*If you're large and have a constant, stable usage pattern it makes no sense.
Even for large companies, if you have somewhat stable usage most of the year, but periodically have usage spikes, cloud providers still remain super beneficial.
That's the whole selling point of cloud. Spins up the resources when you need them. Spin them down when you don't. Cloud thrives off companies spinning up resources and never spinning them down, even when they don't need them anymore.
I'd love to do something like this, or use API keys, but I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription.
I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.
I think in many cases the token bloat comes from using a fleet of autonomous agents that "collaborate" over a problem. Using one coherent agent loop with a human involved might not feel as futuristic but it's more effective and efficient (right now).
We have two wildly different cohorts of people. Those who see these tools as a technological curiosity and those who see them as a means to a specific end. I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money. I'd much rather be HITL on one very good agent loop if there is real money on the table. If you are mostly having fun, being curious, or exploring (which is fine!) then the cost of subscriptions might feel safer. Running an IRL version of factorio can get very expensive.
I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now. I am still using GPT5.5 in my copilot with custom model configuration for most heavy lifting in visual studio. It is more than sufficient. My average monthly token cost is <$100. Paying for a subscription would be more expensive because I have a predictable and controllable amount of demand.
This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.
Just not finding this to hold true. The difference in work quality for peers isn’t a matter of how many threads they run, but how much attention they give each. Which is a skill.
> I know that if I finish a task with a certain set of constraints that I will get paid a certain amount of money.
So not salary… ok. That explains some of it. Getting paid by the task might flavor one’s approach. But also one could reason, more tasks, more pay… somewhat confusing.
> I also think the API tokens perform better but I have zero evidence other than observing the quality of my work product relative to that of my peers. I have almost a religious fervor about using prepaid tokens now
And this appears to be the other half. It looks no less futuristic than the more wireheaded approach, just different in form.
I often read opinions where people say their particular method of more hands-on working with AI is the most efficient and reasonable way.
From 500 hours working on my mobile app project outside of work, I can confidently say that using anywhere between 2 to 10 conversations to parallelize work is much more effective in my project.
The models being served in the API are the same as via the subscription, there are no shenanigans here, particularly not concerning quality.
And GPT 5.5 was great at the time, I made heavy use of it for my project, but it's long outdated and already being retired.
You also mentioned using it in copilot, which is a third-rate harness that is frustratingly buggy and inefficient.
There's no comparison to Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.
Use whatever works for you, but frankly, I think you should try something new.
> This is analogous to variable vs fixed rate electricity. Paying the real time wholesale price is a massive economic advantage if you can figure out how to control the demand side of the house.
rrr_oh_man is claiming that wholesale fixed rate electricity is generally cheaper than varible rate domestic electricity. Or that the wholesale-bit is higher order than the variable rate-bit. Not that it's a big issue, bob1029's point doesn't actually care about one situation being wholesale. It's just a somewhat narrow, (in this case) inconsequential, but also valid, nitpick.
The current crop of flash models are more comparable to sonnet than opus but they are very affordable.
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab
The real price for tokens at a specific level of intelligence is dropping rapidly. Between models improving and new hardware getting faster, I think prices will be going down, not up.
> Better to get a handle on it now.
I experiment with a lot of providers and models. I strongly disagree that anyone needs to start migrating now in preparation for prices maybe going up in the future.
It doesn’t make sense. Deal with a price increase when it happens, if it does.
Switching models and providers isn’t some huge lift. I can jump to a new model or even hardness and get a feel for it in a day or two. It’s not some huge undertaking that requires preparation and planning.
If prices go up, try something at that point in time. Don’t worry about it until then.
When Claude Code subscriptions really started to catch on, there was a popular idea on HN that Anthropic's end game was that basically every dev adjacent role would need to pay for a $200/mo coding plan.
Then, both Anthropic and OpenAI in lockstep developed a enterprise pricing structure that openly coerced large businesses to pay API prices where it was feasible to spend $200/day rather than the comparatively cheap $200/mo.
Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
From experience, if you work somewhere with very disconnected higher ups a sales person shows what your token usage is vs spend on the monthly subs for whatever set of users you have and then show an API price with a sample bill for even “more users” at that same number of tokens that is 30% lower. The crux of course being that your existing user base is not going to use fewer toke a just because you signed more people up and have a discount for the status quo.
Then when you consolidate all users to a single provider you find out you have a 2x to 3x larger bill because you… logically have more users at the same average token spend than the quote.
At my previous job, all while managing a full team, I did a lot of porting of legacy apps to modern standards to maintain various obligations. It was AI gen work in between meetings and paperwork. It was seen as such a success that I was asked to move to an IC role to focus on it within the “Elite new products team” that was supposed to be all AI and the latest tech. I showed up to find that they were pushing out low quality manually written code in 12 hour days six days per week to appear like LLMs were in use to save face because they lacked a token budget or the skills to properly manage one under the APIs. They had dismissed someone who had spent multiple thousands per month on Agent swarms. It was the perfect situation to make their 3x budget issue a 10-30x budget spend issue.
For many many reasons I left that job and got a new one but that was the cherry on top.
Companies still believe they have IP to protect. Even when all they do are basic CRUD systems or on the verge of collapsing if they don’t renew some contracts.
The API/subscription split as always there. I don’t know why you’re talking about it as a bait-and-switch development.
That doesn’t change anything about what I said, though. The relative price per task or price per unit intelligence is also going down in the APIs too.
> Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
What are you talking about? The APIs serve the same models as the subscriptions. Unless you think the price of APIs has been going up (it has not) this argument doesn’t make sense
It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing. Most enterprise at this point are paying API pricing
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
In the optimistic case you describe, what smart customers want to watch out for is being lured into vibing your projects into such byzantine slop-complexity that subscription plans and trailing models are no longer sufficient to make progress on them.
Vibe-coders talk about surrendering understanding to the models, trusting that there will always be a model able to overcome and work through any technical debt they happen to accumulate, but the danger that still lurks there (at least for the naive) is that you'll need increasingly large contexts, increasingly sophisticated models, and increasingly large token spends just to keep that ball rolling.
Between profitable enterprise accounts being ineligible for subscription, eager but busy people paying for underutilized subscriptions, and naive vibe-coders falling into their pit trap, you can indeed imagine subsidized subscription accounts being available for a long time and remaining an effective value hack for people careful enough not to fall into the pit trap. But only insofar as they are that careful.
You cannot predict the future, but you can identify risks and attribute a likelihood. A risk is that the subsidized inference will either end or be reduced significantly in the next 1-2y. If you think the likelihood is high enough it makes sense to ensure your systems are prepared for it.
> It's not obvious the subsidization will end. Loss leaders are a thing.
Loss leaders are a thing so long as they actually do lead somewhere. If your primary value proposition is conveyed by the loss leader itself, where do you go from there?
Also they can always find another way to make money. Make subscription users product and sell some analytics like "show most trending project being built this week".
Also, some subset of developers on subscriptions are going to develop products that use the API, and some of those products are going to be successful.
>At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.
So just wait until that happens? What's the point of scrimping and saving now? Not to mention you're paying for a premium in the meantime.
(meta commentary)
really gnarly word choice: "drop" in "they're going to drop the real prices in your lab"?
I took your meaning as "they're gonna drop [a bad surprise on you by raising] the real prices"... so at least it's not quite as tortured as the ambiguous "support for version N dropped today" (where you often can't even infer the direction from context).
this isn't just a tangent, I'm having trouble understanding the point you're trying to make, which hinges entirely on deciding if you meant "drop" literally
The term "drop" becoming a synonym for "release", "put out" or "put into effect" for things outside of music/albums is one of the most confusing linguistic innovations of the last decade.
They meant "they're going to drop a bad surprise by charging you API prices", so yes, a better wording would be "they're going to give you a bad surprise in the form of forced API pricing".
> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less.
This only applies under the assumption that everyone tokenmaxxes their subscription.
I have visibility across a few different Claude team subscriptions. I'd say roughly 10% of people max their subscriptions.
I think I've only seen one organization where the under-used subs don't more than pay for the tokenmaxxed ones.
And that is ignoring the 90% margin that API inference runs at.
At some point companies will need to have the “scary” conversation about the value proposition of adding another human to the team, or adding a comparable amount of token spend to the team.
$1k/person sounds like a lot, but a ten person team at $1k token burn / head / month is spending $120k. How much does a new hire cost, tco? Does velocity from one more person compare with velocity from one more person’s worth of tokens?
Sure, learning to be efficient matters. So does taking the time to consider cost vs alternative. You might be surprised by what you find, in either direction.
Counter point - models get better, ways to run them gets optimized and hardware will eventually come down in price.
The share of tasks where "cheaper" models are enough also increases for same reason. For majority of use cases it will quickly become race to the bottom. And that means part of the pie for the "premium" models of frontier AI labs will quickly become smaller and smaller.
> I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription
Like a big white truck or a 600mm lens, expensive gear should be purchased by an employer. I think most folks talking about API access are getting it through work/self-employment.
Anthropic needs to retune their personal plans. Opus is the Amelia Bedelia of models. Maddening! I shelled out $100 for Fable to drive Opus and finish a personal project, but that's probably my last time loading up on usage credits. I put a second $100 towards API credits so I could dink around with API access and understand conversations like these.
There's another big element that is being completely overlooked.
People who use API keys on their dime are usually running DeepSeek 4.x or GLM 5.x (Flash or otherwise) and similar models.
RE: Subsidies:
What if subscription costs are still high enough to be profitable (I believe they are for OpenAI).
Then maybe we should be saying that API users are paying an order of magnitude more than the cost, at least at the very top end (frontier models). Likely because big cos are willing to pay top dollar for what is the best and unmatched elsewhere.
For a lot of large scale day to day work, deepseek / zai models (the latter comes with a subscription) can be very cost effective and very competitive actually.
Another thing of note is that when coding at 'scale' to my surprise over time with memory aggregation across users/sessions these models can be better than the evals would have you believe because they seem to be differently/less (?) RL'ed (aka actually listen to instructions), which results in them being more fastidious about writing memories and benefiting from them, especially over time. These are of course mostly subjective opinions but they were surprising, and not what we were expecting.
Relevant: the proxy we wrote and use:
https://yapp.latchlabs.dev is partially open sourced: still working on releasing more of our memories stuff.
Personally at home I use the free github copilot and then openrouter when that runs out. Last month I used $0.90 of openrouter. Zero so far this month. When my bill starts hitting double digits I'll consider options.
Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)
I'm with you there. I'm on expensive plans with everyone because I run out of tokens and rotate/use the models that are best in their niche...
CLI Model Pct Remaining Reset Date
claude all models 15% 3d
claude Fable 50% 3d
grok all models 0% 4d
agy Gemini 36% 5d
agy Claude and GPT models 0% 5d
codex codex 0% 6d
And I also just used two of my three get-another-week-free tokens for codex.
If you've got an agentic swarm, or are working on multiple big projects at once, or have agents parsing data... you burn through tokens fast. The last four days in API would have cost me well over $3k.
I'm always curious, what kind of software exactly are people building that requires multiple parallel agents and thousands of dollars per month in AI tokens per developer!
The drug dealer gives you a free hit because it is profitable for him in the long term for you to be addicted to his product, not because he is your friend.
If you're genuinely curious, I'd recommend searching around about the history of this persistent urban legend. It's really interesting.
But the short version is that there are lots of people who want to buy any given drug and drug dealers sell them. I don't know exactly what you mean by "WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs", but there typically isn't a whole lot of waiting. There's a lot of demand out there. Giving away a bunch of free fentanyl to random people in the hopes that one of them instantly gets addicted would be a pretty wasteful and high risk sales tactic, especially given the number of people that want to buy it already.
...yes? It doesn't literally kill you if use more tokens than usual?
And we're talking about subscription plans from OpenAI/Anthropic here. Switching to a different model and/or harness if the price changes isn't a "the world has run out of opioids and I'm going to need a detox center" level crisis.
The original question was "are you sure an OpenAI subscription isn't heroin?" Different impacts of overuse (death vs slop code) feels like a valid point of difference.
This is a weirdly melodramatic analogy.
If you want to flatten everything to "all things habit forming are definitionally equivalent", you'll get some pretty funky results.
You're equivocating, they were talking about addiction, you're talking about overuse/overdose which is where the analogy breaks down for pretty obvious reasons.
What? (1) Yes.. it's never that [stupid economics, they don't want their purchasers to die.. might as well sell fentanyl], (2) it's always that [hardly any way to propose alternatives.. within the scope of not killing the customer]
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying but if you're curious, there's a lot of writing about the persistence of this particular urban legend. A lot of it starts with 1920s newspapers painting pictures of dastardly drug peddlers luring in children with free drugs to get them hooked.
Turns out that drug dealers by and large prefer the straightforward approach of selling drugs to the huge market of people who want to take them.
People using API keys heavily, are either making enough money from whatever they're doing to afford Anthropic's high prices, or are using a mix of locally hosted and cloud-based models. E.g. using a cloud model as a planner/orchestrator, with a local model as a subagent that follows the orchestrator's designs/instructions.
I had a subscription for a few months. I found that at the end of every week I would succumb to the sunk cost fallacy and try to squeeze all the usage out of my subscription. I'd rather pay a little extra in LLM cost to not have that issue.
We (some friends and I) built it because we wanted to understand how these things worked and also had max accounts. It has since grown into a ton more, but is still in essence a very full featured local proxy.
I think businesses are footing the majority of that bill right now due to regulatory requirements, but for individuals that price increase is def coming. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but enjoy it while it lasts :')
I am on the 25 dollar plan and I never even come close to hitting the weekly limit. Still manage to ship quite a bit. Not sure how folks hit their Claude limits. I have handle on the codebase though.
You might not have a choice. For example, if you want to get a guarantee from Anthropic that they don't train bases on your prompts, you will need an enterprise deal, which is pay-by-token.
There are tools like Paseo that call the existing CLIs meaning you can keep using the subsidized subscriptions while still having access to the json stream.
My first tech job was at HP, in 2015, started there just in time work and live through that split. That was a smoother one from what I hear but it was not a fun job to have at the time
I think it is helpful to remind folk that these policies are not universally hated. Indeed a majority of voters voted specifically for them, and they were explicitly laid out.
This is democracy in action. The majority (of those who care enough at all) get to rule over the minority (and the apathetic). Obviously not all actions will be universally loved, but no govt action can ever be universally loved.
Well, for one you're not supposed to use a majority vote to abolish democracy, or mess with unalienable rights. You can think of it as "democracy with precommitment".
Its also helpful to remind folk about why someone would hold this position.
The largest reason US got to where it was at least in the world economy stage was because of the visa program. It was the country everyone wanted to move to, because you can apply your skills, make money, start a business, with very little restriction comparatively, buy a house, and live your dream life.
The more people wanna work, the more opportunities there are for work. Any time money changes hands, like in salary for work, this grows the economy, which further creates new jobs.
If someone is for this type of restricted immigration, then you should have a clear cut position on why you think things being more expensive, less available, and overall lower economic activity (which affects things like one being able to get a mortgate or other loan, and so on) is generally better for the country.
Because if they don't have those reasons, or have ones that are not rooted in reality than the position comes from xenophobia and racism in 99% of the cases.
Countries are not merely economic zones..! While I don't even agree with you (skilled immigrants are very different from unskilled), even if I did, anti immigration sentiment is largely about culture. I would prefer to live in my own culture than to be slightly richer in someone else's culture.
It be valid point if you cound point to a set of traditions and beliefs that defines what American culture is, but modern American culture is literally an average over contributions from different cultures due to all the historic immigration.
He's not saying the US doesn't have a culture. He's saying the US is large and diverse and has multiple cultures. Thus trying to define "American culture" is difficult.
The point is valid, but perhaps not relevant. Broadly, yes, Americans are easy to spot abroad. Attitude, behavior etc are all part of culture.
Yes, an American from NY and one from Alabama will have massive differences, but culture (anywhere) doesn't mean that people are all the same.
Deep down, if you substitute "culture" for "race" in most (not all) conversations you get a much closer understanding of the real problem. For example the first lady is an immigrant, but clearly the right kind.
Im sorry, but if you think that someone being effectively racist in a nice way is somehow better than being up front and calling them out for their belief, you are beyond lost. People like you deserve Trump. Youll ride your high horse of morality of being nice to everyone straight to your grave.
Please spare us the sermonizing and personal vitriol, thanks. I posted the same reply to the other commenter. My role here is to uphold the guidelines, not to adjudicate on the relative merits of arguments in a fundamentally toxic debate. This place only continues to exist because we have guidelines and uphold them daily, and because enough other people bother to be respectful in the way they participate here. If you’re not able to make your points without personal attacks, this is not the place for you.
I’m as concerned about economic collapse as anyone. We’re not so delusional as to think we can fix the hardest problems in the world by writing assholish comments to each other on what is a nerd message board. This is a site for people who build things, and for people who are are interested in discussing new approaches to difficult problems. It’s not for clobbering each other over the head with ideas that people have been clobbering each other over the head with for decades. Stop trashing the guidelines and our efforts to uphold them; they are the entire reason this continues to be a place where people come to discuss difficult topics after nearly two decades. Please go somewhere else if this is the best you have to offer. This is a place for people who have high standards of themselves.
In the US, anti-immigrant sentiment is often the highest in regions with relatively few immigrants, far away from the border. The less that immigrants are part of peoples daily lives, the more people seem to fear for their "culture".
Presuming to have any real agency over the evolution of human culture also seems misguided. Culture is like a river, in that "no man ever steps into the same one twice". It's constantly changing in unpredictable ways, from generation to generation or even within generations, with or without immigration. That goes for the cultures of immigrants also.
The more people stand to lose, the more they fear losing it? shocking. (I don't even think that's true. Southern border states are a lot more concerned with illegal crossings than anywhere else. People who have to live near ethnic ghettos have a bigger problem with them than the coastal elites pushing for it. Etc)
Pretending that importing millions of foreigners will not affect the culture whatsoever is just a dumb or disingenuous argument, sorry. We already see a microcosm of it with Indian tech workers, having constant scandals about only hiring other Indians of their caste, and with the southern border states having dual spanish language signs everywhere. UK has issues with Islamic tension today already.
It is so fundamentally obvious that mass immigration from non-western cultures will produce non-westernized cultural changes, that otherwise wouldn't happen, that I have to just assume you are intentionally pretending not to understand that.
> The more people stand to lose, the more they fear losing it? shocking.
No - the less real exposure a person has to immigrants and their communities, the more dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric has a chance to substitute for real experience.
> Southern border states are a lot more concerned with illegal crossings than anywhere else
Southern border states are also generally filled with a lot of people who actually know, from experience, that illegal border crossings and immigration are not the same thing.
> the southern border states having dual spanish language signs everywhere
The humanity! There will always be cultural diffusion along borders, no immigration policy is ever going to change that reality. The lives of people on either side are integrated in real tangible ways despite the lines on maps.
And the reverse is also true, of course. Mexico is filled with English speakers and it's quite easy to get around there without speaking a lick of Spanish. It's a great place to visit.
> Pretending that importing millions of foreigners will not affect the culture whatsoever is just a dumb or disingenuous argument
The argument is more that any predictions about the future of culture or efforts to steer it one way or another are mostly futile, and likely more inspired by ones prejudices and irrational fears.
Whatever it is that you are afraid of losing - you probably won't - or if you do, the immigrants probably weren't the ones who took it from you.
(It's actually way more likely that some piece of technology, maybe built by some people on this very site, will be the thing that kills your culture)
But will remain anonymous and are okay with the collateral damage. My suspicion is that competition makes you feel insecure. I was born and raised in SF, and I see this not only with immigrants but also from people who feel violated by migrants. There is a spectrum. It’s ugly, short sighted and unhelpful. It’s what it takes to make the valley, but people love pulling up ladders. At least, behind an alias, you’re will to acknowledge your shortcomings.
Tell me how bitter you are without telling me how bitter you are, anonymously.
You’ve let your bitterness infect your happiness and think no one can see you regurgitating your lack of self worth all over your shirt.
Can we agree these are actions of a coward, you’re attempting to label as democracy and that it accomplishes nothing because no one reading this has authority?
I would genuinely like to understand how you square this with the current president being known to leverage a lot of low/unskilled temporary workers visas.
If these weren't issued he would need to hire Americans?
This feels like one of those times where it is easy to vote for a policy when the effects are on a vaguer or populational level, but when you actually meet or make friends with someone affected it takes on an entirely new light.
I mean this is how gay marriage flipped, enough people got to know their homosexual friends, neighbors, or even family members and realized that the policy was hateful against someone they cared about and the stated harms were clearly rediculous when put in the context of that real person you know.
Hey, if all it takes to get the government to hurt those immigrants is electing a narcissistic pedophile to the highest office of the land, then so be it.
I'm a Canadian but I don't understand this sentiment towards Americans.
I think that citizens of a country should have a say in their policies without it being called "xenophobia". Could some vote for these policies because of "xenophobia" ? possibly but not all.
From what I've gathered, the primary reason Republicans won the election was because a portion of Americans felt unheard and the party gave them a voice.
I'm not obliged to like it but I feel like pushing people like the parent away is precisely why United States is caught in a quagmire right now.
Obviously, Canadians have a very different view than Americans regarding immigration but nonetheless, the will of people should be respected.
The critisism isnt about the policy on immigration. The critisim is about analogously giving a convicted felon a flamethrower to use on your house to get rid of unwanted bugs and thinking that its the right solution. All while also crying about small government all the time. That kind of thinking is pretty much on par for modern conservatives though.
The truth is llegal immigration in the sense of criminals coming here was never a problem. Most of the "illegal" immigrants were coming here by abusing the generous asylum system. And furthermore, they were coming here for work opportunity, not to leech from the system.
The border bill that Biden had in plan would have fixed that. Trump told Republicans to veto it because it would hurt his chances.
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.
I'm surprised to hear that it's so successful beyond banner ads. I figured most platforms would use the same domain for their ads as their content. I'm pretty sure YouTube and my "smart" TV do that. Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.
They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
I use uBlock Origin on my Windows, macOS, and Android versions of Firefox but I also pay for YT Premium. It means I can use the official YouTube client on my Android devices without ads. I get YouTube Music. The creators I watch get a share of my monthly fee.
Reading comprehension? I don't see any ads with YT premium. That's the whole point. Plus you get YTM. Great that FF works for you (I also use FF), but I, nor my family sees any ads on any of our PCs, Phones, TVs etc. YT premium is stupid cheap for what it provides.
Same with ublock origin on firefox, been years since I've seen any ads. There was a period where they tried to break through the blocking and occasionally I'd see one, but it kinda seems like they gave up.
YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.
I use the web version and when clicking an artist's name I only see a description for well-known ones. Other channels don't show any description even though the YouTube side has one.
I assume one requirement for getting genAI tracks is being initially fine with hearing music from random channels and also hearing music produced after 2022; if one only cares (for example) about pre-2020 very well-known music they're probably going to be safe.
I regularly listen to recent music, but often tracks I explicitly search for, and autoplay based on those I “liked”. My “Liked Music” playlist has several thousand entries, so I suspect that heavily steers what I’m presented with.
Even for large companies, if you have somewhat stable usage most of the year, but periodically have usage spikes, cloud providers still remain super beneficial.
That's the whole selling point of cloud. Spins up the resources when you need them. Spin them down when you don't. Cloud thrives off companies spinning up resources and never spinning them down, even when they don't need them anymore.