Sorry, cannot edit the grandparent post. I copied that invalid link from safari's url bar, perhaps Google Play store did something unexpected with URLs.
Humans are highly adaptable. It's hard to go back while the thing we're used to still exists, but if it vanished from the world we'd adapt within a few weeks.
For McDonald's fries it's certainly much less than 25%. These are a high margin item, I wouldn't be surprised if ingredients costs is only 5% of that €2.99
Of course! That is why I qualified it as "averaged over all menu items". The expectation is that higher-margin items are purchased in a volume that balances out lower-margin items.
Also sodas/fountain drinks are famously high-margin. Depending on the size, as much as a third of the COGS comes from the disposable cup.
The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.
I've had a fairly long career as a web dev. When I started, I used to be finicky about configuring my dev environment so that if the internet went down I could still do some kind of work. But over time, partly as I worked on bigger projects and partly as the industry changed, that became infeasible.
So you know what do, what I've been doing for about a decade, if the internet goes down? I stop working. And over that time I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains. And I've lost maybe a day of work because of connectivity issues. I've been deep in a rainforest during a monsoon and still had 4g connection.
If Anthropic goes down I can switch to Gemini. If I run out of credits (people use credits? I only use a monthly subscription) then I can find enough free credits around to get some basic work done. Increasingly, I could run a local model that would be good enough for some things and that'll become even better in the future. So no, I don't think these are any kind of valid arguments. Everyone relies on online services for their work these days, for banking, messaging, office work, etc. If there's some kind of catastrophe that breaks this, we're all screwed, not just the coders who rely on LLMs.
It does sound like a wonderful life... but if you want to have a family, you'll need to put down roots somewhere. I know a nomad who ended up doing this in Mexico - he'd never have guessed it years prior - and is super happy. So maybe, as a way of finding the country you're "meant" to live in, it's a nice approach. I think it's a younger person's game, though.
Well we did put down roots after a few years, or at least we have for for a while (me and my partner). We'll probably get the travel bug again.
We don't have or want children but I do know people who do this with families. There's an amazing community called world schooling where people travel and arrange a month in some beautiful place around the world with other families. They'll organize teachers and activities for children and make friends with the other parents.
I've met quite a few of them - the immediate assumption people will jump to is that they must be rich. But that's not the case, they're just normal people who love to travel and have jobs that can facilitate that. And the children I've met seem happy and well adjusted.
People that stay put are no friends of mine. I have a remote job and travelled 20 weeks last year, all to do my sport with friends. Most of us have remote jobs or are FIRE’d already.
Meanwhile I’ve lost roughly a month from internet issues. My guess is you’re experience was unusual enough you felt the need to component where most developers who where less lucky or just remember more issues didn’t.
> Meanwhile I’ve lost roughly a month from internet issues.
If you tell me "I lost internet at home and couldn't work there", it's one thing. But that you simply went about a month without internet connection, I find it hard to believe.
It’s not a single continuous stretch of one month, I’m probably significantly older than you, and I’ve lost access to critical services because data centers have had issues not just myself.
Hell, on Tuesday I lost ~2 hours because Starlink was having some issue. When it came up I was on a different ground station and getting very low speeds. Not such a big deal except you never get that time back.
Last 10 years has been about average. I’ve used a phone hotspot some but it’s often not an option. My prior company wanted a really locked down setup on their systems. WFH required a fixed IP address for some god forsaken reason.
I've been on ChatGPT Pro plan since introduced, and also used codex-rs since it was made public, never hit a limit. Came close last week, not sure if the limits were recently introduced or there always was but they got lowered, but I think that's as close to "unlimited" as you can get without running your own inference.
I've tried Anthropic's Max plan before, but hit limits after just a couple of hours, same with Google's stuff, but wasn't doing anything radically different when I tried those, compared with Codex, so seems other's limits are way lower.
I finally bit the bullet and got a $200 Claude subscription last month. It's been a busy month and I've used it a lot. More than is healthy, more than I sustainably could for more than a few weeks. I've managed to hit a 5 hour limit exactly once (20 minutes before it refreshed) and I've never hit more than 80% of a weekly limit.
But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.
While that sounds impressive, a $200 subscription is still not pocket change. Do you have any approximation of the amount of tokens you use on average, and how much would it cost on a per-million-of-token billing?
Good question. I bought the subscription on 16th of January. I used a tool called ccusage.com. Assuming it's accurate, since then I would have racked up $1976.64 in API charges. There's been one single day that would have cost $324.82.
And here am I thinking that my life depends too much on the internet and the knowledge you can find on it. So if something big/extreme happens like nuclear war, major internet outage etc, I know nothing. No recipes, so basic medical stuff, like how to use antibiotics, electronics knowledge, whatever. I don't have any books with stuff like that like my parents used to.
I have seen some examples of backed up Wikipedia for offline usage and local llms etc and am thinking of implementing something as a precaution for these extreme events.
> And over that time I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains. And I've lost maybe a day of work because of connectivity issues. I've been deep in a rainforest during a monsoon and still had 4g connection.
If it's any consolation, Bavaria is a beautiful part of the world that's up there with any tropical island or rainforest. I hope to visit again sometime.
I consider it more or less immoral to be expected to use the Internet for anything other than retrieving information from others or voluntarily sharing information with others. The idea that a dev environment should even require finicky configuration to allow for productive work sans Internet appalls me. I should only have to connect in order to push to / pull from origin, deploy something or acquire build tools / dependencies, which should be cached locally and rarely require any kind of update.
Do you know how many times since 1999 I have had my work Internet go down? Definitely not enough to spend time worrying about it. The world didn’t stop.
In 2022, funny enough I was at an AWS office (I worked remotely when I worked there) working in ProServe, us-east-1 was having issues that was affecting everything, guess what we all did? Stopped working, the world didn’t come to an end.
Even now that I work from home, on the rare occasions that Internet goes down, I just use my phone if I need to take a Zoom call.
So what other technology that has been available to consumers affordably for over 3 decades do you refuse to use? Whst is “amoral” about using the internet to its fullest?
I thought all of this should have been clear in the first post, but I guess it wasn't.
The problem is not using the Internet, but being expected to use it for things where there isn't a clear domain requirement for it.
The immorality I describe is on the part of the entity expecting Internet usage, not the user.
The issue is that I paid money for my hardware to own it outright, and this expectation makes it feel like I no longer actually fully own that hardware.
You mean you don’t see a clear use to use the internet to access the worlds knowledge that is processed by a cluster of super computers is not something you should need? Should we all have our own data center in our homes?
I also bought my phone, but I still need a global network to make it usable
So exactly what is your moral point about not using the “computer you bought” along with the internet to augment it like it still the mid 90s?
You don’t want a “dev environment dependent on the internet”, exactly what are you going to do with your code without the internet? Just keep it on your computer?
Eh, it's better. But it's still a mess unless you're using a device specifically designed for Linux like a Steamdeck or Framework. Expect to spend a lot of time messing around in the console if you install on an arbitrary laptop that came with Windows installed. Wifi problems, sleep problems, external monitor problems, laptop screen brightness problems, graphics card problems.
The only issue I have is I'm limited with the size of board I can comfortably play on my phone, and I rather keep my laptop as a games free zone.
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