You're entirely right, but Fixed vs Variable costs are a well understood distinction that OpenAI's bean counters aren't merely glossing over here.

If your up-front investment is $1M, each unit of output sells for $2000, and costs $1900 in operational expenses - Your profit is $100 per unit. Once you sell 10000 units, you've broken even and every additional sale is $100 in pure profit. Presuming you expect to sell significantly more than 10000 units, the initial cost is literally irrelevant over the long term.

For a more physical-manufacturing analogy, consider a modern chip fab costing double-digit billions of dollars to build, just to sell fancy chunks of melted sand for a few hundred bucks each. Yet TSMC is one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with net margins slightly over 50%.

Not sure what you think is or isn't subject to being disproven here. "Security" isn't some monolithic "do X and call it a day", it's 100% situationally dependent.

If the situation requires radar, we use radar. If the situation requires strong passwords and MFA, we use strong passwords and MFA. And if the situation calls for giant concrete acoustic mirrors - Yes Virginia, that's why the UK coast is dotted with exactly those.

You're the second person confused by this detail, so let me make it clear: Browse anonymously, log in to post/comment, then log back out.

Isn't that how most of us use Slashdot? Reddit is no different.

For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.

The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any other group, that land would simply be taken by eminent domain and there'd be nothing to discuss. Case in point, did you all know there's an eminent domain case going on right now in North Dakota where ranchers are fighting a pipeline going through their own land... Which in turn was seized from the Sioux? Guess which group isn't even at the table.

While performing mod duties, you're right.

Mods are still regular users of the site, though and not everyone wants /r/PonyLovers in their viewing history.

Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

You appear to be violently agreeing with me.

Yes, those articles all say we need better managers. Why? Because the current crop largely suck at the actual task of managing, conflating oversight with line-of-sight. And some aren't even interested in managing in the first place, only in maintaining their micro-fiefdom to stroke their egos. What part of that disagrees with my stance?

If you're taking issue with my choice of quantifiers, yes, I'll readily admit good managers can absolutely make most jobs easier. Good managers are rare, and Covid gave us the receipts. None of that has anything to do with whether or not the work itself can be done remotely - If a car's steering wheel is broken, do we punish the tires?

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

Any task that doesn't require physically interaction with product or customer can be done from anywhere on the planet with internet access.

OB car analogy: Some people really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a steering wheel but the rest of us drive 10-20k miles per year just fine.

The UK was using "listening ears" to detect incoming attacks before radar existed.

I don't think that's really needed in this case, however, because:
1) We do have radar now and human visual tricks don't really matter to it, and
2) Purely optical detection is still trivial for non-humans, this hits exactly one intended blind-spot tuned just for us.

This is a one-trick pony, albeit that trick is very cool if you happen to be a deaf human without access to a variable frame rate camera (e.g. any cheap modern phone), and the payload isn't subject to being centrifuged into oblivion. Most small mammals will still see it just fine; cameras running at a multiple of its rotation rate will see it as a stable if somewhat blurry image. And a high enough shutter speed (given enough light) would just plain show it as it is.

For spying on protestors in a noisy urban environment - This is perfect. Against any military targets with better tech than longbows and armored cavalry, not so much.

As long as we're throwing out unsubstantiated claims - though this is completely true - I work for a company with effectively zero on-prem non-front-line workers. And not talking about the financial services sector or some niche mom-n'-pop, it employs a few thousand people (is that less than "many thousands"? Does it matter?) in an industry we all use but isn't particularly visible; I'd call it better than 50/50 you've personally received services from my employer.

When I say "virtually all white collar work", I mean exactly that; and while I recognize your hyperbole, I have no issue with it because it's still true, at least as a proof of concept. Your own company's failure to accomplish the same is a condemnation, not a counterpoint. Sure, let's not sugar coat this - Of course there are people who can't be trusted to work remotely. That's a completely different claim, however, than saying the job itself couldn't be performed remotely.

More importantly than our respective anecdata, I'm not the one initiating this claim. I provided a cite, take it up with Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant as published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

/ And don't think I didn't catch that context switch between your third and fourth paragraphs... Unless you happen to be a manager of professional social media astroturfers.

I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.

In my opinion, that's still drastically different than working because it gives me a captive audience of people highly motivated to kiss ass. Loyalty or not, I am invested in my work (as opposed to my job) - Doing it reasonably well is directly conducive to the company remaining solvent and me continuing to draw a salary.

Am I merely deluding myself by thinking doing the job well because it's in my and my coworkers' best interest, is at least a tiny bit more noble than doing it because I like having an army of sycophants at my disposal? Maybe, Maybe not; in the context of WFH, though - I still get my work done, while the Bill Lundbergs of the world have realized to their horror they're utterly irrelevant to my productivity.

Covid showed us that far, far more of us can successfully WFH than were previously doing so.

Yeah, IT is the low-hanging fruit here; but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely; and going further, unless your job specifically requires direct interaction with the product or customers, there's little legitimate reason to burn an extra 20% of our waking lives commuting. And that just to hang out in a noisy and disruptive environment full of people more interested in being seen than in doing the job.

The noteworthy exception is, unsurprisingly, management itself. WFH has effectively demonstrated the problem was never us worthless lazy doers, it's been managers who consider visibility as their primary role all along (or worse, ones who "oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity."). But actually managing requires real skill. It's more palatable to leadership to conflate managing with browbeating than finding people who can actually manage.

It's much simpler than all that - Remote work proves management are exactly as useless and attention-seeking as we always suspected they were.

Leaders equating line-of-sight supervision with effectiveness found themselves without their primary management tool

having well-trained, well-motivated managers leads to massive boosts in productivity from hybrid and remote working models. The data support this argument from the flip side, too. Among companies that reported struggles with remote work, this issue was concentrated in firms in which leaders fumbled the management and coordination of their remote teams.

Remote and hybrid workers are struggling with leadership gaps that were never addressed when companies shifted out of the office. Many management habits remain rooted in on-site visibility rather than clear expectations and outcomes.

And most damning of all, The study concludes that narcissistic leaders oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant write that "leader narcissism is a critical but neglected source of resistance to remote work."

This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.