OpenAI doesn't let you change your email address, either.
Readit Newssearls commented on Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address support.claude.com/en/art... · Posted by u/behnamoh
searls commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside
OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation.
One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.
At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.
It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.
searls commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside
I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 months ago.
Funny, had it tell me the same thing twice yesterday and that was _with_ thinking + search enabled on the request (it apparently refused to carry out the search, which it does once in every blue moon).
I didn't make this connection that the training data is that old, but that would indeed augur poorly.
searls commented on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/summarity
Bully on me for owning hardware and expecting it to behave consistently across OTA updates.
At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware for use with a particular piece of never-to-be-updated software and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?
I doubt such a thing has ever happened in the history of consumer-facing computing.
As somebody who picked up Backbone after Sammy and other earlier attempts, when React came along and took the world by storm, I more or less decided to nope out of JavaScript development and go back to Rails.
Every generation needs to learn the same lessons in their own time, but people often asked me why I’d go from speaking at national JavaScript conferences to essentially disappearing. The answer was the overwhelming popularity React and Webpack. Life is short and I don’t have time for this shit.
This is a great reminder and I need to start doing this. Bullet point plans aren’t enough for lots of vertical slice work unless it fits really neatly into well known buckets (e.g. Rails MVC)
In early September, Mike Judge's post challenging the productivity potential for coding agents by asking where the supposed AI shovelware is. It's been stuck in my craw for the past couple weeks, because I keep running into programmers of all stripes who refuse to engage with any of this newfangled AI tooling on the grounds that it's useless.
I realize people are all processing the AI boom differently, and there are many valid reasons to be really mad about all of it, but—as someone who's seen his productivity skyrocket with Cursor, then Claude Code, and now Codex CLI—it seems a little ridiculous to claim that the tools simply aren't capable.
Of course, if we never identify which projects were facilitated thanks to coding agents, we'll never have clear social proof of what they're capable of. That's why I put up this /shovelware page on my blog and started hosting a GitHub badge.
searls commented on The Japanese landscapes that inspired Studio Ghibli films bbc.com/travel/article/20... · Posted by u/koolhead17
I've been to Dōgo Onsen several times, but I had no idea of the putative connection to Spirited Away. If you'd asked me at the time, I never would have made the connection based on visuals alone. They're really overstating the case.
Point being: please don't rush here based on this article. It's an old bathhouse with tiny baths and a somewhat unique interior for Japan. The most interesting part is honestly the imperial bath suite, which is a museum that can only be accessed via appointment. The "Spirited Away bathhouse" is an entirely fictional construct based on a bunch of different locations, and Ghibli has said that there's no existing bathhouse that models the one on the movie.
I hate this kind of lazy tourist porn. For the past several years everyone has been overcrowding Shima Onsen in Gunma, because the outside of that one looks a bit like the movie, and lots of articles were written saying the same things. If you want Ghibli, go to the museum in Tokyo, and don't overwhelm random places looking for something that doesn't exist.
Yeah, I went to Dogo Onsen last year and after the fact people told me it was inspiration for Spirited Away and I literally didn't believe them. I've been to countless riverside onsen resorts in the middle of nowhere that look more similar.
Agree this kind of article is really reductive and misses the point, but what're you gonna do.