materielle (u/materielle)

materielle commented on Don't push AI down our throats gpt3experiments.substack.... · Posted by u/nutanc

crazygringo · 21 days ago

That doesn't change anything. If there aren't any harms except that certain people don't "like" a feature, it's not the government's role to force companies to allow users to opt out of features. If you don't like a feature, don't buy the product. The government should not be micromanaging product design.

materielle · 21 days ago

Why isn’t it the governments role?

Because you think it’s not?

What if I, and many other people, think that it is?

materielle commented on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/fleahunter

aurareturn · 23 days ago

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years

- Extremely personal data on users

- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable

I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.

PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?

materielle · 22 days ago

I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?

My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.

Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.

But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.

After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.

materielle commented on Why is Zig so cool? nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo

pjmlp · a month ago

Author is apparently unaware of alternatives like Ada, Object Pascal and Modula-2, where most of those "innovations" were already available.

It is kind of interesting that packaging the same ideas with a C like syntax suddenly makes them "cool", 40 years later.

materielle · a month ago

I’m actually not a huge Zig person.

But yes, avoiding arcaneness for the sake of arcaneness will earn you more users.

A big success of Rust has nothing to do with systems programming or the borrow checker.

But just that it brings ML ideas to the masses without having to learn a completely new syntax and fight with idiosyncratic toolchains and design decisions.

materielle commented on Replacement.ai replacement.ai... · Posted by u/wh313

mobileturdfctry · 2 months ago

Henry Ford's philosophy was that if he paid his workers a higher wage, they would be able to afford the products they were producing, namely his Model T automobiles. This would, in turn, create a larger customer base for his company and help stimulate the economy by increasing consumer spending.

materielle · 2 months ago

I actually think this is a pretty good argument against AI dooming that I don’t here that often.

Sam Altman doesn’t own AI. His investors actually own most of the actual assets.

Eventually there is going to be pressure for open ai to deliver returns to investors. Given that the majority of the US economy is consumer spending, the incentive is going to be for open ai to increase consumer spending in some way.

That’s essentially what happened to Google during the 2000s. I know everyone is negative about social media right now. But one could envision an alternative reality where Google explicitly controls and sensors all information, took over roadways with their driving cars, completely merged with the government, etc. Basically a doomsday scenario.

What actually happened is Google was incentivized by capital to narrow the scope of their vision. Today, the company mainly sells ads to increase consumer spending.

materielle commented on A Tower on Billionaires' Row Is Full of Cracks. Who's to Blame? nytimes.com/2025/10/19/ny... · Posted by u/danso

pbronez · 2 months ago

Yup. We should tax this out of existence.

materielle · 2 months ago

Devils advocate: is it really such a problem? Perhaps it should be banned simply on moralistic grounds.

But I fail to see how a hundred or so buildings sold to millionaires and billionaires numbering in the thousands has any affect at all in a city with 20 million people.

Again, surely it’s not the best nor most democratic thing that these buildings exist at all.

But I don’t see how it can impact the bread and butter real estate and rental market. Surely this is caused by the city’s numerous bad housing policies like rent control, zoning, public transportation, education.

materielle commented on Django: One ORM to rule all databases paulox.net/2025/10/06/dja... · Posted by u/pauloxnet

1a527dd5 · 2 months ago

ORMs are one of those topics that get hotly debated for little reason IMO.

ORMs like almost everything else in SWE they are _tool_. It's not a law or a prescription. It's not mandatory.

ORMs are fine for 99% of cases. When it isn't fine use raw sql, no one is going to mock you, no one is going to jeer at you. Most times ORMs are fine, sometimes they are not.

materielle · 2 months ago

My problems with ORMs is that they are a solution in search of a problem most of the time.

We already have an abstraction for interfacing with the DBMS. It’s called SQL, and it works perfectly fine.

materielle commented on Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests twitter.com/awesomekling/... · Posted by u/sergiotapia

rhdunn · 3 months ago

The value proposition is not having vendor lockin and having WebKit/Blink be the defacto behaviour. For example the Ladybird team have found and raised spec issues in the different specs.

Another example is around ad blockers -- if Blink is the only option, they can make it hard for ad blockers to function whereas having other engines allows different choices to be made.

materielle · 2 months ago

That’s certainly an advantage, but I’m not sure that’s the value proposition.

It’s that Chrome and V8’s implementation has grown to match resourcing. You probably can’t maintain a fork of their engine long-term without Google level funding.

materielle commented on Why haven't local-first apps become popular? marcobambini.substack.com... · Posted by u/marcobambini

tonymet · 3 months ago

I've also wondered. Having worked on similar apps, I think it's usually due to a bug where data is inconsistent , someone important complains, so the devs just invalidate all data to prevent the bug ever happening again. Inconsistent/stale data is more evident during testing than the caching issues (testers are usually using stable office wifi)

materielle · 3 months ago

It doesn’t even have to be a bug. Having some rule like “invalidate all data older than 6 months” makes it easier to reason about and test for backwards compatibility.

I’m sure the data format of Apple Maps is constantly changing to support new features and optimizations.

materielle commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy

leakycap · 3 months ago

No company would ever sponsor someone if the last bullet is part of the deal. You're just killing the visa program another way with that wishlist item alone.

materielle · 3 months ago

Wait, so if we give the foreign workers the same at will employment rights as Americans, then they are no longer interested?

I thought they needed these foreign workers because no American could do the job?

materielle commented on A new experimental Go API for JSON go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp... · Posted by u/darccio

binary132 · 3 months ago

how is a nil map not null? It certainly isn’t a zero-valued map, that would be {}.

materielle · 3 months ago

It should be marshaled into {} by default, with a opt-out for special use cases.

There’s a simple reason: most JavaScript parsers reject null. At least in the slice case.