This is basically why the big companies can sell subscriptions for cheaper than API costs. First priority can go to API users, lower priority subscription users get slotted in as space/SLO allows, and then sell the remaining idle GPU to batch users and spare training. Oh and geography shift as necessary for different nations working hours.
> The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes (9.5m when in background), and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages (“lonelycpp” is acct, loads iframe viewer page).
Doesn’t seem too crazy for a generic react native app but of course coming from the official US government, it’s pretty wide open to supply chain attacks. Oh and no one should be continually giving the government their location. Pretty crazy that the official government is injecting JavaScript into web views to override the cookie banners and consent forms - it is often part of providing legal consent to the website TOS. But legal consent is not their strong suit I guess.
And when the app links off to an EU site? Nothing prevents an EU user from using this app. There are a variety of Trump enthusiasts, though I suspect less than there are here in the US.
Quite honestly, it’d be hilarious to see the clown car response from the White House if some EU bureaucrats tried to enforce their GDPR rules on the White House though. “Lol Make us” is the nicest response I can guess at.
They conduct a pervasive, hidden, persistent user tracking not only without consent, looking at the analysis, but also stripping the user from a chance of declining tracking on other sites.
Which federal law would be relevant here? I'm only aware of California and EU laws that might be. But, I'm fairly certain they don't apply to the US government because of several Constitutional and international laws superseding.
I'm not sure. If there is an attorney to answer that would be interesting.
First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?
Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).
Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.
Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can.
And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them?
It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
> If you (a manufacturer) apply, they want information regarding corporate location, jursidiction, and ownership. They want a bill of materials with country of origin and a justification for why any foreign-sourced components can't be domestic. They want information about who provides software and updates. And they want to hear your plan to increase US domestic manufacturing and progress toward that goal.
Wow NGL this sounds great if you ignore the reality that it'll be used as a partisan backdoor to enriching the administration.
I clear my throat. Do it loud enough that the other end can tell someone is on the line, so they'll know to start the conversation. It isn't a rude "WHAT" type answer, but it doesn't directly acknowledge the caller, and is not inviting a conversation. Its a common enough act that it's not suspicious nor weird to hear during a conversation, and therefore its not off-putting if extended family or clients called from an unknown number.
It doesn't share my voice (for fingerprinting, demographic leak, etc, smh).
Also works as a bot filter - Humans tend to start with a "hello..?" because they're not sure anyone is there, while robots use the non-zero audio as a signal to start talking with full confidence.
Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least.
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
In 2026 we need to update our mental model of Google. Google has been wildly successful at adding diversification. Around 40% of Google’s profit (depending on the quarter) comes from non-search income.
They build a wildly successful cloud platform, they’re expanding their subscription services, they’ve got enterprise offerings, etc
The trick is that Google accepted that none of their other business would likely have the margins and volume that search has, but they did it anyways.
Generally no. Big tech companies have gotten good at locking down devices to the boot loader. Some of the signing keys for certain OTA versions have leaked, but you can’t rely on that.
Some of the devices contain browsers, and people have set up hacky ways to turn them into thin clients through that, but it’s not particularly reliable IME.
I heard some Chinese brands which made similar hardware for Chinese consumers don’t lock their devices down, letting you flash an open install of Android on them, but I haven’t seen anyone try that IRL.
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