Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
> Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though?
The GP was talking about Google specifically, and their outcomes on AI are nothing to scoff at. They had a rocky late start, but they seem to have gotten over that. Their models are now very much competitive with the startups. And it's not just that have more money to spend. They probably have more training data than anyone in the world, and they also have more infrastructure, more manpower, more of a global footprint than the startups.
The Innovator's Dilemma is an anecdotal, maybe a statistical relationship at best, but not a fundamental law of nature. When an established company has everything it should take to become a leader in a new industry in theory, and in practice their products are already on par with the industry leaders, you know at some point it becomes rational to think that maybe they might become a leader.
Google didn’t have a late start, they invented the tech, had bespoke hardware in place that supported it and have money to spend.
I don’t have any idea what comes next but Google and Microsoft look bad right now because they can’t execute a product strategy.
My personal bias is that either ms or Google or both will land just fine after it all shakes out but they started with a lead and are now playing catch up.
The models are better, the integrations are now in your email, search, youtube, docs, spreadsheets, slides, Gemini is now higher than ChatGPT in the App Stores
I think you are right with the timeline being Google was infinitely ahead in the beginning, did nothing, then fell behind, but right now, they feel ahead -- established even, and distributing AI into all their products
I’ll concede it’s my impression not any facts, but when I talk to non-tech users they tend to hate the ai being embedded in all of their apps. I think the ai google search results are at best polarizing.
For technical users it’s very rare to hear people picking Gemini for general use cases unless they are required to for other reasons.
Google models do seem to get used a lot for specialized tasks though.
they did have a late start in terms of productionizing the models. It's definitely improved but there was a time where Gemini and the associated tools werent as good as claude/oai
> and the best monetization plans is ads.... Again?
Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
That's why local LLMs are important, and to preserve the current open weight models, because those are likely still untainted by ads. It won't be long until ad recommendations are directly baked into the weights of open models.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting?
I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
They probably would if they could. That gives me some bad ideas - you could vary the line frequency to play the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin It' jingle, etc.- good thing I'm not involved with either ads or power delivery.
You could make this work! I saw a project once that used some open uk power grid information to triangulate videos by listening to the background hum. Genius but also a real "oh god what have we done" moment for me.
> Last time I checked Dario staked Anthropic’s future and reputation, on paid subscription.
Tech CEOs might be wealthy and powerful but there are two things they definitely don't have anymore: trust and the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe Dario is gonna be the exception to the rule but I doubt it.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
I think today's LLMs and their derivatives (agents,..
) are an impressive technological/research achievement with amazing real-world utility. Innovation at its best. I don't see the enshittification of commercial products based upon LLMs as taking away from that. Like I said, I see the potential of this technology in the local/open weights model space. Yes, those are currently noticeably behind the commercial offerings. But that's not a fundamental problem. It's not a race. If we keep improving open products they can one day match if not exceed the commercial options. A bit like open source desktop environments/operating systems - it took a while, but now the OSS options can arguably match if not beat the commercial ones.
Local LLM models? It'd sure be a shame if enterprise buyers cornered the market on RAM, GPU and storage supplies and put them out of reach for consumers.
Great observation, and thank you for pointing that out. I deployed a new MR for that using the awesome YASaaS for only 17.99/mo to create QR codes in your NextJS website. Using your company credit card to a new platform tied directly to your bun dependencies to pay for all your library subscriptions. Would you like me to tell you how much you'll spend this month?
One thing I always found a bit of a puzzle: it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc, but I still find it curious. If it's generally said to be good for you, shouldn't the effects be a bit more robust than that?
Well the answer here is: other factors.
Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen.
Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles.
Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes.
So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job.
Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped.
Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.
> it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population...
When it's a work, you're expected to show up and do it consistently every day. So you can't afford alternate days to get adequate rest and recovery time. Your body is gradually wasted away by the job. When it's more of a leisure activity, you can afford just not to do it and rest, when you don't feel well, so the combination of workouts and recovery time can be net-positive, health-wise.
You can have confounding effects. Specifically note Cochrane’s Aphorism.
"The correlation between any variable and smoking is likely to be higher than the correlation between that variable and the disease."
If you aren't controlling for substance uses (which anyone who has walked by a construction site would know.) You are going to misread an effect. Smoking in particular is actually just that bad for you.
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
Not being rich per se, but probably stress. The body has no innate knowledge of how wealthy you are, outside of some information stored in the neocortex about financial details (which has little influence on the overall functioning and regulation of the organism as a whole). But it does keep track of a very important signal, and that is neuroception, or safety, absence of threats. And being wealthy, absence of sources of stress, or ability to avoid them, brings about that state of feeling secure, safe, which affects every cell of the body and leads to a good regulation of the whole organism.
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.
However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.
Your scientific study does not support your claim (body keeps track of social status) and the other is a men's health magazine article. Hardly the cutting edge of science
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
Basically a good point.
Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though.
You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
At minimum medical industry is good for providing various measurements regarding the state of your health and environment. This can get quite pricey quite fast.
Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.
Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.
There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.
Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.
Nutrition too. Not to paint everyone in the construction industry with the same brush, but there’s often a lot of cheap, high calorie, fast food and sugary drinks on site and in work trucks. This is manageable for younger workers, but by a certain age, the job responsibilities become less physically demanding, the metabolism slows down, and the eating habits remain.
Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc.
I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects.
Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch.
They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.
My father worked concrete construction and stayed relatively fit from all the activity, but his skin was trashed from all the UV and he smoked into his 50s. I've never met a person with more wrecked hands since. It was like shaking hands with 40grit paper.
Construction workers are not known for taking care of themselves, and it's a notoriously machismo culture. Sun screen? ok dandy.
After going bald I appreciated just how damn practical the sombrero is. Now I wear a wide brimmed hat (Tilly or Panama hat or big straw farmers hat or, if I’m feeling flamboyant, a sombrero) almost any time I’m outside. Goofy maybe, but I think my skin is better for it.
This is probably about extremes being bad. Having an extremely sedentary lifestyle is bad, but also having an extremely strenuous one is bad too.
I used to lift weights regularly. I'd go to the gym three times a week for an hour or two at a time. I'm pretty strong naturally and thought my training was going quite well being able to bench 1.5x my bodyweight, squat and deadlift more than 2x etc.
Then I paid some guys to move house for me. Actually, my job paid, I have still yet to pay for this service myself. They were lifting whole chests of drawers without even emptying them. It was crazy. I've since done plenty of this work myself (moved house three times by myself), but I do take the drawers out etc. Basically I work more intelligently and take more time.
What the moving guys were doing is harder, less safe, and they are doing this day in, day out. Add to that poor diets (both seemed to be fuelled on crisps, Coke and fags) and the differences become more clear.
So, like with anything, don't be too extreme. Too much heavy lifting will be just as bad for you as too little.
> I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc
Similarly, people that run 45 minutes a day are in great shape. But if you run a half marathon every day, you will age quickly
You’re exactly right, too much of a good thing. And for hard strength training, you can hit that tipping point very quickly. Probably within an hour a day if you’re going hard
This. I go beyond those programs (currently weight training 4/week with an upper/lower split) and it's still ~4 hours/week inclusive of some stretching at the end of each workout.
Unless of course you’re training practical, useful strength. Which requires intense bursts of weight training, and balance between tempo runs, rucks with 35-40% of body weight, and slow run/jogs. Weightlifting is a small part of a larger picture of strength and being able to put it to use. Cardio is the single most important thing you can train because without a gas tank you’re just a fat, slow, strong slob.
You don’t need to be elite nor on juice to do this. All you need is a purpose. I do this all the time, am over 35, and not on juice. My fitness is great but no where near elite.
Rippetoe is an obnoxious jackass and you can venture to his forums (cult) to see it. He’s great at making fat, out of shape, strongmen. He’s not great at producing a fighter, tradesman, or operator. When you want to know what works look to the people actually using their fitness not morons like him who proselytize and look like the hardest thing they do all day is eat a pack of bon Bons.
Strength on itself is already functional and useful. I kind of agree with you, its why i have been moving away from the strongmen stuff, more into kettlebells, calisthenics and walking during lunch and/or post dinner.
Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.
imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
If you lift weights Monday and Friday, you give your body time to recover and get stronger.
People whose job is to lift weight, they don't lift things heavy enough and they don't give their body time to recover. They work everyday, whatever if their quads are hurting or not. It has very little benefits and only destroy the joints.
There's often a machismo culture in jobs like that, in which people neglect things like PPE or safety procedures. Or of course, abusive employer-employee conditions in which workers are exposed to hazards without their knowledge or ability to mitigate it. Obviously, not everyone participates, but it's widespread enough I think it could explain this somewhat.
Many blue collar professions tend wear out one or more essential body parts in some manner regardless of cardio or strength fitness. Maybe some are differently "easier" than others like HVAC or electrical, but they still take a toll on knees, necks, and backs that can render one incapable to perform the tasks. Some guys last longer than others but there's usually a decision point of retirement balancing enjoyment vs. additional income vs. retirement health.
My dad was a light duty mechanic with his own specialty shop until 1986. He blew out a cervical disc and exposed himself to a variety of carcinogenic chemicals, and that was the end of his career.
And, as others point out for manual workers, they don't fully recover. As it's their job, many professional athletes will perform while partially injured and exacerbate it. And it's not even professionals! One of the older men in my tri club has a permanent Achilles injury now in his 60s because of an injury sustained when he was younger. The doctor told him to rest for a month to let it properly heal. That weekend he was running a sub-30 10k at the local league competition!
I think it's because while on the job you cut corners and everything. You don't, and often can't, use proper technique. In the gym, barbells are perfectly symmetric and balanced. On the job, you might carry something that forces you into a horrible posture. That can't be good for you
Look at it this way.
Construction workers aren't strength training they are wearing themselves out via hard work that requires strength. Not the same thing.
There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
> Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training.
I wasn't in construction but I did spend three years working as an arborist / forester between 2022 and 2025 whilst taking a little break from tech after a long 20-year stint. I've been in good shape since I was 30 with strength training, cardio and even a little stint as a masters level competitive olympic weightlifter. A long way of saying, I know my body fairly well.
Two years into climbing trees in domestic settings and hand cutting in timber plantations, even three days a week and my body was hammered. Now maybe that's because I was in the 46–50 year old range, but it was clear it wasn't a viable long-term strategy for me. Speaking about the people I now know in that industry, it's commonplace for "climbers" to be done by their mid-thirties. Shoulders all mashed up from climbing and carrying heavy loads. It's not pretty.
On the positive side and injuries notwithstanding (I did get a shoulder issue just like everyone else) my bodyweight dropped 10kg and I did look (and feel) much nimbler. The core of the problem in this kind of work is that when the rubber hits the road "getting the job done" always comes before "correct techniques for doing X". And there's no liability claim to be had as at the start of each job you sign the risk assessment which states that you will get it done in a health-and-safety-compliant way. If you don't sign, you're not on the crew the next day and you're walking home from site. This is basically how it is in the UK for these kinds of jobs where salaries are between £24–34K annually.
I have the same observation, and I’ve often been curious about it.
I think truthfully, if we do anything for too long our bodies overoptimise for the task and we lose the benefits to fitness and other health issues also creep in.
Young construction workers are often extremely strong and fit, but nearly all the 40+ ones I know have a huge gut and sound like wheezing ICE engines.
There are a handful of exceptions of course, but as far as it goes the general rule is this.
It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
> It could also be that factors surrounding the culture of construction workers (lots of alcohol to wind down) are huge contributing factors in of themselves.
Terrible food, too. I'm not in construction but I do have to tour worksites for my job somewhat regularly, and pretty much everybody is eating some combination of greasy kebabs and mcdonald's.
I like me a juicy kebab as much as the next guy, but eating just that for days on end can't be good for you.
Now they're certainly more active than a keyboard warrior like yours truly, but there seems to be a consensus around not being able to outrun / out-train a bad diet.
Because their jobs are not "functional strength training" at all and you're discounting all the negatives that come from that kind of work. It's borderline insulting to their jobs to make that comparison, to be frank.
I don't get the hype for scrolling WMs. It feels like the app switcher view on phones. Never thought I needed that on desktop, normally it just freaks me out with how much stuff is open.
If you like this, check out stacked tiling. It comes natively in COSMIC and I believe it can be configured in i3, Sway and Hyprland as well. It's basically tabs across windows, but thanks to tiling you have different regions of the screen with their own tab sets. I usually just split the screen vertically once, so I have a left and right region. Turns out so many workflows can be described as 'ingest information somewhere and apply it somewhere else', and this is just such a useful layout for this. Whenever I have something that requires sole attention, I just maximize that window.
If you are looking for some reasoning behind the "hype": one piece of it is that humans have relatively good contextual spatial memory and using one very large "space" that has a sort of "physicality" to it (you can scroll it; things generally stay where you put them; etc) can feel really good. It goes back to some of the early ideals of "spatial navigation" of the original "desktop metaphor". (Many of which have been somewhat lost to time, with a lot less emphasis on things like windows opening in the same appearance as when they were last closed.)
I think where scrolling WMs starts to feel like it scratches peculiar itches the most is when you have a complex multi-workspace config in a more traditional tiling WM. Each workspace is a different place. In some of the best cases the WM may give a metaphor that each workspace is on a cube or other polygon that you are switching faces on. Scrolling WMs simplify needing to do 3D compositing if you want to visualize that "space" at a distance or have nice flips between workspaces that provide spatial cues to your brain, because scrolling is a thing we do a lot. We have many apps with "infinite scrolling" today; applying that to one large workspace can feel like a nice space to have to arrange your windows in, and other common computer gestures like zoom out and then back in to a different part of it feel "natural". Navigating your "desktop" becomes just like navigating a large Excel file or a large code file.
I guess it's the 'large' part that turns me off. If it's actually far away so that you need to scroll a lot to get there, it just feels like it's more work to me. Sort of replicating one of the less appealing features of a physical desk, the mess that it quickly becomes if you manipulate a lot of documents. I don't even use workspaces that much for the same reason, and having tabs takes away a lot of the need I feel. You even retain some sense of physical distance because of the tab positions.
To stay with the physical analogy, the layout I've described is like always keeping all your documents in two neat stacks before you. Except that it's much easier and quicker to flip pages to the top than it would be with physical documents, so you're rarely tempted to start spreading them out.
I feel like my biggest gripe with every single WM I've tried is the Idea that if I reboot, I lose everything. Sure I can add complex rules in sway like "always open Firefox on workspace 2, slack on workspace 1", but i still have to launch them on boot (unless I automate this as well), and it becomes complex when I say I always want 3 terminals on workspace 3, etc.
I wish I could fine tune once, and snapshot whatever it is I'm using, and have it appear automatically when I reboot.
Yeah, I remember at one point I had some rather complex auto-workspace layouts in my xmonad config. I don't remember if I tried to automate the launching of apps as well, that most customized config was several computers ago.
Relatedly I know that Windows PowerToys has a tool called "Workspaces" that also automates the launching as well as the placement, but it doesn't seem to integrate enough with FancyZones for me to find it that useful. Which is weird because they are "neighbors" in PowerToys. Still it's a good idea and interesting to see an experiment in that direction.
Agree on compiled languages, wondering about Go vs Rust. Go compiles faster but is more verbose, token cost is an important factor. Rust's famously strict compiler and general safety orientation seems like a strong candidate for LLM coding. Go would probably have more training data out already though.
The SE has a minimum capital requirement of 120k € so is not within reach for most people. I think this EU-Inc would be a simple structure with a lower threshold.
I am absolutely for it. There are too many different types of company structures in the individual EU countries and they don’t work well when you move and come with all sorts of different risks. Obviously many are also just cumbersome to start and dissolve. You could start five US LLCs within ten minutes of filling out some online forms whereas to start one European entity depending on the country you might have to make a notary appointment, register with the national registry and the tax authority. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement which can take days to weeks.
Per the Wikipedia article, an SE cannot be incorporated directly. It must be created out of one or more national, public (!) companies already formed under the law of a member state.
What about the explanation presented in the next paragraph?
> Consider how an exponent affects values between 0 and 1. Numbers close to experience a strong pull towards while larger numbers experience less pull. For example 0.1^2=0.01, a 90% reduction, while 0.9^2=0.81, only a reduction of 10%.
That's exactly the reason why it works, it's even nicely visualized below. If you've dealt with similar problems before you might know this in the back of your head. Eg you may have had a problem where you wanted to measure distance from 0 but wanted to remove the sign. You may have tried absolute value and squaring, and noticed that the latter has the additional effect described above.
It's a bit like a math undergrad wondering about a proof 'I understand the argument, but how on earth do you come up with this?'. The answer is to keep doing similar problems and at some point you've developed an arsenal of tricks.
In general for analytic functions like e^x or x^n the behaviour of the function on any open interval is enough to determine its behaviour elsewhere. By extension in mathematics examining values around the fundamental additive and multiplicative units \{ 0, 1 \} is fruitful in illustrating of the quintessential behaviour of the function.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
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