gbalduzzi (u/gbalduzzi)

gbalduzzi commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside

HDThoreaun · 15 days ago

As long as revenue rises faster than training costs and inference remains profitable I dont think this is an issue. Eventually theyll be able to profitably amortize training across all the users.

gbalduzzi · 15 days ago

> As long as revenue rises faster than training costs

And this is definitely not happening. They are covering training costs with investors money, and they can't really stop it without their competitors catching up

gbalduzzi commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside

usef- · 16 days ago

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added.

At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.

The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".

gbalduzzi · 15 days ago

Youtube didn't have a significant competitor, once the quality started declining and the ads started creeping up, there were no alternatives to switch to (as a user) because the content creators were in on the profit.

The same isn't true about ChatGPT.

Anthropic and Google provides a similar product, and switching to a better/cheaper platform is fairly easy as it only depends on you and not on others (content creators or friends) doing the same.

gbalduzzi commented on Google is killing the open web, part 2 wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia... · Posted by u/akagusu

charcircuit · a month ago

>Mozilla bent over to Google's pressure to kill off RSS by removing the “Live Bookmarks” features from the browser

They both were just responding to similar market demands because end users didn't want to use RSS. Users want to use social media instead.

>This is a trillion-dollar ad company who has been actively destroying the open web for over a decade

Google has both done more for and invested more into progressing the open web than anyone else.

>The WHATWG aim is to turn the Web into an application delivery platform

This is what web developers want and browsers our reacting to the natural demands of developers, who are reacting to demands of users. It was an evolutionary process that got it to that state.

>but with their dependency on the Blink rendering engine, controlled by Google, they won't be able to do anything but cave

Blink is open source and modular. Maintaining a fork is much less effort than the alternative of maintaining a different browser engine.

gbalduzzi · a month ago

I agree with everything, but just to be clear:

> This is what web developers want

I don't think it is what web developers want, it is what customers expect.

Of course there are plenty of situation where the page is totally bloated and could be much leaner, but the overall trend to build web applications instead of web pages is dictated by user expectations and, as a consequence, requirements.

gbalduzzi commented on Grammarly rebrands to 'Superhuman,' launches a new AI assistant techcrunch.com/2025/10/29... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

chemotaxis · 2 months ago

Perhaps you do, but I think this misses the point. For-profit writing is the most successful use case for LLMs today. A significant proportion of all the docs I see at work reek of LLMs. A fair amount of articles you read in the media are written by LLMs. Lawyers use it for legal briefs (sometimes with comical results). Doctors use it for patient notes.

Basically, a significant portion of the population doesn't like writing or isn't good at it and really wants a "get it done" button. I might not love it, but the market is there.

So Grammarly is addressing a very real need. Further, it's really the only way for them to stay relevant, because you're getting AI editing / writing features in Gmail, Docs, Office 365, etc.

gbalduzzi · 2 months ago

> because you're getting AI editing / writing features in Gmail, Docs, Office 365, etc.

To me it is exactly why this move doesn't make sense.

Why would I use Grammarly/Superhuman for writing with LLM assistance, when I have an out-of-box alternative that, at worst, is equal?

They can't even compete with pricing, because they need to use their competitor models

gbalduzzi commented on I built the same app 10 times: Evaluating frameworks for mobile performance lorenstew.art/blog/10-kan... · Posted by u/0xblinq

Akhu117 · 2 months ago

I am the only one shocked that no comparison or test or thinking of native development? Web dev are this closed to other languages? I came here for this kind of comparison because of the article. headline

gbalduzzi · 2 months ago

It's not about being closed to other languages, it's about being economically pragmatic in many, many cases.

As shown in the article, you can build ONCE an app that loads in milliseconds by just providing an url to any potential customer. It works on mobile and on desktop, on any operating system.

The native alternative requires:

- Multiple development for any platform you target (to be widely used you need *at least* ios, android, macOS and windows.) - Customers are required to download and install something before using your platform, creating additional friction.

And all of this to obtain at most 20-30ms better loading times?

There are plenty of cases where native makes sense and is necessary, but most apps have very little to gain at the cost of a massive increase in development resources.

gbalduzzi commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro

gbalduzzi · 2 months ago

Twilio is down worldwide: https://status.twilio.com/

gbalduzzi commented on Examples are the best documentation rakhim.exotext.com/exampl... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

gbalduzzi · 2 months ago

You need both and there are no ways around that.

Examples let you grasp immediately how to use the library and provide you good starting point for your integration.

Detailed explanation of all params and configurations allows you to solve more complex problems and understand the full capabilities of the tool.

I am miserable when any of the two kind of documentation is missing.

The only exceptions are very simple libraries, where the example tells you already everything there is to know.

gbalduzzi commented on NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system bitsoffreedom.nl/2025/10/... · Posted by u/mattashii

arethuza · 3 months ago

When I watch YouTube on an Apple TV the ads seem slightly relevant - when I watch on a mobile device they are completely awful, literally no idea why I'm being shown most of them.

gbalduzzi · 3 months ago

You probably disabled some privacy settings on your mobile (or you are not logged in with your user).

gbalduzzi commented on NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system bitsoffreedom.nl/2025/10/... · Posted by u/mattashii

delusional · 3 months ago

> But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people.

I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless service of facebook, with our nearly worthless data. Facebook combines that data with other data from other people, and create data that is extremely valuable for advertisers.

The important bit of this theory is that Facebook is presumed nearly worthless. What that means is that outlawing their combining or collection of data from users wouldn't cause their service to transition to a pay-per-user model, but rather would completely dissolve the product, which nobody would miss.

gbalduzzi · 3 months ago

Even if the data collected by Meta is really worthless (and that is a big if), Meta shows content to a billion(s?) of people everyday.

That alone is definitely not worthless lol

gbalduzzi commented on Crates.io phishing attempt fasterthanli.me/articles/... · Posted by u/dmarto

hombre_fatal · 3 months ago

I got an official email from Paypal last week saying that I had a charge for $900 at Kraken, and to call some number if it's suspicious.

What's great about the attack is that it's sent from paypal.com and signed by paypal. And the email contains a legit link to paypal, not some phishing site. But the phone number is the attack.

The attack:

1. Register a paypal business account

2. Add the victim's email address (or one that forwards to them) to the biz account's "secondary users"

3. Add a custom invitation message about how they have a $900 charge that they need to contest by calling a phone number that you control.

4. Paypal shows your custom invitation message inline with their official email with no indication that it was written by someone other than paypal (wtf?)

Here's the email that was of course surrounded by Paypal's own official email chrome:

> New Profile Charge: We have detected a new payment profile with a charge of $910.45 USD at Kraken.com. To dispute, contact PayPal at (805) 500-8413. Otherwise, no action is required. PayPal accept automatic pending bill from this account.Your New PayPal Account added you to the Crypto Wallet account.

I called the number and some guy started asking me for my info starting with my full name. I didn't hang around on the call long enough to see what the attack was.

gbalduzzi · 3 months ago

Let's say someone falls for this.

What happens next, when they become the business account secondary user?