I have probably never felt more insecure (and disgusted at the same time) in a Western country, the way I felt on the streets of LA. Not all of them, of course, some are obviously well guarded - which in turn makes me think the government and city council is not doing a great job really.

Is the situation as bad in San Francisco?

LA is gigantic. There are more safe streets there than most major cities in the world.

Tokyo begs to differ

I was going to use some numbers but because Japan doesn’t really do street names it wasn’t really comparable.

Tokyo has 25k km of streets. LA has 9k miles.

Edit: Missed the ‘most’, sorry.

LA is freaking large. Depending on where you are some places are more disgusting then others while other places are completely pristine.

SF is worse. But SF is also tiny.

SF is better than I remember 6 years ago.

Purely anecdotal

The EU is using populist claims to introduce laws with ideological bias (big corp bad, America bad, America corp super bad). Everyone knows the digital act was never meant to be a fair set of rules, it was introduced to punish US companies at will.

At the same time, most governments, public offices, agencies and businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without access to American software.

The problem is that it is way easier to (over)regulate and tax, than to create a strong environment for business and innovation to thrive, in order to grow your own tech giants.

That's a lot of emotional words without a single bit of context from the actual article. Your comment is better suited to FOX news' website.

I don't see how your comment is adding value to the discussion besides claiming emotionality and an absurd reference to FOX news, which implies that my opinions are not welcome here and I should go elsewhere with them.

My post is my opinion, offering an entry point for a discussion to those who might have a different opinion from mine.

The opinion is so detached from reality that it’s not going to result in a useful discussion.

There’s nothing about America in the consumer protection laws. It doesn’t matter if the service provider is a corporation or a non profit.

You can have any opinion you want but if you don’t ensure the quality of it, people will call it out for what it is.

In some circles you can defend lack of intellectual rigor with „any opinion is valid” and „you just don’t like my politics”, but that’s useful for electoral politics, not for intellectual inquiry.

When it comes to election interference it’s more like EU vs Russia. Who owns the platforms is secondary, it’s not like TikTok should be allowed to do election interference because it isn’t American.

You’ll learn in the course of your future experience that not every discussion will introduce a new perspective into your life. And you usually can tell very early when that’s the case.

>Maybe you should try.

If somebody claims the moon is made of cheese without joking, I'm not going to argue with them. I'm going to laugh them out of the room assuming.

Your opinion is like claiming the moon is made of cheese.

By that ridiculous argument the federal case against Al Capone showed that the US tax code was ideologically biased against Italian Americans.

The very idea of this regulation is that Tech Giants are not desirable, since they're mono- or oligopolies.

Any average EU politician would be far left in the US.

"Over regulate and tax"? What? Have you done any reading on how almost all US tech companies go to extreme lengths to avoid paying tax?

Thanks for proving my point that they need more taxation.

Are you saying that if a business (or individual) wants to pay the lowest tax possible (legally, that is) it should be a reason for more taxation? Is that what taxation is about, revenge?

Of cause that is a reason for more taxation.

There are 2 types of taxes: Those we charge for revenue and those we charge for behavior.

We don't charge income tax to deter people from working. We charge income tax because we really need money to fund stuff.

If you can not raise enough money, because companies / individuals are optimizing their tax, then you change it such that the budget holds.

... Oh well, I reckon if you are in the US you just keep borrowing. In that case, sorry about my reasoning.

Can't deny that some EU politicians (mostly conservative ones, surprise, surprise) have a hidden agenda behind it.

The statement that gov & businesses in Europe would not be able to operate normally without American software is easy to disprove. Just look at how easy the Chinese or the Russians could shed or avoid their dependency on crappy Microsoft or expensive US cloud providers. The problem is just that many European politicians are so technically inept they believe it themselves.

The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.

If that is true, how come new competitors spring up all the time in Silicon Valley and other places in the US while the European sector lies dormant?

That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting. The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.

Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.

Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?

I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.

The question remains: why would you generate a full glass of wine? Is that something really that common?

It’s a type of QA question that can identify peculiarities in models (e.g. count “r”s in strawberry), which the best we have given the black box nature of LLMs.

I used to use Claude.ai as my go-to LLM for everything. But then my conversations around taxes and finance got very frequently patronized by the LLM and even flagged. All legal stuff! It is just that my personal tax situation is a bit more complex than other people's because of businesses I run and geographic complications (living in more than one country, etc).

It got to the point where I was forced to go to ChatGPT if I wanted to just be left alone and get my answers. Then o1, o1 pro, o3-mini and Deep Research dropped and I have almost no reason to go back to Claude anymore. These days my main use case is using it as part of Cursor for code generation / co-piloting. But that's it.

If Anthropic wants to get me back, they should treat me as an adult again.

Everything, basically. From great cooking recipes to figuring out + designing a new business, and everything in between.

I wonder if AI could create a "commentary" script that instructs the TTS how to read certain words or chapters. The commentary would be like an additional meta-track to help the TTS make the best reading.

That should actually be possible to do already with existing tech. I haven't seen if you can instruct Kokoro to read in a certain way, does anyone know if this is possible?

I am using more Claude.ai these days, but the limitations for paying accounts do apply to ChatGPT as well.

I find it a terrible business practice to be completely opaque and vague about limits. Even worse, the limits seem to be dynamic and change all the time.

I understand that there is a lot of usage happening, but most likely it means that the $20 per month is too cheap anyway, if an average user like myself can so easily hit the limits.

I use Claude for work, I really love the projects where I can throw in context and documentation and the fact that it can create artifacts like presentation slides. BUT because I rely on Claude for work, it is unacceptable for me to see occasional warnings coming up that I have reached a given limit.

I would happily pay double or even triple for a non-limited experience (or at least know what limit I get when purchasing a plan). AI providers, please make that happen soon.

> I find it a terrible business practice to be completely opaque and vague about limits. Even worse, the limits seem to be dynamic and change all the time.

Here are some things I've noticed about this, at least in the "free" tier web models since that's all I typically need.

* ChatGPT has never denied a response but I notice the output slows down during increased demand. I'd rather have a good quality response that takes longer than no response. After reaching the limit, the model quality is reduced and there's a message indicating when you can resume using the better model.

* Claude will pop-up messages like "due to unexpected demand..." and will either downgrade to Haiku or reject the request altogether. I've even observed Claude yanking responses back, it will be mid-way through a function and it just disappears and asks to try again later. Like ChatGPT, eventually there's a message about your quota freeing up at a later time.

* Copilot, at least the free tier found on Bing, at least tells you how many responses you can expect in the form of a "1/20" status text. I rarely use Copilot or Bing but it demonstrates it's totally possible to show this kind of status to the user - ChatGPT and Claude just prefer to slow down, drop model size, or reject the request.

It makes sense that the limits are dynamic though. The services likely have a somewhat fixed capacity but demand will ebb and flow, so it makes sense to expand/contact availability on free tiers and perhaps paid tiers as well.

I believe the "1/20" indicator on Copilot was added back when it was unhinged to try to prevent users from getting it to act up, and it has been removed in the latest redesign

If you go through the API (with chatGPT at least), you pay per request and are never limited. I personally hate the feeling of being nickeled-and-dimed, but it might be what you are looking for.

It’s insane to me that they don’t have a “pay $10 to have this temporary limit lifted” micro transaction model. They are leaving money on the table.

they are optimizing for new accounts/market share over short term rev

Which pushes customers to other services when they are unable to provide.

They seem to lack capacity at the moment though

Which price discovery tools would fix.

No, it's energy bound.

Or the reverse, slow reasoning.

Yeah it's crazy to me you can't just 10x your price to 10x your usage (since you could kind of do this manually by creating more accounts). I would easily pay $200/month for 10x usage - especially now with MCP servers where Claude Desktop + vanilla VS Code is arguably more effective than Cursor/Windsurf.

Oh very intriguing! Could you please elaborate how you are using MCP servers with VS code for coding?

Personally I'm using the Filesystem server along with the mcp server called wcgw[0] that provides a FileEdit action. I use MacWhisper[1] to dictate. I use `tree` to give Claude a map of the directory I'm interested in editing. I usually opt to run terminal commands myself for better control though wcgw does that too. I keep the repo open in a Cursor/Windsurf window for other edits I need.

But other than that I basically just tell the model what I want to do and it does it, lol. I like the Claude Desktop App interface better than trying to do things in Cursor/Windsurf directly, I like the ability to organize prompts/conversations in terms of projects and easily include context. I also honestly just have a funny feeling that the Claude web app often performs better than the API responses I get from the IDEs.

[0] https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw

[1] https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

Just use the Filesystem MCP Server, and give it access to the repo you're working on:

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...

This way you will still be in control of commits and pushes.

So far I've used this to understand parts of a code base, and to make edits to a folder of markdown files.

how is that better than AI Coding tools? They do more sophisticated things such as creating compressed representations of the code that fit better into the context window. E.g https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html.

Also they can use multiple models for different tasks, Cursor does this, so can Aider: https://aider.chat/2024/09/26/architect.html

I have never found embeddings to be that helpful, or context beyond 30-50K tokens to be used well by the models. I think I get better results by providing only the context I know for sure is relevant, and explaining why I'm providing it. Perhaps if you have a bunch of boilerplate documentation that you need to pattern-match on it can be helpful, but generally I try to only give the models tasks that can be contextualized by < 15-20 medium code files or pages of documentation.

I answered a comment asking how to do it.

I didn't say it was better!

fair point

Let me get this right. Farmers, who are already struggling to meet ends, will have to pay CO2 tax in order to produce FOOD that we all need to SURVIVE and not starve to death? What diabolical plan is that?

I am the a huge fan of forests and spend a lot of time in the woods, but man, more trees will not feed us.

A big percentage of the land usage are to grow crops to feed animals to feed us.

If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive amount of surface.

I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get those proteines from all the many other sources (peas, tofu...).

Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.

They are already massively subsidized and this will only increase their subsidies. In Denmark farmers control government similarly to the way big oil abd gunmakers control government in the US.

How much safer is "owning" your domain?

An anecdote: A few years ago I used to have my own domain. Then one day my credit card expired, the new one did not work and my account got frozen. I fixed it, then I forgot to actually extend the domain and it stopped working. Of course, no incoming email, no access to my old mail, etc.

Fortunately I could buy the domain again after a couple of weeks of time, so it did not end in a catastrophe, but it was truly a very stressful time. I know, it was my fault, but shit like this happens all the time to people.

I have very much migrated my email away from my own domain to Gmail. I used to run a website but I have now retired (it and myself) but I retain the domain. My question was how long can I keep my domain viable as I get older, my health deteriorates, maybe my mind too. Having a Gmail account actually feels safer. My domain mail is redirected to Gmail and labelled so I can see what I am still getting.

The other danger with losing your domain name is that a new owner can simply set up MX records and start receiving your email, e.g. password reset etc.

It's "own your condo" vs "rent a condo" safe. You aren't safe from standard stuff going out, but you are safe from your landlord evicting you.

Does nobody know you can rent domains for ten years in advance? This argument comes up every single time. Just extend it for ten years (or better yet, nine years so you can always migrate) and then set up a calendar event to remind yourself to add another year every year. You'll have a looooong ass grace period to deal with payment issues.

You can use Cloudflare to top up your account to the max (because they sell domains at cost), and then move to a registrar of your choice to save a bit of money.

When you die, your domain will not be reacquired for a decade, giving your accounts on various sites (or even sites themselves) time to expire. 2FA everywhere is a must, obviously.

Domains usually have a 30 day period after expiry where only you can buy it back.

It is important to avoid circular dependencies though. My Fastmail account has one Fastmail-managed email address that my domain registrar's emails are configured to go to.

But at least you can do something yourself.

If Google bans your account for whatever reason you can do nothing.