Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.
You can buy a 13" color e-ink display for ~$250, or a 7" e-ink display for ~$60. These can be placed in a frame for a couple bucks more [2].
Two things that I did not anticipate:
1: Refresh time is a lot longer for color displays (~20s) as compared to black and white displays (~0.5s).
2: Stock images tend to use cartoons. There is a reason for that. These displays require dithering which seems to work a lot better with a limited color palette, flat areas, and bold edges.
It depends on the colour display. Kaleido screens use a colour filter over a B&W screen so they are just as fast as refreshing as the B&W ones. The other colour eInk displays are much slower which is why they've seen less uptick in consumer eReaders.
Rooftop solar generally requires professional installation. Balcony solar, as discussed in the article, does not require professional installation and simply plugs directly into an outlet.
Depends on where you are. I can DIY the physical mounting parts of a rooftop install where I live (San Francisco), but a licensed electrician needs to do (or at least supervise) the wiring.
I do wonder if having an electrician come by after the fact to inspect it counts as "supervising", though.
Here in NM, you can take a "homeowner's solar exam", and if you pass (75%) you can do the full install, including connecting to the grid, yourself.
The exam is much harder than one might expect, but if you're reasonably competent with residential wiring, far from impossible. It covers a bunch of stuff that is irrelevant for 90% of all residental solar installs, naturally.
No, it is very, very, very far from the full electrician exam. Still a lot more than one might expect from the open book aspect, and the amount of the NEC it actually covers.
California just passed "balcony solar" but requires G99 certification, which is, of course, slightly different than the G98 that everyone else on the planet uses.
That's what I thought after he lost in 2020. And yet he came back in 2024 winning even more votes, both in absolute terms and in percentage, than he did in either 2016 or 2020.
The hubris of the party machine being wielded to prevent a challenger to Biden was the problem. There were many of us screaming that a new candidate was necessary, but nobody listened. They stayed lock step in line with the party machine.
I voted for Dean Phillips in the primary. He was blackballed. Local party officials even tried to keep him of ballots.
It even got to the point where Ezra Klein was loudly complaining about what was happening, and even he was criticized.
If you want to understand why the Dems keep losing, you have to understand the party machine. Looking at how the Phillips campaign was treated, and the Sanders campaign before that, show exactly how someone can run on exactly the issues people care about but be shut down before it ever comes to a vote, because it harms the political interests of the higher ups in the party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Phillips#2024_presidentia...
The Democratic Party's electorate aren't really paying attention.
A "coherent" is not the same as "comparable to non-self-published authors".
Early LLMs were trivially non-coherent. The stories it wrote should shift constantly. The story could start on the moon, then the character could drive to Madison, Wisconsin.
A more obvious way to see this is in video generators. If the "camera" turns 180° twice, we often look at a completely different scene.
Can current models write an entire coherent book? I don't know. I have never wanted to generate such a book. But "do I like this book" is not a good test for coherence.
There is a quote from a CGP Grey video from a bit over a decade ago, "There isn't a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right." [1]
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
This is one step away from walking into the same mistake all these discussions do, including replies to your comment.
Yes, we can probably invent new jobs and new career fields.
No, it does fuck all for people who lose their current jobs mid-way through their career or later, and watch themselves and their families be kicked down 2-3 rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, possibly throwing them into generational poverty.
Or, in short: yes, there will be new jobs. But not for you, and not for your children.
For the society and human civilizations, these techological revolutions were always a net positive down the line. For individuals caught in them, they rarely were.
That's why the Luddites were destroying looms. Not to fight the progress of technology, but to save their own families from being thrown into poverty.
Timeframe is also different, agriculture changed over generations and the kids that would not take over the farm had access to education and could move to cities. Now we may see a similar job destruction over a decade without alternatives available for much more people.
> had access to education and could move to cities
Or their rural economy collapsed, everyone was hungry and unemployed, and they moved somewhere new out of necessity and basically started over with nothing, living in squalid conditions and working very unsafe, unpleasant, and exploitative jobs.
I think the difference is the Luddites weren't happily designing and building innovative new looms for 50 years and now suddenly surprised-Pikachu that the automated-loom-maker has come for them.
What did you think "disruption" meant? Vibes, papers, new Javascript frameworks?
The amount of consumption is largely dependent on income level. There's a recent study from Moody's that says that in the US, the top 10% income bracket now accounts for roughly half of consumer spending. As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
This doesn't make sense at all. It is a bad statistical analysis of consumer spending. [1] A few things from the thread on why by Levy on why it feels wrong .
First, why does it feel wrong?
1. the top 10% get about 50% of pre-tax income
2. they get 30 to 37% of disposable income after tax&transfers (depending on source)
3. and we know the rich have a higher savings rate, so consume a lesser share of their income (US, China)
May be not top 10% but top 0.1% are good at avoiding tax using various loopholes. Like borrowing against stocks (and other appreciating assets) till death to avoid paying CGT and debt is then repaid by heirs which do not pay CGT AFAIK. So they can spend more than income stats would suggest.
> As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It works right up until some form of revolution, either politically or violently. We are far from anything like that but I'd rather not get close to the line. I think I'm a minority view though, despite being in the top 10% myself.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
Caesar was a populist reformer. The Roman Republic was long destroyed at that point, due primarily to concentration of wealth and replacement of the plebians with slaves.
Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.
And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick (trying to map it onto contemporary politics?).
Caesar was killed by the same people (hardline conservative ultra-wealthy 'Optimate' families/factions) who also brutally murdered the tribune of the plebs (person appointed to beg the ultra-wealthy for favorable legislation) and his supporters not once but twice. He was killed for the same reason too - land redistribution, limits on slave labor. That was called 'tyranny' by the elites.
Crassus was wealthy before Caesar and died before Caesar took power. This kind of politicking was just a necessary evil in the Roman Republic - which always was an oligarch-controlled plutocracy and never a true democracy as we know it today (e.g. Athens). It was 'pay to play', sponsorship of the ultra-wealthy was not optional.
If by Disney you mean tickets to Disneyland and similar theme parks, then pricing rising above inflation actually reflects wealth inequality getting smaller, not bigger. A lot more people in the world than in decades past now have enough wealth to consider traveling to one of the small number of Disney theme parks in the world and spending time there, and there's only so many people who can fit in the park at once. The Disney corporation could (and has) built more parks around the world, but maybe you care about Disneyland specifically, and there's only one of those today just like in the 1950s when it was built.
The issue is that there isn't economic demand from that audience for approximately 90% of companies operating today. Maybe Disney can succeed by going upmarket, but can all the animation/filmmaking/TV/theme park companies they compete with?
The number of millionaires/billionaires/etc feels low enough that there won't be demand for dozens of companies in every possible industry. The ones that have the biggest fanbase/cultural footprint maybe stick around, but the majority would presumably just go under.
Horses absolutely are consumers. They eat, they drink. They just can't manipulate their environment to get more food or drink.
The human system relies on us doing stuff for each other, mediated by "money". We get "paid" by some other human for doing stuff for them. "Stealing" is discouraged. "Being given" is rare. "Money" originates from fiat, goes where it goes.
Humans unable to do for others don't get "paid", get starved/sick etc, experience pain, cause trouble and disappear eventually. When doing stuff for people is not done by people, the pay cycle breaks. When machines do a substantial fraction of economic activity (intangibles like decision-making, writing, answering the phone, etc. as well as transport), there is no need for very many people. Absent the need, there will be no support. The farms won't give their food away, they will arm themselves against the hungry.
There will be some human work. So long as machines cannot equal human touch and experience combined, there will be medicine. There will always be sex work. But who affords it?
Possibly racial disparities will diminish. A machine might actually give equal medical care to, or equally arrest, the Black and white person. Or not, depends on the training. Look who's developing the AIs.
Economists thought that economic development means democratic development. They were wrong, see China. They thought that economic liberalization means good governance. Wrong, see Russia. Economists are right about things until they are wrong, and we can all run off the cliff with them.
When the population drops (war, starvation, refusal to bear children) to the level needed to run the machines, the system will stabilize. Pretty much the horse scenario.
Yes, we've seen that already without necessarily a technological singularity. You accurately describe the great depression in the 1920s and several similar events prior to that.
But what's consistent with those events is that they end and economic development is resumed under different circumstances. I don't see any reason that the current era will be different or that current problem will be unfixable. People used to get paid to build national parks. What would be our current iteration of national parks?
This transition will be a lot slower than the shocks that produced depressions and recessions. A couple of good wars will thin the herd, which is how populations have been weeded out in earlier times.
Public works projects need funding and purpose. I'm not optimistic about what purposes the make-work funding gets applied to these days. Public beauty, cleanliness, health are not in the priorities.
Huh? The Great Depression was a cyclical event. So public works projects only needed to last until the market recovered. Technological revolutions are structural changes. There is no “national parks” equivalent program which we were willing to run to sustain the horse population at 1900 levels.
Does this result in millions of micro-businesses? All on the verge on bankruptcy, all continuously going out of business as new ones are invested in by VCs hoping to make a quick buck
More likely it results in a state of permanently doing gig jobs as any temporary work you can find is just a front to train a lower quality, lower cost automation to replace yourself.
That is one possibility but it goes against the interest of all income groups of the economy, including the ones on the very top. So a solution is in everyone's interest to be found, and nor is it a physical impossibility.
Until the ones at the top own a fully automated supply chain for their every need and luxury and all they need from everyone else is the ability to feel superior.
In this case, why doesn't the rungs of the economy below the rich just... run the way they have been? Serious question, I've been mulling over in my head what it means for a few people to own the majority of "the economy" and goods to be very cheap, but no one has any income.
What I always come back to is this: Why does it matter what the very richest do? Worst case the economy operates approximately as it does now (maybe with us knowledge workers knocked down a few rungs). But like, the rich can't eat _all_ the food.
I feel like the most likely outcome is that the quality of life of the bottom 90% is overall better than today. HN'ers quality of life is maybe worse than it is today.
They keep buying ten of the houses I want to live in, knocking them down, and building a single tasteless McMansion on the combined block, and then lobbying for building and zoning regulations that won't let me build another house.
Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.
The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.
I think if we jump instantly to a fully automated world, perhaps there's no problem, but in a normal transition from the actual world the issues are
- capital / limited goods
- allocation of labor
Things like land are a limited commodity. Concentration of ownership usually comes with rent extraction. Because you need to live somewhere, but available locations are finite (and supply can even be controlled, and is). This means that you can end up with a cartel scenario where increasingly normal peoples previously disposable income is tied up in an increasingly large % to those fixed costs of living. This is arguably well under way in some countries.
The second point is, the richest enjoy goods like personal yachts, private planes, luxury restaurants. If a lot of labor is increasingly allocated to producing highly inefficient luxuries, it's essentially wasted. You might have hundreds of businesses employing thousands of people or machines, but the productivity of their work is essentially all going into products consumed by a few people. I'd say a limited amount of this is a good thing, it's a normal part of the proliferation of choice enabled by capitalism. But taken too far you return to a historic economy where most peoples productive life is spent serving a tiny elite, while living in poor conditions themselves.
In our financial system, your income as an individual has to be significant enough to send a signal to produce the goods you want. If this ceases to be true for even a significant minority of people, you will find consumer choices and available quality decreasing for those people, which is a real problem. This is to a lesser extent happening in some segments of the economy.
Yes, though I'd say that rent extraction and labor being directed to the whims of a small number of people is essentially the same thing. And even under a step jump to full automation, the owners of fixed goods can still extract monopoly rents.
This is also largely the conclusion of classical economics (i.e. Adam Smith) and the argument was developed in great detail by Riccardo, George (who explicitly considered the no-labor-required case in 1800s), and many others.
Narcissism and psychopathy are why. The richest people stopped needing to care about money to fill their lives with endless luxuries billions of dollars ago. They enjoy being richer and more powerful than others.
The rich will buy all the scarce resources and charge the maximum possible price to extract all of the value you can provide. You will be unable to accumulate wealth. Dynamic pricing of fast food will extend to all food and even to e.g. plumbing fittings - you don't own a copper mine, so you can't go make your own. You will do hard and degrading work for a subsistence living despite the ample resources and technology required to improve your condition.
This is history, not a random hypothesis. Feudal serfs had the ways and means to bootstrap, but in fact lived worse than their pre-feudal ancestors.
I actually have a random thought that it is this innate human drive that causes society to be mostly employed despite massive differences in technology and productivity across geography and time.
What if the driver of employment is not efficient return of capital, but satisfaction of human mind?
Your statement makes it seem like we had no problem losing professions to automation. I'd argue this isn't true.
There are plenty of poeple who have inadequate work the world over because there isn't enough paid work to do, and most professions are servicing wants, not needs, so the demand is very elastic, with many people now multi talented and still not making ends meet.
I know it's been talked to death already, but the fact that the video is so wrong on self-driving cars is mind-blowing. We can rationalize post-fact as much as we want - still it is shocking that popular belief never expected language models before self driving.
Popular belief never took the regulatory obstacles to self-driving cars seriously. If LLMs required insurance to use, they also wouldn't be available in public yet.
I'm not sure I agree that it was ludicrously wrong. His thesis is "the question isn't whether self-driving cars will replace human drivers, but how quickly". Sure it's been slow going, but you can't walk down a street in San Francisco today without seeing a Waymo, which wasn't true a few years ago. We're still at the bottom of the S curve.
1. There are no rules of economics. Economists attempt to understand things that happen and use that understanding to predict future events, but frankly there’s not a lot of consensus.
2. Economics is a function of human behavior, not horse behavior. Economics is about coordinating human effort. Humans make economics, horses don’t. When economics change in a way that is bad for horses, the horses have no recourse. When economics change in a way that is bad for humans, the affected humans seek to change things.
Indeed. The economy may in fact eventually close in on itself and become a fully automated system with no humans in a loop. "Disneyland with no children", as I believe Bostrom called it.
Assuming we are around for this, this raises the question: if the economy can function without us, what claim will we have on its outputs?
Isn’t technology defined by how things can be used by humans, I.e. tools? Horses can’t use smartphones, and a “smartphone” designed for a horse would look significantly different. Seems a like a nonsensical argument based on the definition of words. Technology is what humans can use to achieve tasks.
They still are, wherever people work with animals at small scale. People get attached, and the boundary between "animal as my fellow (if dumber) friend" and "animal as my main capital investment" gets really blurry. This was the reality for most people until 20th century, and we still see echoes of that in old books and stories.
This sounds like a clever argument, but the mindset of some executives really has no impact on how differently horses and humans are treated in society.
To spell it out:
When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.
I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.
In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.
When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
I don't disagree. Trajectory has overall been great for people. Just saying it's not uniformly great for everyone at all times, in fact whenn it regularly flies off the rails, restoring it exacts a great cost from individuals and societies.
It's not really "many" centuries. It's more like three or four and even that's not uniformly distributed. There are still many subsistence farmers in the world, and almost all of us were doing that for thousands of years.
Also, those past few centuries have involved the largest violent revolutions and wars in human history.
The idea of employment and money is a relatively modern conception. There is no physical law that states it must work indefinitely and efficiently for all participants.
>Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.
Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."
It took me a while to figure this out too and only did in the last couple days: a 10x, 20x, or 25x plan is the cost of your monthly sub times that multiplier in terms of API costs.
So a 20x plan, that was formerly $200, would have been $4000 in API credits. Which sounds like a lot but the API is absolutely horrendously expensive - like you'll burn through $100 in 45 minutes of 5.6 Sol on High reasoning. I know this because I did this once.
They still used multipliers in the email. The relevant passage was:
Starting October 30, 2026, your included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex will decrease from 20 times to 10 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance. Your GPT-6 Pro limit in Chat will decrease from 200 to 100 messages per week. Your price remains unchanged and you’ll keep your current limits through October 29, 2026.
And:
For those who want even more usage and speed, the new Pro 500 tier offers our highest usage allowance, with 25 times the usage of Plus. It also includes access to Ultrafast, with up to 8 times faster token generation.
I ended up going with a Synthetic subscription (they host some open-weight models including K3 and GLM 5.3). They're the only subscription that I found that's simultaneously cheaper than token rates, and is extremely transparent about usage and pricing.
How does that make economical sense from the side of synthetic though? (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I usually am)
If they're simultaneously cheaper than token rates but couldn't they have sold these tokens in the first place on a platform like openrouter?
And the platforms that are hosting these tokens on openrouter aren't really earning any money at all in the first place as that itself is a race to bottom (and its more so just neutral, neither positive nor loss or barely profitable) so unless synthetic is actively making loss, and if that's the case, then it might not be sustainable, I don't quite understand the economics behind it.
Is the economics behind this the fact that since its a single subscription instead of token based pricing. Some people might use less tokens than what their subscription costs and so it offsets/subsidizes the other set of people who need more tokens.
But then, this means that as you had suggested in the first place, it would be a good deal for the people who want more tokens, so they would flock even more to the platform and it should eventually balance out unless external money is being burnt as I had said earlier.
I am genuinely interested in how they make this work so I would love if someone can shine some more light to it as I would like to read more about its economics that makes it work, thanks in advance! :-D
It appears, from the outside, to be a collection of small optimizations:
- The way they pace and limit usage seems to echo some strategies I've seen to reduce the impact of burst usage
- They cut down the maximum context length of most models
- They claim to have some custom sauce that improves how they handle API requests and reduces error rates
- Their explanations appear focused around optimizing concurrency in the same way that the 'flex' mode of some APIs does, though I've not seen specific docs of them claiming that this is part of how they save on costs
There may be more that I haven't seen or noticed. I don't work for or with them.
I tried searching for "Synthetic AI Subscription" and "Synthetic Data" is such a massive keyword in AI pre-training circles it's impossible to find the company.
They are suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.
If:
1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated
2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.
What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?
It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.
Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
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