the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

Anybody could vibe code an online video game store backed by s3 in about 20 minutes, where is the monopoly? Before steam existed people distributed games on floppies and CD/DVD. Nobody is stopping you from selling your video games mail order, or on your own squarespace store or whatever. There's zero economic moat here. I routinely pay a premium to buy my games on steam because I don't trust the developer to keep track of my account or even keep their store up in 90 days.

The published a crude llm about a year ago that if scaled up would be similar to what everyone else is doing, but haven't published anything new since, as far as i'm aware. It's not terribly difficult to train your own ai these days, just that the gpu hours are expensive

Famously, the Coors (beer) brewery in waste heat keeps the sidewalks free of snow and many of the buildings heated in the winter. PG&E built a power plant at the site of the H&C sugar refinery in california and the waste heat is used to make baking sugar. It's not that uncommon.

AI is going to have some safety mechanisms in generation, there's a chance the AI written herbal remedies are actually safer than a lot of what human authors of the genre are saying

> English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide.
 
English dominates because not only are there a lot of speakers, but it is the modern business lingua franca and most anyone who owns a desktop computer today can probably grumble out a handful of statements or questions in english. Hindi and Tamil on the other hand, use completely different writing systems and beyond a couple of clever words have zero vocabulary overlap with "western" languages. Simply due to inertia of 2 billion speakers Hindi/Tamil etc will continue on forever, but I can't see them being targeted by western technology. Americans and Europeans already struggle with cyrillic and it's at least recognizably sorta phonetically similar about half the time. Tamil just makes my eyes glaze over when I see it on street signs in Malaysia or whatever.

What are they even managing at that point? I would struggle to assign a team lead to a team that small. Presumably these were senior IC that needed a pay bump to keep them from going to another company? Maybe they assign a manager to every single internal product?

Have you tried finding a specific app you've used before, perhaps 2 years prior, the good one that's freeware and not ad supported? The play store is atrocious and pushes inferior apps every time over other, better apps. There's 1001 free timer apps but the store pushes garbage on you if you try and search for this. I only use Spotify on my phone, specifically in the car.

Google play store has always been horrific, app search is so intentionally broken as to be useless. I might have bought a couple apps in the first opening years but it's not worth it anymore I don't have any "paid" apps beyond uber and spotify, and I'm working real hard to get rid of spotify.

Probably on the computer side, immutable infrastructure will continue to reign supreme. Since 2015 there's been a big shift towards immutable infra/code. You can let AI fart around in lower environments but until everything passes all the tests, it won't get promoted to production (or end-users computers). You can see this in immutable package managers like nix already. Or in the Android case, it's completely locked down on the user side and only changes on major updates. Managing mutable infra is going to phase out over time, especially if AI gets involved.

If there's a paid tier that is ad-free of a reasonable cost, I don't see the problem with blasting people with ad volume. You're subsidizing the users with ads, and clients want . If your business model is 100% ad supported then sure, normalize ad volume I guess.

The trick I've had to use was to get to the MVP, maybe 800-1600 LOC, and then draw some lines where you see the seams, have it refactor it into 3-6 main files, and split it across there. Then close the conversation and start a new one, and keep iterating. Once a file gets over ~1200 LOC I ask it to split that file and refactor, and summarize any particularly tricky chunks of code. I haven't tried adding new complex large features on an existing codebase, but it seems to be really good at spinning up and iterating on MVP/POC up to ~5000-7000 LOC. I've been burning through my "programming ideas" backlog/list in my spare time with good success, particularly in rust.

Millennials have finally started buying houses and plan on living somewhere long enough to buy a wire-in-the-ground annual cable subscription.
 
Not me though, I'm ad-free streaming till I die at this point.

Yep I also have a kagi subscription too. It's great; I'll never go back to Google search as my primary. Between it and the various ChatGPT flavors of the week I pretty much never use Google products anymore outside of Gmail, and very rarely Google maps.