Apple could make a modular device to very close to the same price they do their current laptop. Its much more about size and supply chain then some minor changes in design. Maybe a little bit more extensive, but not more then 5-10%. They don't make it modular because they don't want it to be modular.
> Comparing Iran to North Korea is something someone with no actual understanding of Iran would do. Iran is not a hermit kingdom.
That was your comparison, not mine. My comparison was that once they obtain a nuclear weapon, there's nothing we can do anymore. They can obtain more, and then use them as a threat to tax the Straight, further enriching their regime, &c. That's what has happened to North Korea (minus the strategic position and of course it's slightly different due to China).
The JCPOA wasn't effective for two reasons:
1. We weren't getting the cooperation we needed in the first place to examine nuclear sites.
2. We shouldn't have to pay off Iran to not get nuclear weapons. Why do they get to be treated differently than any other country?
1. We had anytime/anywhere access to their nuclear facilities and 24 day access to any square inch of their country. They never violated that part of the agreement and it's also silly to think intelligence didn't already know where all the facilities were.
2. The payments were a trivial part of the deal. It's especially ironic given this administration keeps offering payments to end the current conflict.
The reality is any deal we sign today is going to be substantially worse in every way for us than the JCPOA was.
> Why do they get to be treated differently than any other country?
This is the crux of the thing though. North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and even South Africa all had successful and clandestine nuclear programs without any military intervention. Going to war with Iran is completely arbitrary - there is no direct threat to the US, and we did it without any cooperation with any of the countries actually dependent on Gulf oil.
> This is the crux of the thing though. North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and even South Africa all had successful and clandestine nuclear programs without any military intervention. Going to war with Iran is completely arbitrary - there is no direct threat to the US, and we did it without any cooperation with any of the countries actually dependent on Gulf oil.
Or maybe we just learned our lesson. Is the world better for each of those countries having nuclear weapons? I think not. Why permit yet another one to join the club? Why does Iran get special treatment? Do we need a JCPOA with all other countries, to pay them off as well to not get nuclear weapons? If you are in favor of nuclear non-proliferation you have to become a circus star to be able to jump through all of the contradictory hoops needed to justify somehow giving Iran special treatment or suggesting it's ok for them to have a nuclear bomb.
Calling the war completely arbitrary is intellectually dishonest and pointless in a discussion.
> and we did it without any cooperation with any of the countries actually dependent on Gulf oil.
As quoted by German defense minister Boris Pistorius:
“What does … Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?” [1]
There is no country or coalition of countries that can do anything about this. They lack any meaningful military capabilities to stop Iran. What exactly is there to cooperate on? Iran is already sanctioned by the EU [2] for example. If we think it needs to be done, we just do it. It's not up to those who have no ability to do anything about it to decide whether we get to do something or not. I don't agree with how Trump has handled that aspect of the war, but the grandstanding and pearl clutching over a non-existent and not to come into existence coalition against Iran is mostly falling on deaf ears.
If it's purely about non-proliferation then partnering with Israel on this is extremely hypocritical.
> If we think it needs to be done, we just do it. It's not up to those who have no ability to do anything about it to decide whether we get to do something or not.
Says who? I don't think anyone outside of a small group of hyper-Imperialists actually believe this.
Even if I bought the premise that a war is preferable to the JCPOA, what's the actual end goal? Bombing Iran into submission was always a delusionary idea. Taking and occupying the country is the only realistic, long-term path if we want to go down this hardline path.
> If it's purely about non-proliferation then partnering with Israel on this is extremely hypocritical.
I didn't suggest it was purely non-proliferation (I'm assuming you are talking about the war itself) - I was just responding to the JCPOA aspect.. We partner with nuclear states all the time, such as the United Kingdom and France. We're even partnering with Pakistan now to help facilitate negotiations with Iran.
> Even if I bought the premise that a war is preferable to the JCPOA, what's the actual end goal? Bombing Iran into submission was always a delusionary idea. Taking and occupying the country is the only realistic, long-term path if we want to go down this hardline path.
Now we're talking. I really am not totally sure about what the best response here was. But I'm also very much of the opinion that this has been war-gamed to death by the Pentagon. Perhaps we had some faulty assumptions. Perhaps it's still too early. Even today I was reading that there was a leaked internal communication where the Iranian ruling regime is becoming increasingly concerned about the economy due to the blockade. There's a lot to discuss here in general.
AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape.
Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising.
This in particular dawned on me when asking Claude for instructions in taking apart my dryer. There was literally only one webpage on the internet left with instructions for my particular dryer - the page was more or less unusable with rotten links and riddled with adware. Claude did it's best but filled in the missing diagrams with hallucinations.
I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.
It might not be a lot of money, but it would certainly be more than the pitiful ad revenue you get from posting content online right now. And if I want to upload corrected instructions for repairing this dryer I would have reason to.
AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse, because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content"" to be connected to real questions like "how does my dryer work" or "what is going to happen to oil availability six months from now".
AI trainers didn't pay book authors until forced to. $3,000 ended up being a pretty high value! But it was also a one-off. Everyone writing books from now on is going to have to deal with being free grist to the machine.
Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam.
I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam.
Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spammers.
I find that very believable. My completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that OnlyFans is a money-laundering and dragnet-style-blackmail campaign for unlawful mass surveillance. I can’t imagine a normal or even abnormal person paying content makers, but I could imagine contractors and NGOs smurfing payments.
I have a friend who pays (or at least paid) for cam shows. I don't understand it either because there's so much free content, but then you have cases like the guy who murdered his parents because he'd sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to a cam performer who he thought he was in love with.[0]
> The Miami New Times claimed that freedom of information laws in Florida make it easier for journalists to acquire information about arrests from the police than in other states and that this is responsible for a large number of news articles.[3] A CNN article on the meme also suggested that the breadth of reports of bizarre activities is due to a confluence of factors, including public records laws giving journalists fast and easy access to police reports, the relatively high population of the state, its highly variable weather, and gaps in mental health funding.
I worked in music streaming for several years. Yes, there is spam, but in my experience this was less than 1% of total consumption, even if now it is a huge share of available content (also a lot of it seems to be mostly for money laundering). Also, the share of revenue that Spotify and the other services pass on to rights holders is roughly on the scale of old brick and mortar retail. But how people spend has changed. Indie music nerds used to spend much more than the average mainstream listener on records and CDs. Under streaming, both mostly pay the same subscription price, so enthusiasts spend, while casual listeners spend more. On streaming platforms payouts are tied to streaming consumption not purchases, so music with strong branding, playlist support, and promotional backing does well, and the major labels are good at that.
What share of what Spotify pays out makes it's way into the pockets of song writers and musicians is a more complicated story, generally more if the artists are with a good indie label, generally less if they are with a major. At the same time, majors have had to offer less abusive deals than they used to, because DIY and indie distribution more viable.
The other big shift is that in the retail days new releases drove most purcahse, but with streaming catalog is a source of reliable recurring revenue, and the majors own a lot of catalogue, especially stuff they acquired outright in an era when artists often had their work basically stolen from them.
The key difference between Spotify and LLMs scraping the open internet is provenance. Music on Spotify does not just appear there out of nowhere. It arrives through an accountable chain: a label, a distributor, an aggregator, a publisher, a rights holder. Sometimes this chain is thin, like with self-serve, pay to publish distribution through companies like CD Baby. Most of what is actually streamed has a provenance that reflects serious editorial and financial commitment by an organisation in the form of money spent recording, developing, and promoting an artist. This provenance chain is critical contextual information about who vouched for the work, who invested in it, who holds rights to it, and when it entered the culture. Art, music, writing do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of an ongoing cultural conversation, and who said what, when, and under what institutional backing is integral to its meaning.
So I share OP's hope the long-run equilibrium for LLMs looks more like licensed media than scraping and open web search. I want a world where models license published content from rights holders, not for training, though that would be nice, but to surface answers with links to identifiable sources in a verifiable published database, and let part of my subscription pay for access to the underlying referenced material. Information is valuable, and it's reasonable to pay for it. Aligning incentives around truth is the challenge.
Putting ink on paper and moving books around is the least important part of what a publisher does. The important part is selection, investment, positioning, promotion, and accountability. This curatorial function has always been important, and it can only become more important the tsunmai of ai slop and misinformation grows. I hope that chatbot manufacturers partner responsibly with rights holders and lean into the value that publishers have created instead of potentially destroying it.
As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.
“Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “
I think people get distracted by the "percentage of revenue paid to musicians" thing, when the bigger reason streaming pays out so little to artists is that people pay $10-$15 per month for unlimited access to all music. Even 80% of that, split across dozens or hundreds of musicians, is not very much. Of course, it's also worth remembering that streaming was partially a response to widespread piracy. It's difficult to get people to pay very much at scale for easily copied digital media.
In addition, a greater share of the payout (relative to number of streams) goes to big music distributors that control the biggest, most popular artists and have the leverage and employees to negotiate those agreements.
That's probably not the best comparison. Spotify only benefits the big players resp. those with the most bots. If you actually want to support specific artists, you'd have to use Bandcamp or similar sites.
It has already done so, and we can be confident in saying that.
Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content.
Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption.
Theres jokes about GenAI being the great filter; while I doubt this, I do hope this is the final push that makes us think of how we want our information commons to be nurtured.
> Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content....
> Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption.
AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to drop on verified content, you'll be served prolefeed slop and be that much more ignorant.
> I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.
What do you mean by that? It seems inherent to the technology under capitalism: it allows a flood of slop and anything public and valuable will be plundered, so the incentive is to make valuable stuff exclusive and elite.
The TLDR of my point is going to be that wealth concentration and information pollution sets up economies that don’t work for us in a manner that is healthy for us.
> The TLDR of my point is going to be that wealth concentration and information pollution sets up economies that don’t work for us in a manner that is healthy for us.
I agree. Though I think it's important to understand that a capitalist economy serves wealth, and nothing else. It's depressing, but I think it's more likely we'll have a genocide of workers than any kind of non-capitalist economy, since modern advances are simultaneously entrenching the power of elites and sapping it from everyone else. Even if you could overcome fragmentation and manage to organize a general strike, the trillionaires won't care because it's robots and thoroughly indoctrinated libertarians doing the remaining work.
> I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.
As a software user I wish I could do the same for all the software I use.
So not at all for their work and with a reverse Robin Hood model? That would be terrible for software.
The way artists gets paid on streaming is a genius play at catering to the biggest artists and labels and screw over the smaller ones, especially true on Spotify with their freemium model
I think everyone overblows the whole "AI is poisoning AI!" thing. It could be a problem but the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers... I am not sold. If I was choosing what to 'feed' AI, I wouldn't even bother with textual social media (besides Github / Gitlab / other source control)
There's way more value, if seeking out answers, in following the links to external sources, scraping books, and other sources that aren't "unwashed masses saying whatever they want".
> the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers...
> ...
> scraping books, and other sources that aren't "unwashed masses saying whatever they want".
The problem is there's a lot of knowledge that only exists as reddit comments, blog posts, or social Q&A.
> I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.
This system is usually called taxes.
Which then pay for the universal healthcare, free education, affordable housing, libraries, parks,.. and so on.
LLM doesn't need to invent it, we should stop allowing them (people and companies behind LLM) to avoid it.
I already posted this, but the budget cuts are also because Federal funding was up to historic level due to COVID and has been cut significantly below baseline by the current administration. California should not calculate school funding the way it does anyways. A teacher is paid the same regardless of whether their class size is 20 or 30, whether some kids are home sick or not. So a more complex allocation system that takes this into account is absolutely required. Failure to do so is intentionally under-funding schools.
My point was simply that it is shady to hide the miscalculation, and I indicated the point in the budget under severe stress right now I would have liked to see funded should the appropriate discourse have been possible. The cause of the stress is irrelevant. 2 billion goes a long way when everything is being cut. It could save 2 billion in services.
Correction: This is a correction to the forecast - not the budget.
By the state's own admission, there could be as much as an $18 billion dollar budget deficit if the state economy fails to grow as projected. It could also be a smaller shortfall if the economy is even better than expected.
Miscalculations are pretty common and this is why they are revised several times a year.
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
> The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
If you’re referring to their AI services being ‘woefully behind’, that’s just a market sector that they’ve chosen not to focus too much effort on. That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
I’m not sure what else they are behind on frankly, as their current offerings have been extremely stable from day dot.
How many products has Google released and killed in the past 20 years? Apple managed to land on a good thing with Apple iTunes and iPhotos in the early oughts, and managed to transition those core services into Apple Music and iCloud with little to no disruption to users. iCloud is generally a pretty predictable service that delivers on a core set of user requirements very well.
Also, thief productivity suite isn’t meant to completely replace Office, and for a free package, it meets many users needs perfectly fine.
> That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
Define sensible. Apple's B2C margins are peanuts compared to what Nvidia's commanding right now, and they're both ARM retailers competing for the same cutting-edge fab space.
Are you referring to any security features in particular? There's a new zero-click exploit every 6 months for iOS, and NSO Group is showing no signs of slowing.
Could be the case! Without being to strict on the terminology I just wanted to give a clear message: Our planning processes and time range expectations are changing completely
I think it's funny that nearly all videos on Youtube used to be short. Then Youtube pressured creators to make longer and longer content for ad revenue purposes.
Its a fun thought exercise, but I've found the opposite to be true in most cases. More expensive clothes are usually less durable (depending on the brand). The same goes for appliances, and cars, and phones, and etc. The cheap designs are simple and robust and the expensive designs add complexity and features.
In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
> The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome
Not the same outcome. They show up at their destinations fresh from a good night's sleep, having showered at the lounge. Their back doesn't hurt from trying to sleep upright in a tiny seat or schlepping a heavy rucksack.
If you have enough money you are ok with paying to get those outcomes.
Amtrak sucks in so many ways, but that said for almost a decade prior to COVID when I had the opportunity (roughly yearly) I'd travel Amtrak first class between Tacoma WA and Oakland CA (Starlight). Kind of a day's vacation going each way (and they'd sell you a tax free bottle of good wine you could wander around first class with).
It was weird, I would arrive in Oak / SF rested, grounded, not nearly as stressed... and without a flying horror story to share (although the "alien abduction" made a good story). [0]
At the end of the journey Amtrak sucked, but flying sucks more; so much of the suck is fixable in both cases but it never seems to happen.
[0] I'd rate your chances as about 1:3 something unexpected will occur. An 11PM electrical fire / "alien abduction". They put the train together wrong / in a hurry and first class was right behind the engines (they sealed the door with duct tape to keep the rain / snow / wind out), and at night going through the Cascades in OR there were a half dozen of us crowding around with our wine bottles looking out over the engines; very cool. A freight broke apart in the Cascades stretch and we sat in the bar car (drinking wine) and watched the maintenance crews humping connector knuckles from behind us up to the freight in front of us (some of those freights are over a mile long; did I mention we were basically on the side of a cliff?).
For very long international flights I could see it, but I also see people in the first class seats on shorter flights where it’s hardly worth it. (I assume at least some of them are upgrades.)
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature.
If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
I think you're right on the luxury brands being less durable.
To address the second airplane example, we really have to go through all that you're buying. Namely: more leg space, faster airport queue processing, more luggage, better in-flight service. Do I value these at 3x the cost? Maybe yes.
Both me and the richest person on the flight are going to the same destination. They're not getting there any faster or safer. Everything else is a fleeting luxury.
Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem.
If you are over thirty and still this strong, then you have my respect and envy. I’m not even forty and even I would say a >7h economy flight (middle seat particularly) can take about two days to recover from.
How much money would you pay for two extra days of life? In the end, time itself is also “fleeting”, if you want to put it that way. But I sure as heck would fork over the money if I had it.
The funny thing is that from what I heard with the antiques markets (which is admittedly possibly a decade or so old) it is antique luggage of all things which is 'in' and antique furniture which is out relatively speaking to the past.
The grandkids not wanting it may still apply if they are still minors, there would be plenty of time for tastes to shift again.
It’s not suitable for air travel, but I treat anything for air travel as disposable. I still use it all the time for car-based travel. It’s larger and nicer than what I fly with.
If you're chasing after the ones that are most well known on Instagram, then you're paying for the logo and getting quality that is not that much better than much cheaper stuff.
If you look for lesser known brands that are more expensive but that expense is because of the materials and craftmanship, then it's often worth the money.
This highly, highly depends. I've never bought a Meile appliance but seen others here swear on them for durability. Le Creuset and All Clad make cookware I've had for decades with no problems or degradation at all and they'll last for centuries as far as I can tell. I've got a 70L pack I bought from the Arcteryx factory store 20 years ago and I've damn near taken it to the moon and back. Virtually every mountain in North America. Had it rained on, dunked into streams, fallen while full of 40 kilos of gear onto sharp rock. Not so much as a single seam has ever frayed and it's just just as waterproof as it was the day I bought it.
And you're overestimating the cost of first class, at least in my experience, and that's kind of a lot of experience. I work in pre-sales engineering and travel a ton. My company won't pay for first class, but I'm 6'2" with ten screws in my spine and always pay for the upgrade, and it's usually between $200-$500, which has never tripled the price and almost never even so much as doubles it. You can sneer that I'm overpaying for nothing, but you try getting into a situation where sitting in a sardine can for four hours leaves you unable to stand up straight for 40 hours when you land. To me, it's worth it. The other option is I die with more zeros in my bank account, which is even more pointless. It's not like I'm failing to hit savings goals because of this.
Same thing applies with cars, by the way. I work from home when not traveling and don't drive very much, but I do own a luxury vehicle, and the difference between that any nearly any rental is pretty stark. It doesn't win on any reliability rating I'm aware of, but I've put less than 20,000 miles on it in 6 years of ownership and don't particularly care about the durability. I care about comfort and my own car is way the fuck more comfortable than the Nissans and Toyotas the rental agencies give me.
"Effete needs" is awfully sneering. I've lived on the back of an Abrams tank for weeks at a time in the past. I lived in the backseat of a 1994 Honda Civic and worked an overnight shift detailing theme park restrooms while putting myself through community college 25 years ago. I can live with little to no comfort if I actually need to, but given the choice and sufficient disposable income that it makes no difference, why the hell would I choose to be less comfortable just so I can brag to all the Bogleheads that my savings account has an extra hundred grand in it when I need five mil to retire anyway? Frugality doesn't push the needle much in the realm of travel and consumer goods. Cheap housing and a well-paying job is what pushes the needle.
Bought an expensive jacket. It's indestructible and cool and has good pockets. It's a motorcycle jacket. I didn't know I was buying an indestructible normal jacket.
Don't be obtuse. Of course you can spend more money without buying better craftsmanship. Some trainers from Prada or Balenciaga will wear out faster than a pair of Aldens.
Consider school backpacks. If you can, you should probably buy a Tom Bihn backpack. It's $400 and will last for decades. Spending more money will buy something fancier, but it won't be better at being a backpack. If you don't have that much cash to drop? Jansport, Eastpak, North Face? They're all the same mediocre product made by the same PE group. And they're still not cheap.
We're not the target audience for this thing, but I'm at least happy there's a way people can put their money where their mouth is.
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