The American constitution is riddled with problems that many later democracies managed to fix. In general, the founding fathers envisioned a system where amendments were far more common and they didn't realize they made the bar too high. And that doesn't even touch on the electoral college, first-past-the-post voting, vague descriptions of the role of the supreme court, and no method for no confidence votes. Of course, it would be next to impossible to fix these in America because it would require a significant rewrite of the constitution.
The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.
But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
It really isn't ill-defined at all. Both the constitution and the law allowing the president to impose tariffs for national security reasons is clear. There are just some partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.
This specific law does not allow imposing tariffs, which is the whole point of the ruling. Roberts’s opinion says that a tariff is essentially a tax, which is not what Congress clearly delegated.
He didn't pardon anyone involved with January 6th until he was re-elected. There is a documentary where Roger Stone acts psychotic with anger because Trump refused to issue a pardon for him or anyone else after Jan. 6. Trump is a selfish person, and if he thinks he is going to be vulnerable, he isn't going to protect anyone else for no other than reason than he thinks they should go down with him.
We've let criminal administrations get away with too much for too long. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump 1 were all allowed to disregard the law and it got worse every time. We cannot move forward without purging crime and corruption from our system. Everyone from the top down to Billy-Bod ICE agent.
No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.
Consumer AI is not going to come close to bailing them out. They need B2B use cases. Anthropic is a little better positioned because they picked the most proven B2B use case — development — and focused hard on it. But they'll have to expand to additional use cases to keep up with their spend and valuation, which is why things like cowork exist.
But I tend to agree that the ultimate winner is going to be Google. Maybe Microsoft too.
Unless you're totally dumb or a super genius, LLMs can easily provide that kind of monthly value to you. This is already true for most SOTA models, and will only become more true as they get smarter and as society reconfigures for smoother AI integration.
Right now we are in the "get them hooked" phase of the business cycle. It's working really damn well, arguably better than any other technology ever. People will pay, they're not worried about that.
It would have to be $60-$80/mo. in value over and above what you could get at the same time with cheap 3rd party inference on open models. That's not impossible depending on what kind of service they provide, but it's really hard.
I don't see that. I've used LLMs and I've seen very little direct value. I've seen some value though Photoshop etc. But nothing I'd pay for a direct subsciption for.
The value is well worth over $60-$80/mo. But conflating that with the market condition is very different.
In the world where you cheap open weight models and free tier closed sources models are flooding the market, you need very good reason to convince regular people to pay for just certain models en masse in b2c market
After 30 years with a shit operating system known as Windows, Linux still cannot get over 5% adoption. Despite being free and compatible with every computer.
"Regular People" know ChatGPT. They know Gemini (largely because google shoves it in their face). They don't know anything else (maybe Siri, because they don't know the difference, just that siri now sucks). I'm not sure if I would count <0.1% of tokens generated being "flooding the market".
Just like you don't give much thought to the breed of grass growing in your yard, they don't give much thought to the AI provider they are using. They pay, it does what they want, that's the end of it. These are general consumers, not chronically online tech nerds.
> After 30 years with a shit operating system known as Windows, Linux still cannot get over 5% adoption. Despite being free and compatible with every computer.
You need to install linux and actively debugging it. For ai, regular people can just easily switch around by opening an browser. There are many low or 0 barrir choices. Do you know windows 11 is mostly free too for b2c customers now? Nobody is paying for anything
> "Regular People" know ChatGPT. They know Gemini (largely because google shoves it in their face). They don't know anything else (maybe Siri, because they don't know the difference, just that siri now sucks). I'm not sure if I would count <0.1% of tokens generated being "flooding the market".
You just proved my point. Yes they are good, but why would people pay for it? Google earns money through ads mostly.
> Just like you don't give much thought to the breed of grass growing in your yard, they don't give much thought to the AI provider they are using. They pay, it does what they want, that's the end of it. These are general consumers, not chronically online tech nerds.
That's exactly the points, because most of the internet services are free. Nobody is paying for anything because they are ads supported
It's nothing to do with Windows but with the applications (including games) that just run on it and the fact that most companies just run it it by default.
It doesn't matter. I firmly believe both OpenAI and Anthropic are toast. And I aay this as someone that uses both Codex and Claude primarily.
I really dislike Google, but it is painfully obvious they won this. Open AI and Anthropic bleed money. Google can bankroll Gemini indefinitely because they have a very lucrative ad business.
We can't even argue that bankrolling Gemini for them is a bad idea. With Gemini they can have yet another source of data to monetize users from. Technically Gemini can "cost" them money forever, and it would still pay for itself because with it they can know even more data about users to feed their ad business with. You tell LLMs things that they would never know otherwise.
Also, they mostly have the infrastructure already. While everyone spends tons of money to build datacenters, they have those already. Hell, they even make money by renting compute to AI competitor.
Barred some serious unprecedented regulatory action against them (very unlikely), I don't see how they would lose here.
Unfortunately, I might add. i consider Google an insidiously evil corporation. The world would be much better without it.
They also have tons of data on the users' habits and desires which they can use to inform the AI with each specific user's preferences without them having to state them. Because so many people use Google maps, Gmail etc. It's not just about training data but also operational context. The others lack this kind of long-term broad user insight.
I'm not using Google services much at all and I don't use Gemini but I'm sure it will serve the users well. I just don't want to be datamined by a company like Google. I don't mind my data improving my services but I don't want it to be used against me for advertising etc.
The people in charge have a pathological hatred for the IRS. AI is just an excuse to continue destroying the capabilities of the IRS. In the meantime, they’ll keep borrowing to fund the government while telling everyone it’s ok because they slashed programs that make up a tiny portion of the budget. This can go on until there is a major economic shock related to US debt, but honestly, most of them will be dead by the time that happens.
> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.
That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.
I'm not saying companies can't do fine in many respects after experiencing hypergrowth, but like you said, that's after hypergrowth - the hypergrowth isn't sustainable.
And I disagree: outages are a fairly literal example of tech breaking. A few outages aren't catastrophic though, and I agree are fairly common. I know it's cliche, but "move fast and break things" might get growth, but it also gets broken things along the way.
Hypergrowth is growth and churn at the expense of sustainability and stability. It can definitely be fun though!
Unfortunately, I think the next head of the fed is going to be appointed specifically to reduce interest rates, so we’re probably just going to go back to the 0-rate trough.
I don't see how this can happen, tbh. Like, the chair is just one vote, and the regional Feds have almost a majority. Presumably, whoever gets the job will say they'll reduce interest rates, but I don't see how they can actually accomplish this without getting the rest of the Fed on board.
The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.
But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
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