the land on which you lived - was a just, beneficial and suitable place for civilisation to settle.
Now, back to the web. Right now, we're in a phase of feudalistic control. In order to "feel informed", or to even be entertained, you are required to make sacrifices (your personal data), to a rich group of Lords who demand The Law bends to their will.
The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
As a society we have a choice: our future online presence entirely owned and shaped by a handful of "land owners", or we invest in making the New World and creating an online world that we want to see.
This isn't about aesthetics. It's about freedom, democracy, the law, your rights and those of future generations. There's a place for landlords in this World, but please don't try and consign the IndieWeb to a curious retro hobby clan: it has the potential to offer you and many others so, so much more than that.
TFA says that IndieWeb does not need to "take off". I agree. But it also doesn't need putting down or dismissing, and it can adapt to whatever future defining vibe of youth culture it needs to: it is a platform, not an art form. It is land on which to build coffee shops/libraries/museums/diaries, not those things itself.
>The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
Freeholding has always existed since the web was born. The current structure of overwhelmingly dominant landlords was built on top of it.
The problem we have is that the IndieWeb is not currently a viable alternative for most content creators who need to make a living. If it's not economically viable then it's by definition a hobby.
"Taking off" may not be the right yardstick, but I think walking away from the goal of making the IndieWeb economically effective enough to claim back some territory from the oligopolists just means giving up.
I think making money from a website is fine. You can sell products and services, and that's great.
I think adtech on websites is a problem. And social media is an adtech product, not a content product.
IndieWeb for me is about reducing reliance on adtech. You want to build a page to showcase your hand-carved penguins? Cool, hit me up with a URL! Selling independently produced courses or 1:1 mentorship? Offering consultancy or classes? Cool!
Wrapping it all up in an adtech hell hole for people to harvest my data and then try and scam me or sell me utter crap based on browsing patterns around "news stories" that are false? Nah, I'll pass, thanks.
If my desire to make a living without submitting to some all powerful overlord makes me part of the problem, then we disagree on a very fundamental level on what the point actually is.
Would you say the same about music or fine art? What is the "point" exactly? History's greatest writers and artists have generally been able to dedicate their time to working because they are supported financially by selling their work.
> steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past
Well most of our power generation still comes from steam turbines, and boiling water is more of than than not still the most efficient approach for energy extraction, so it's as much the present and future as it is the past.
Thing is that music trends are (indeed) only trends and expected to not last centuries, and that the steam engine is arguably inferior to what came after. What the "build your own website" crowd posits is that what we have now is factually inferior and dehumanizing.
I agree that there's a lot of misguided prose about the whys and hows of such a revival, but trying to make the web fun again for the small part of the population interested enough to put in some elbow grease is worth it, in my opinion.
It's not trying to change the world, it's trying to build a small "indomitable Gauls village" style community.
> Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
Both have creative vibe. They are not future defining or "youth culture", but that does not mean they are not meaningful or personal or decentralized.
It is ok for subcultures to be what they are and not being mainstream or becoming super popular.
Right? I don't understand OP's thought there. Plenty of jazz still innovates. Look at the impact Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin have had, especially with Kendrick Lamar, over the past decade. Innovation is there if you're paying attention.
Creative, perhaps, in a purely artistic sense. Even here, I think it's arguable. But, it's still definitely an art form and art is creative.
"Creative of modern culture" is what rock music was... a pretty defining quality of what rock music was. It produced youth culture. Mainstream culture. Memes. Fashions. Ethos, etc.
Currently, there is not a single bonafide "rock star" under 50. Even the idiomatic term "rockstar" has fallen out of use.
This is more to do with the effect of the web disrupting and decentralizing the ability of corporations to create and curate a homogeneous cultural experience than the failure of rock as an art form. "Rock Star" is a commercial construct that can't exist in a world of Spotify and Soundcloud and hyperlocal community-created genres.
Listened to "the song that some claim made Dylan go electric and pushed rock music into a completely new direction." I always liked it.
It's profoundly odd that "The Brits," mostly working class youngsters had this impact on american culture, by introducing and merging american themes and styles to americans... by mixing them with other american art memes.
Infusing rock n roll with smokey blues vibes. Putting Beat Generation themes into pop. Three years in and you have american musicians mimicking Liverpool lads doing impressions of an american singers' accent.
...and somehow it's not cheesy. That song sounds like authentic americana... at least to me.
You can't leave out Bob Dylan's influence with introducing the band to marijuana, as well as Jimi Hendrix not making it big in the US, and being "shipped" to the UK to start the Jimi Hendrix Experience. That didn't just have a big effect on The Beatles, but acid rock/psychedelia as a whole. You also had Black Sabbath taking blues music and downtuning it, and playing it slower, all due to Tony Iommi's work accident where he lost his finger tips. Modern metal music owes a TON to Black Sabbath, especially styles that play slower, like doom metal and all its various sub-genres. There was a lot of sharing between countries, and I think that is why the music is so closely tied together (along with the entire psychedelic movement).
Brits singing re-packaged "race music" for Americans. Americans did try (see Pat Boone etc) but while the Beatles/Stones/Hermans Hermits dominated it was the rise of Motown that is most intriguing. Black Americans moving north for industrial jobs and having good wages finally put their music on the map. That it was playable on the radio for everybody (unlike the blues) was a masterstroke.
If you listen to the Beatles back catalog today it's pretty bad. Motown still sounds fresh.
Rubber Soul onwards are all masterpieces (except maybe Let it Be) and feature among the greatest music written by anyone, ever. You are seriously underrating them just by virtue of the fact that you don't personally enjoy listening to them, which seems silly to me.
People who don't listen to the Beatles usually don't even realise it when they're listening to the Beatles anyway, the younger you are the truer it is.
Each to their own but there are plenty of Beatles songs that stand the test of time IMO.
Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out", or "Yesterday"? Superb.
I don't like the Beatles either. There's just something about their sound that really grates on my nerves, IDK what it is. They were obviously historically significant, but I very much dislike listening to them.
100%. Weirdly derivative without any real insight into what they cribbed. Paul McCartney and his twee later stage gobshite, Maxwells silver hammer etc just no
I mean it's fine to not like the Beatles but they weren't derivative (literally the opposite), and not liking the song that is considered by many to be their worst or most controversial isn't saying much (and actually it's a perfectly serviceable song really, it's just the mythology that has built up around it that has really caused it to take flak).
I've always liked it. I think the only reason you would think it was their 'worst' is if you got all your opinions from a sort of musical 'hive mind' - someone that compulsively reads Rolling Stone or whatever. People need to do their OWN thinking.
I have actually been listening to the Beatles back catalog, and its incredible. The musical invention and diversity is unlike any individual group I've ever heard. I love Motown, but honestly, if you've heard one 4 Tops song, you've heard them all, they even parody themselve with "The Same old song". But then you listen to the Beatles at the start of their hits with I want to hold your hand and then compare it to the end with the Symphonic Medley on Abbey Road, and you cant believe they're the same group, and all in a period of 6 years.The only other artist I can compare them to for so much evolution in such a short period of time is David Bowie.
The beatles back catalog feels so generic. Especially when you start hearing contemporary to that period music (the animals etc). All short sweet songs, using generic pop music chord structures and lyrical themes for the most part. Not to do them any discredit, they did come up with those lyrics but they did not come up with the chord structures or lyrical themes. They picked them because they knew they would be popular. They went up and did literally what elvis did to get his fame: rehash known good pop music with a pretty boy (or four) marketed to young girls ensuring capture of the youth market for a generation. And boy were the beatles marketed moreso than a lot of artist at the time and a long time afterward.
The movie "Echo in the Canyon" is a little too worshipful and has a little too much Jakob Dylan, but it really highlights how all of the artists of that time including the Beatles were listening to each other and pushing their own art further to match or top what they heard from other artists.
So... Mammoths are elephants. Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than African elephants. They were likely genetically compatible. You could probably achieve a passable mammoth phenotype with selective breeding.
Also, Proboscideans existed in many climate zones through various climactic periods. They're not narrow specialists.
Mammoths just happen to capture the imagination, representing the ice age. Megafaunal extinction. Ancient hunters. Rewilding. Etc.
There's still an enormous number of edits they need to make. I don't remember the exact number they said but I believe it was in the several hundred to low thousands range. Meanwhile the rest of the world is mostly focusing on "an edit". It's not impossible, but it'll be quite an undertaking.
Enormous number of edits needed to achieve what specifically? Hairiness?
OOH... any hairy elephant they produce will be "mammoth enough" for most. Elephant + Hairy = Mammoth. It won't be the same species/subspecies as extinct mammoths, but it'll be a mammoth.
OTOH, any number of edits will be insufficient for others. It won't be the extinct species, just an artificial hybrid.
IMO... this is one that's best left as a fantasy. The moment there a little herd of resurrected mammals exist in a zoo as real life animals is the moment the mystique will dissipate.
Of course they capture the imagination... I mean... imagine wooly mammoths roaming the boulevards of Paris... or having wings and perching on top on the Eiffel Tower... sadly no cure for cancer in sight.
I was jesting, but only so. I think we are going to see weird DNA experiments in the wild, because people will do it for shits and giggle (or social media engagement).
They're extremely careful not to state that as their plan.
In general, they make a huge effort not to talk about their plans vis-a-vis Taiwan at all. They just keep repeating that Taiwan is part of China.
The closest they come to stating that they plan to use force is that they'll sometimes say that they won't reject the use of force.
Given that nobody has proposed a scenario where China actually could do something like "take the IP by force" (since the IP would be gone if they ever tried to invade) and we can generally see that the Chinese leaders aren't complete idiots, it seems highly unlikely that they're planning an invasion any time soon.
If all it costs them were never having access to those chips again the chinese would've taken Taiwan already.
The chinese want to invade Taiwan because they think it's a rebel province, their only consideration is whether the US will oppose them militarily if they do.
It's clearly not just about the chips.
China didn't attack Taiwan before 1987, when TSMC was founded.
There are many disincentives. The biggest one is that China is confident that they'll get full control of Taiwan without violence.
They believe that the US is in a state of terminal decline and Europe will never overcome centuries of infighting. A significant portion of the population of Taiwan wants to reunify. They fully expect that they can just continue to nurture supporters within Taiwan and wait out the West and Taiwan will just fall into their lap.
Why would they go to war when they think they can get everything they want without war?
> The chinese want to invade Taiwan because they think it's a rebel province, their only consideration is whether the US will oppose them militarily if they do.
IIRC, the US's wargaming shows that if it tries to intervene, it will lose. Taiwan is too far from the US and too close to China.
The US has unrivaled force projection capabilities; half the worlds carrier fleets, the largest navy by tonnage, and the technology to execute unprecedented combined arms maneuvers.
China has insane defense-in-depth; more missiles than you can shake a stick at, the largest navy by number of ships, a vast arsenal of countermeasures, and a 4:1 population advantage.
China can't stand toe-to-toe with the US anywhere except the immediate vicinity of China. In that vicinity, nobody can get close if China doesn't want them to.
> China can't stand toe-to-toe with the US anywhere except the immediate vicinity of China. In that vicinity, nobody can get close if China doesn't want them to.
I think you have a typo there.
Personally, I think if the US wants to defend Taiwan from invasion, it needs to stock them up with a massive amounts of missile/artillery/whatever systems and ammunition, and that needs to be distributed all over the island so there's no concentrated stockpile to attack.
But the US cupboard is bare, and Ukraine made it barer. IIRC, in an all-out war the US itself will run out of missiles in a few days or weeks, and lacks the capacity to replenish them at a reasonable rate.
If the US bluff is give us what we want or we pull our security guarantee and China invades and you are forced to blow the fabs and move your engineers.
That hurts the US access to chips, short term. But then who is going to fill the demand and where will the talent migrate, and who else is going to build the capacity ($$$)?
The US revealing its true face (the fact it was no allies, only vassals) and trying to bully Taiwan into giving up its most precious economic could be something that help China in the long run. I mean, given two bullies, why try to appease the distant and foreign one, instead of the one with cultural and linguistic ties? Seems an incredibly short-sighted move from Taiwan, but it's good that more people see its true colors. Taiwan should try to gain more protection from Japan.
IDK... if a profitable market is up for grabs, $$$s are not a problem. The financial system is quite comfortable fronting cash for factories making in-demand products.
Have people suddenly forgotten that markets and enterprises exist, and are quite good at making products. Chips are not minerals. The state department isn't a tool for this job.
In any case, TSMC is currently within the US sphere. Nvidia makes most of the capital gains. US government gets to deny China. US companies get good chips. Where's the upside in blowing all this up?
Perhaps pulling the security guarantee and greenlighting reunification under PRC is the destination, and onshoaring Taiwan's critical industries is deemed prudent in advance of this.
At some point being assimilated by China starts to look like a good option. Why blow up fabs if you join willingly, and then its China who is blocking US from buying chips made on latest nodes.
I wonder what the Japanese government has to say about it or, whether the Taiwanese government would allow itself to sign a formal trade and security treaty with Japan, apart from their One China Policy stance.
Ruthless but ineffective: he'll stiff contractors and suppliers, but still failed to keep a Casino solvent when the house is supposed to always win. He also started a tariff war in his first term that ended up with him subsidizing farmers.
Judging by the rest of the comments from my own, all of this is anecdotal right? I don't know the true facts nor their context. And why is he so irrevocably offensive to ya'll? Has he hurt you in some way personally? (not trolling)
1. It's not anecdotal. There's a very long papertrail if you wish to seek it.
2. I also shared my opinion about Larry Ellison in a different HN thread, and he's done nothing to me except make Java deader to me than it already was.
Do you speak negatively only about those who've personally affronted you?
> Do you speak negatively only about those who've personally affronted you?
Yes? Only if it fuels workplace jokes and casual drama, apart from social media.
> I also shared my opinion about Larry Ellison in a different HN thread, and he's done nothing to me except make Java deader to me than it already was.
Can you link it? Interested in reading about it, the parent threads, and the post.
His acknowledgement during the 2016 presidential debates that he gamed the system by using chapter 11 bankruptcy laws to restructure his corporate debts and limit his financial obligations to his creditors without taking a significant hit to his personal liabilities. Dave Chappelle even based a skit as a satirical representation of this Trump narrative on SNL and his other shows but the broader drama that followed afterwards with characters like AG Letitia James, Eli Bartov's court testimony, judge A. Engoron's ruling and Kevin O'Leary's subsequent vocal criticism on it, from the perspective of real estate development... ruthless.
Ruthless? Mostly just a penny pinching liar. By all measures (until he started this presidency grift) he would have made more money just putting his inheritance in index funds, he's just projecting.
Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...
If necessary they'll add an anti-abuse policy or whatnot to mitigate the heavy users.
The sophisticated modeling is basically "just get going" with a guesstimate and adjust if needed.
I doubt that pricing structure will sink any ships. It's going to be about utility.
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