I used Duolingo for a year, learning German. I also learned that that vocal matching game you can do repeatedly and that ramps up and up to high scores - you can do it repeatedly and get very, very good at it and get to the top of the tables fairly consistently. I wasn't cheating, I was just getting really fast at one specific exercise. It also meant I gave up on everything else, all the standard grammar lessons etc. and stopped learning anything much useful.

I then learned that it's cheaper and more effective than the increasingly enshittified Duolingo just to borrow novels in German from the library and read them with a translation dictionary.

...should have spent more time at the practice range.

With a 5x productivity boost, I hope you're enjoying the 5x pay rise your employer must obviously be giving you, as a reward for the 5x more profit you're generating for them! Good on you!

Non-AI stocks are now just the "old economy"? Maybe we should, maybe, wait until any AI company at all has actually made a cent of profit before we call them the "new economy" and relegate the companies who make real money and things the "old economy".

There appears to be deep confusion, across the public in general (and dare I say the managerial class in particular) about what large language models actually *do*. Nobody with any understanding of what these things actually are, how they would, would imagine getting one to generate a password would be a smart idea. Somehow (marketing? hype?) people have been convinced these are intelligent, do-anything machines, and I have no idea how we break that impression.

Of course, American car makers would never be subject to this kind of government intervention, investment or market distortion, nor car dealers playing with numbers or being dishonest. Clearly this is just a Communist Chinese thing.

And how many of those 800 million a week (lol lmfao) are paying? Like, 12 or 13 maybe?

Excellent framing here from the adware/private data collecting industry; the European law in no way mandates banners. The law mandates requiring consent for data collection, which is entirely reasonable. If you don't collect and transmit identifying/private data, you don't need to put a banner on your website. The whole banner thing has been malicious compliance from day one from the ad industry.

It's always very surprising to me, that when companies insist their workers can be replaced with AI - it never seems to be senior management roles they replace. Why can't the CEO be replaced by a chat bot? After all, CEOs don't do much but churn out bland boilerplate corporate text, they never deviate from the mean or do anything particularly surprising, they just copy what every other silicon valley CEO is doing that month - the human role seems completely redundant when you could so easily ask a LLM to do the job.

The fun part of this, is this is written as if OpenAI's "400 million" numbers are in any way credible and believable. OpenAI are not very *open* about how they calculate that number, how they determine unique vs repeat uses, API calls verses an actual human directly using ChatGPT.

I hate to break it to them, but as someone who manages research assistants with PhDs, I can tell you research assistants with PhDs cost significantly less to hire than $20,000 a month.

Also, laughing at $4 billion in annual "revenue" rather than profits from OpenAI. They spent $9 billion to get that $4 billion in revenue. Absolutely setting fire to cash, which isn't surprising since they aren't going to get any customers who want to pay 4x the asking price for research assistants.

Is there a reason the utterances of scammers like Sam Altman deserve all this attention? The cycle is well established; OpenAI is bleeding money, their products are unprofitable and not meeting expectations, roll Sam out to make more bizarre, unfounded claims, media reports on it, rinse, repeat.

A professional is someone who works the damn hours they are *paid to work*. Someone who works for free outside those hours isn't a professional, they're a schmuck.

I feel this was probably a legitimate thing to worry about 10 years ago, but batteries and phones have improved across the board so much that it feels kind of pointless to care this much. I've always just...plugged my phones in whenever they were low, not worrying about if it's a fast charger, or if it's already at 90%, or anything else, and it's been fine! My current phone, a cheap Motorola that I've just plugged into fast charging and relied on the default settings to manage that, has been going strong for 2 years now and I haven't noticed any battery degradation worth worrying about, certainly nothing physical like swelling. The charging port is going to break or the screen crack before the battery causes me any problems. Life's too short to get paranoid about charging your phone above 85% and whether changing that to 80% is better or worse...

It's cool how in a few short years the internet has gone from "information wants to be free, man!" to reinventing copyright from scratch except now it kills the planet with a pointless blockchain at the same time.