itsyonas

$1,000? According to ccusage, I used around 3,200 USD worth of API credits last month, but I'm on a plan that only costs around 100 USD per month, and I'm not even a heavy user. At the end of each week, I have typically used about a third of my weekly Claude limit. So either their APIs are heavily overpriced, which seems rather unlikely, or they subsidise subscriptions to the tune of 100x or even more.

Well, I will enjoy it while it lasts.

Might as well just use uuidv7

In other words: I expect this German DNS SNAFU to have 0.000000001% impact on the world's GDP this year.

126 trillion USD * 0.00000000001 = 1260USD

I'm pretty sure the impact was higher than that ;)

Could you explain how the Vietnamese were involved in the US democratic process that resulted in around 3 million of their people dying? Similarly, how are the Iranians currently involved in the US democratic process to veto the use of AI targeting against them? As a German citizen, how can I object to being surveilled by OpenAI products used by US agencies?

It turns out that those affected by this are actually excluded from the process by design.

but I don’t think violence is funny or justified

Well, that's okay, because even Sam Altman disagrees with you. He absolutely believes that violence, including deadly violence, is justified - hence his contract with the US Department of War to use their systems in kill chains.

Perhaps the problem is that whoever threw the cocktail didn't use AI to select him as a target, or maybe he didn't receive payment for throwing it? Because what other difference is there?

Immigrants can be German citizens.

So, are you suggesting that women should be punished for the decisions of men? Why wouldn't you just object to forced conscription in general?

? This includes all male citizens aged 18 - 45.

The states of the United States of America are not nation states.

In the case of a typical war of conquest, fighting pretty much stops as soon as one nation surrenders. However, no nation state in the world asks, 'How can we save the most lives?', instead asking, 'Do we have enough people to send to their deaths to potentially preserve our monopoly of power?'

Of course, at the beginning of every war, some people genuinely believe that joining and defending the nation they live in is in their best interests, but these numbers quickly drop over time. As history and current events show, states start to use forced conscription in every prolonged war at some point.

What's a reason that is politically and not against one's conscience? I assumed that one's political beliefs would also manifest in conscience.

For example, I don't think it's in my interest to defend or die for the German state. However, I would use violence to protect my life if someone tried to kill me or threatened my life directly. The German state would interpret this as a political objection rather than a conscientious one, since I am willing to use violence in principle. If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.

Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995.

Yes, as I said, after the Cold War, Germany no longer wanted to maintain such a large army, so they started accepting any reasonably well-written argument. But in any war, you can see that nation states will start struggling to recruit new soldiers as it becomes obvious to the population that it's a rather pointless endeavour to die for their state. So, they start forcing people. We've seen that in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, USA, etc.

That's a non-sequitur to the question.

How so? Why isn't the question 'Why is anyone being forced at all?' Their question assumes that someone has to be forced, which I fundamentally disagree with, so they should justify that assumption first.

And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again

Correct. They are equal, so I don't think either men or women should be forced.

As you said, you can only object if it goes against your conscience, but if you are against it for political reasons (e.g. you don't think its worth it to die for Germany), that's not a valid reason and your objection will be denied. They were also incredibly strict during the Cold War, only easing off a bit afterwards when they wanted a smaller military.

All nation states are like that. They monopolise power and violence, and will defend that monopoly by sacrificing their citizens' lives if another state tries to infringe upon it.

I think it's clear that the interests of citizens and their state typically do not align. Unfortunately, most states have cultivated and propagated a different idea for decades, which is why so many people have a different perception of their state than the reality.

Honestly, I don't think the problem with war is that not enough women die in it. It makes more sense to argue against forcing anyone against their will to fight in a war.

Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?

No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.

Oops, my mistake. That worked. - Thanks.

When I type in 'DELETE', the button just stays disabled for me. When I tried to make the request through their 'Privacy' portal, I receive a mysterious 'Session expired' error message, and now I've been locked out with the message 'Too many failed attempts'...

All right, but perhaps they should also list the grand promises they made and failed to deliver on. They said they would have fully self-driving cars by 2016. They said they would land on Mars in 2018, yet almost a decade has passed since then. They said they would have Tesla's fully self-driving robo-taxis by 2020 and human-to-human telepathy via Neuralink brain implants by 2025–2027.

- <Denial despite the insane rate of progress>

Sure, but not by what was actually promised. There may also be fundamental limitations to what the current architecture of LLMs can achieve. The vast majority of LLMs are still based on Transformers, which were introduced almost a decade ago. If you look at the history of AI, it wouldn't be the first time that a roadblock stalled progress for decades.

But I bet it would catch up real fast to GCC with a fraction of the resources if it was guided by a few compiler engineers in the loop.

Okay, so at that point, we would have proved that AI can replicate an existing software project using hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power and probably millions of dollars in human labour costs from highly skilled domain experts.

I sometimes have the image that Americans think that if the all Chinese got to read Western produced pamphlet detailing the particulars of what happened in Tiananmen square, they would march en-masse on the CCP HQ, and by the next week they'd turn into a Western style democracy.

I'm sure some (probably a lot of) people think that, but I hope it never happens. I'm not keen on 'Western democracy' either - that's why, in my second response, I said that I see elections in the US and basically all other countries as just a change of administrators rather than systemic change. All those countries still put up strong guidelines on who can be politically active in their system which automatically eliminates any disruptive parties anyway. / It's like choosing what flavour of ice cream you want when you're hungry. You can choose vanilla, chocolate or pistachio, but you can never just get a curry, even if you're craving something salty.

It's weird to see this naivete about the US system, as if US social media doesn't have its ways of dealing with wrongthink, or the once again naive assumption that the average Chinese methods of dealing with unpleasant stuff is that dissimilar from how the US deals with it.

I do think they are different to the extent that I described. Western countries typically give you the illusion of choice, whereas China, Russia and some other countries simply don't give you any choice and manage narratives differently. I believe both approaches are detrimental to the majority of people in either bloc.

I disagree. Elections do not offer systemic change. They offer a rotation of administrators. While rhetoric varies, the institutions, strategic priorities, and coercive capacities persist, and every viable candidate ends up defending them.

This suggests that the Chinese government recognises that its legitimacy is conditional and potentially unstable. Consequently, the state treats uncontrolled public discourse as a direct threat. By contrast, countries such as the United States can tolerate the public exposure of war crimes, illegal actions or state violence, since such revelations rarely result in any significant consequences. While public outrage may influence narratives or elections to some extent, it does not fundamentally endanger the continuity of power.

I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.

"Whataboutism" is being overused to the point of meaninglessness. It describes deflecting criticism by raising an unrelated issue. I did not do that. I did not avoid a question or dodge the criticism. I just pointed out an irony.

I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.

How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?

Surely I don't need to point out the irony of complaining to the US government about another country wanting to impose extraterritorial laws?

The livestock industry is an ecological disaster of unimaginable proportions. 50% of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that land, 83% is used for livestock, despite the fact that it only provides 18% of the calories consumed worldwide.

While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle.

While governments and politicians generally like to portray themselves as being driven by morals, they are actually driven almost entirely by economic interests.

So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, [...]

Well, I would like the freedom to live on a planet with an intact ecosystem. I also think that animals would like the freedom to live a life free from unnecessary exploitation.

[...] and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.

Both are high-impact areas, but changing your diet is much easier than changing your choice of transport - in some countries. Transport emissions account for about 25% of all emissions, 60% of which are caused by individuals' use of cars.

And after all of this, we haven't even touched on what fishing is doing to our oceans.

Either you need a really anti corrupt body which can do their work and fight against such issues

If changing the system is off the table, then this is what any solution would inevitably look like. I do not think the problem is a flaw in the system though. Calling it a systemic issue is misleading, because the system is largely functioning as designed. The logical response, therefore, is to change the system itself.

That idea sounds frightening, largely because most political parties treat the system as untouchable, presenting it as if there are no viable alternatives (thus convincing people that there are none, making them feel helpless). This creates a dead end: people experience the full force of the system's pressures while being told that nothing fundamental can be changed.

In that vacuum, scapegoating becomes an easy outlet. When the system itself cannot be questioned, frustration is redirected towards marginalised groups, under the implicit belief that punishing or excluding them will somehow relieve the pressure on everyone else, and that's how we ended up at this point (imho).

A system centered on people's needs would judge success by outcomes like health, stability, and quality of life rather than by growth metrics. If a policy reduces stress, improves wellbeing, and lowers long-term costs, it should be pursued even if it shrinks parts of the economy or even the economy overall. The fact that we currently treat any reduction in economic activity as a failure, regardless of human benefit, reveals how misaligned our priorities are.

I hope Zohran succeeds in improving people's lives, but I'm not holding my breath. I've been burned too many times before...

But one of the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?

I think this primarily relates to how people are socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society', i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place.

I do think that this is at the heart of the problem. The issue is not an overall lack of wealth, but how it is distributed. This is not going to change, no matter how many data centres or factories are built in the US. Ultimately, all the wealth will still end up in the hands of a select few.

Not to mention that we are already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries, which endanger humans. The ever-growing demand for natural resources and energy, which is directly coupled to GDP growth, is not likely to end well.

It would work in many cases, though not all. You would not hash everything together. Instead, you hash normalized identifiers independently, such as email address, phone number, or physical address. An incoming dataset would only need to match one of these to be excluded.

I would assume so. It's sort of a catch 22 because if they delete your data, they have no way of knowing about you when they buy another batch of data. To have some sort of no track list, they have to keep your data.

They could store a normalised, hashed version of your data and use it to filter any incoming datasets. But, of course, why would they?