This article misses the point. It is not about AI replacing workers, but about AI bringing more ROI. Can an AI convert twice as many customers as a $4k salesperson? It is reasonable to say that in a B2C setting, YES. I've seen that. Better SLA, fast responses during weekends, better adherence to existing playbooks, mapping out objections that are not in the playbook, and suggesting updates for the same prompt. In one week, the playbook evolved, and today we are converting more customers than the sales team. Does it capture the value of the $4k usd sales person ? If the ROI is superior, yes. Will I pay for it? That is a different story (we developed this ourselves).
“Instead of relying on generic GPT blog posts tools, external agencies, or interns, we provide a proprietary content engine that learns from client’s data, builds a data-driven content strategy, and publishes high-quality content automatically bringing organic traffic from Google and AI search.”
You’re right. I’ve just changed the title of the article adding “(un)” to the beginning. I can’t prove the errors are intentional, but given the author’s reputation it would surprise me if they weren’t.
Edited titles (without a reason, like abbreviating them to fit or removing elements suggested by the guidelines for elimination) just get reverted, you're creating work for the mods by not submitting the original title.
I sometimes feel guilty. I’ve tried to set goals (I really have) but it’s just not how I’m wired. I tend to improvise my way through things. Even as a kid, I remember never feeling that urge to "win" at anything. Sports, board games, whatever. Other kids would light up with competition. I’d just… show up, participate, drift through it. I always felt slightly out of sync with that whole dynamic. That’s why this line hit me so hard: “Some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.” Maybe that’s been the point all along. Thanks for sharing this.
same for me, i see it also as a mirror of people's approach to a happy life, ie. ticking the checkbox goals: marriage, kids, career, house, money for x, etc and finding (apparently?) satisfaction in that.
while i never would or could, i live a comfortable life with a lot of freedom but never felt like i've achieved a goal. i just look for the next interesting challenge or path to walk because we have only one life, and sitting with one person in a concrete box somewhere and just sit it out would be a waste of mine.
so i constantly change/challenge the constraints/rules of the game i'm playing to keep life interesting enough to participate without falling into the hedonistic treadmill trap
I’ve always felt the same way. What’s the point of winning in a game? Why are some people so obsessed with that kind of competition? The rules are artificial, it’s somebody else’s box. You’re mostly just training yourself to accept external reward functions uncritically.
When these boxed-in competitive people age, usually money becomes their terminal external reward, but they don’t seem to know what they want to actually do with it.
I always thought of winning a game as proof of my skill in the game. All those hours of studying the rules, practicing moves, or whatever it takes have proven to pay off because I win once in a while - or if I lose it proves that I didn't do enough and is motivation to study/practice enough. Playing the game is in itself fun as well even if I lose and the constraints of the rules makes the game possible.
What I don't get is watching someone else play a game. I want to do it myself. If I'm watching the game it is to learn how someone else does it. OTOH, I can sit in the audience and watch someone else play music for hours... YMMV.
Agree. Winning a game is worth it if you want the prize and the prize will benefit you. But, as you say, doing this uncritically is bad. If the prize will not benefit you, or is so vague as to not matter, and you still feel the need to win, you're being manipulated.
I miss Rushmore’s plain approach. Just enough quirk, sharp acting, and visuals that back the plot instead of hogging it. Newer Anderson films look like photo shoots: pretty, but the story drags. Same story dev teams hit when designers chase pixel-perfect screens and users still wait on real features.
This is because the older films were co-written with Owen Wilson. Once they stopped collaborating, Anderson's later films are unbalanced - they have the whimsical aesthetic, but are too sweet without the bitter piercing wit and clarity of Wilson's writing to make them less cloying (IMHO).
He was going through some major depression and understandably pulled back from the industry. But he brought something very personable and authentic to comedy, and his absence has been palpable.
Many other comedians of the era were too slapstick and over the top for me. I still can't watch a Will Ferrell comedy with any interest.
Owen Wilson has been a fascinating character with a unique yet consistent approach.
Ferrell... Massive comedic turn off for me. He seems like the guy that jumps into a room, interrupts and yells out a joke out of context, then keeps repeating it louder and louder until some polite fake laughter occurs. I feel bad about being this negative about a fellow human being, but his comedic approach sets off a Bully vibe / response in me in anything I've seen him in except Stranger Than Fiction.
Rushmore is my favorite Wes Anderson film. I think you nailed it. It was a great film that was “enhanced” by Wes Anderson’s style. Newer films seem to be primarily delivery vehicles of his style, with a hint of story and plot to move it along.
Yes this. Tennenbaums and Zisou were still primarily narrative fiction which allowed the actors to really be the spotlight, which let the characters really come alive.
In Budapest, French and Asteroid it felt increasingly like the actors were too confined to fulfilling an aesthetic for them to come alive or for the actors to shine.
Apologies in advance for sounding controversially critical, I can't help but be reminded of AI art where its trying so hard to look a way that it stops being something you want to look at.
Royal Tenenbaums & Rushmore have always been my favorite, the way they hit every single emotional chord without being overcooked, and with characters that are relatable.
ChatGPT ≠ Google-scale.Google: ~14 B searches/day; ChatGPT: ~37 M (~1 : 400). Only ~15 % of ChatGPT prompts look like classic “search”; most are writing/code tasks. Google’s own search volume grew 22 % in 2024 and still holds >90 % share. An LLM citation is nice for credibility, but it won’t move traffic or revenue anytime soon.
The 37M/day is an estimate from Rand Fishkin that often gets quoted as gospel. It is based on limited external data. OpenAI mentioned 1B/day - and had significant overall growth in usage since then.
Also, 1 search on ChatGPT easily replaces 5-10 searches on Google.
Many B2B SaaS companies already get the same amount of leads from ChatGPT that they get from Google. Because clicks from ChatGPT are better informed and have a significantly higher conversion rate. I am talking up to +700% CVR vs traffic from Google for some companies.
But users are not clicking on search results in google. They get satisfying response from Gemini & end there. It is a good thing for users but bad for inbound traffic to websites.
1. (Anecdotal) I'm barely using Google anymore. I'm using ChatGPT for a ton of queries and getting far better results.
2. Antitrust actions might (should) strip Google of their "panes of glass" with which they force Google Search as the default. Most Google Search queries are simply the result of defaults. Once those defaults are gone, those queries will go elsewhere.
To add on top of this, how many Google searches also contain Gemini answers in the search results? I've been seeing more and more, especially for code and general factoid searches.
1. From 2010 - 2023(ish), Google slept on DeepMind and allowed OpenAI to steal the narrative. That led to a boom in AI development outside of the Google labs. This is akin to Microsoft's loss of internet/web. A half dozen trillion dollar companies emerged from Microsoft's stumbling, and we're likely to see the same with Google's missteps.
2. After the rise of so many AI startups in the 2020 - 2023 period, the end of Google was being forecast by many. Most of Google's revenue comes through search, and everyone (Nadella, Altman, investors, et al.) were talking about the incremental value of search - Google had to retain 100%, and other players just had to grow.
3. The Google founders, sensing a major blow to their cash cow, took a break from their zeppelin startups and came back. They gave Deep Mind more autonomy, took a knife to product culture, and empowered and encouraged everyone to innovate. The whole company has been re-focused and told they must win AI or face extinction.
4. As of 2025, Google has been killing it on their releases. Gemini, Veo, ... you name it, and they've got industry-leading developments that out-perform and undercut the competition. It's beginning to look like not only will Google not die, but that Google could wipe the field with their AI superiority. It looks like they'll be able to dance circles around OpenAI.
The looming threats are (1) DOJ antitrust eroding Google search ingress and (2) other players stealing Search TAM without the new AI markets being able to replace the search / ads revenue.
Any non-Google players would be wise to put antitrust pressure on Google. Even after the current case ends, they should try to strip away defaults on web and mobile. Stop Google from being able to deploy AI through Google Search, Android, and Chrome. Make Google use the same word of mouth marketing that the rest have to.
splitting these are not a good measure. people who know how to search (a skill the latter generations seem to have lost) also searched for the lowest common denominator coding recipes and produced naive code just like people do with current llm models. only sellers of the llm models make the distinction. it's all search.
Never wondered why 14. But makes perfect sense. Early Unix feels like a masterclass in minimalism under constraint. Also fun detail: Unix V3 had 8-character limits before DOS made it famous.
I am still convinced that they made the wrong design trade off when it comes to C-style strings. A Pascal-style string with a length prefix byte takes up the same amount of memory as a null terminated string but is immune to buffer overflow and faster to strlen as well. The only time C style strings offer up any advantages are when dealing with a string that is longer than 255 bytes, which given the memory constraints of the era were incredibly rare.
I feel like C-style strings were nearly inevitable given C's array-pointer duality law. Square bracket array operations just translate into simple pointer arithmetic. To have a length prefix byte you'd need to either make the compiler treat char* differently than other arrays/pointers or you'd need to have the programmer always account for the special byte at the beginning of the string.
Also even with 255 limitation, there could be optimizations in place with struct/union, similar to small string optimization done in C++ and modern languages.
However even considering this was a non-starter in PDP-7/11, there is no excuse why since 1989, WG14 never considered adding capabilities to the standard library similar to SDS, or language improvements like fat pointers (There was even an attempt proposal from Ritchie himself).
I’ve wondered if there should be two string types in C, analogous to different length numeric types. Short strings (“tokens”? “words”?) could be Pascal style strings and longer strings (“buffers”) could be standard C-style null terminated strings. I’ve never tried to work this out for real, it just seems to me that one-size-fits-all strings might not be the best model.
I think it would be better to have the string type being the address and length pair. Pascal strings store the length immediately before the data, which is different than what I think is better is to store the length separately.
Yes, and just to be clear, presenting that name with the same readability under Unix would take up 12 bytes. Or for example, just copying files from DOS to Unix.
