Yet again:

If you couldn't even be bothered to write it, what makes you think I should be bothered to read it?

Tell me when they have a single profitable product tier.

HUGE bubble here, I look forward to the investors demanding a return on their money.

The fad is starting to plateau.

How ironic, and completely, utter unpredictable.........

They'll be a few token attempts to revive it / rename it / pretend we've invented whole-new-AI for a few years, then it'll die and people will mostly forget about it (especially when AI companies start trying to recoup their losses by charging at a rate that actually PROFITS them), normalise the useful parts according to that increased (i.e. real) cost, then we'll move on to some other fad for a decade or so.

In this case, the car belonged to the parents of those kids, and was registered in Italy. I don't know the Italian law for that.

It was clear, however, that those kids never buckled up in their parent's own car, that the child-lock wasn't on by default, and the kids didn't think opening the door while driving was anything wrong.

Because they just charge the original bank for the costs and thus all users can use all banks without fee.

Same way credit cards work.

The bigger question is: Why do you think it's normal to pay a bank to obtain access to your own money?

I can use pretty much any bank I like and the ATM will let me withdraw money from my account for free.

We even have an organisation that banks sign up to to make sure it all works, including things like changing your PIN at any ATM etc.

It's called Link. https://www.link.co.uk/our-mem...

Give way to traffic already on the roundabout and coming from the same side as the steering wheel is in the car.

It's really not difficult.

Drunk-driving is absolutely socially condemned. Nobody lets anyone drive home after they've had more than one drink. Pubs are required to inform police / confiscate keys. I mean, honestly, it's a "lose all your friends" kind of thing in any sensible job / atmosphere / environment.

And seatbelts are mandatory. Seatbelts and airbags are fitted on all cars made for decades now. The culture is that basically everyone wears a seatbelt. People have had cartoons taken off air because they show Peppa Pig getting into a car and not putting on a seatbelt - they actually went back and edited them to show a seatbelt. Watch any British programme in the last 30 years. People wear seatbelts if they're in a car. It's only American movies, tv shows etc. (not even action movies but comedies and dramas) where I see people jumping into and out of cars constantly with no seatbelt even visible at any point.

It's nothing to do with any technology, though. It's to do with the culture. Drink-driving isn't socially tolerated, seatbelt use is ingrained in everyone from school.

Sure, we still have lots of other car-related injuries, deaths and problems, same as anywhere, but it's the culture that means we save lives.

I once was in a car in the front passenger seat while an Italian ex- was driving some family and there were two Italian kids in the back. They were absolutely resistant to the idea of seatbelts, because they'd been not using them all their lives. We made them belt up, and they didn't like it at all.

And I'm glad we did. At one point the little girl dropped her toy down the side of her seat. So she took it upon herself to unbuckle her seatbelt, OPEN THE DOOR while we were at speed, and lean out the door to retrieve her toy from the gap.

The ping-ping-ping of the seatbelt warning was enough to make me look round, and I had to literally dive across the car to hold her door shut, screaming at the driver to pull over, until we could stop and shut her door properly. I'm not exaggerating to say that she was INSIDE the door... between the door and the seat. If we'd hit anything, she'd be dead. If the door had blown open, she'd be on the road, at speed. We were close enough to opposing traffic on that road that the door would have hit the other cars and been smashed into her.

It's the culture, and what's normalised and what's not that determines where the biggest dangers are avoided. Just like US gun culture determines where their biggest dangers are.

Yep.

I will still be buying phones with SIM slots for as long as I can and, if I really need to, the special SIM adaptors you can buy that let you load a bunch of eSIMs into them using their app.

I don't think I've ever used an ATM ("cash machine") in my country (UK) that has had a fee, ever.

You usually only see it on the mobile machines in shops and tourist attractions, and they're often really dodgy looking and in places I wouldn't want to be taking out a large sum of money. But universally a few hundred yards down the road, there's a free one attached to a bank somewhere.

Why would you pay to get your own money?

(That said, I've been effectively cashless for 25 years, so it's a non-issue, but when I have had to, or when I'm with relatives who do, nobody uses a fee-charging ATM for their money)

IT'S SUPPOSED TO KILL AN INDUSTRY.

You were warned 20 years ago that this would happen, and yet you're still pumping out the thing we're trying to ban because it's killing the planet.

Same as gambling.

I once stumbled across a matched-betting forum with a huge and popular thread about a guy who was basically doing matched-betting all day long.

Scoured the Internet for deals, signed up with every gambling provider, read all their T&Cs, managed dozens of accounts, spent their day looking for a pair of conflicting bets that offered a tiny odds advantage (i.e. they would likely win slightly more than they would lose by betting against themselves at the same time), etc. etc.

It looked really attractive if you weren't a mathematician or logical person because when you looked at what he was doing... he was working stupid hours a day, in a horrible and dull job (because most of what he did could not be automated, gambling companies don't like you scraping their websites, etc.), constantly, where even if you did everything right you could still technically lose, where the T&Cs often meant you could fall foul of certain situations, and where the wins were often small and fleeting and where one mistake could cost you far more money than you'd win.

I mean, sure... "guaranteed" profit in one sense. But what you have at that point is a job being a professional gambler. It looked like he made money because of the occcasional big win, but he needed to put large stakes down constantly to make that and continue to make that.

I never followed what happened, it's really not my cup of tea, but I can't imagine it would be something you'd want to do for decades on end as a career, or even be that profitable. If you have the dedication to do that, or even the skill to automate that, you can make far more money for far less risk elsewhere.

Doing it for a retirement fund? I hope they do it well and there isn't, say, a global economic crisis, war, etc. that wipes out all their gains in one fell swoop. Even something like Bitcoin collapse, AI bubble burst, etc. would severely impact those things because both would cause significant number of billions to disappear and people would be looking to recoup those losses.

You joke, but if the AI was actually AI... you would be able to do that.

The AI should be the revenue generator, directly. You shouldn't need to snakeoil it into human hands as something to boost their existing revenue if you pay for it.

If the AI was even vaguely intelligent, it could be let loose on the Internet and generate income directly - legitimately or not! - for its creators. Instead you have to entice users to come to you to use it.

We know AI isn't intelligent because if it were... companies would just be running AI quietly and the money would be rolling in directly from its use of other things - e.g. stock trading, or creative work (including setting up a company/website, answering email, advertising, getting customers, producing the work, customer service etc.) and nobody would be telling you it was AI and nobody would be admitting to owning those services.

AI-as-a-service to others would be nonsense. Why would you bother? Just put the AI to work directly, on its own, and let it make money for you while you do nothing.

Fact is, it's not intelligent and you'd make a humungous loss (like OpenAI) trying to do that.

I keep saying it:

When AI investors want to see their return, and those companies are forced to charge even cost-price for their services... and your ChatGPT subscription goes up by an order of magnitude... people will start to realise that it's really not worth several Netflix subscriptions every month for something to Google the answer you're after and then present it in the form of a limerick.

We're in the sunk-costs, loss-leader phase right now... and OpenAI don't even have a single profitable tier of their services. And they have a century or more of running costs from investment that was just given to them. And one day someone's going to want that back. And they don't really have a business model beyond "charge a few dollars and let users throw a query at this thing we built".

The reason AI is rounded upon for datacentre use, GPU shortages, sucking up power and water in unprecendented amounts, etc. etc. is real. And at the moment it's still not profitable. When those costs are actually translated back to the customer - it's one of the LEAST EFFICIENT ways to get anything done on a computer. At the moment you're just using countless resources to do this stuff, almost for free.

Like Google in the early days... OpenAI is going to have to find a revenue model because offering everyone a clever search engine for free isn't profitable. Google are basically an ad-space seller far more than a search engine. I can't see that OpenAI could go the same way and reasonably compete, because their operational costs must be enormous.

AI is going to be killed not by humans pulling the panic cord, or by stronger AIs that take longer to train, but by the electricity bill and a lack of customers willing to pay it to open one of their 50-100 documents that they can search for locally if they need to, and a spellcheck that doesn't need to be all that "clever".

Quite.

One of the best explanations I found was that we trained these statistical models to produce something that is convincingly like an answer to the question posed.

So when it makes up references and names and lawsuits and properties and programming keywords that don't exist, that at first look plausible but under scrutiny don't hold up... that's to be expected. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do. It made something LIKE an answer to the question posed.

Which, if anything, is even more dangerous than just not knowing - in the fields of medicine, mathematics (especially rigorous but extraordinarily difficult to realise when someone has made a minor but forgiveable mistake), etc. - because the output is, although nonsense, plausible nonsense for the most part. Which is often harder to spot than outright nonsense.

I'm not in the US but over the last ... 20 years? I have turned Prime on and off several times a year.

Why? Because the delivery benefits only really work if I'm having something delivered which, though I order items from Amazon all the time, I'm happy to bunch up into the start of the month (when I get paid). And because I'm ordering everything then, I don't really care if they all arrive immediately. It's nice if they do, but it's not essential. I've spent a month adding them to the list for next month, and there's nothing urgent there (and, because of that delay, many things get bumped to future months or off the list entirely).

And when I do need something immediately, I can almost always get Prime for next to nothing. This year alone, I've had 6 "trials" at either free or very reduced rates, and 2 reduced-cost renewals (for months at a time), etc. I have one now... 99p for 7 days. I'll likely build up an order, use that trial, then cancel it.

And because of that, video is only a bonus, not a driver in my renewals. And every time I've used the video service, I've not found it interesting enough to renew just for that, or even use it "for free" when I've had membership, trials or deals on the subscription. It's really not compelling enough.

Now they're doing ADS on a pay-for service? Absolutely not interested whatsoever. I don't support such a business model in any way, shape or form.

Currently, after shopping with Amazon since about 2001 (when they were just books), I haven't been a Prime member for the vast majority of the past 2 years, and when I have it's been for fleeting moments for free or at significantly reduced prices, and I've crammed everything into that period that I needed. Ever since they raised prices on me, basically.

If the subscription was half the price, I'd probably just have it like I did before - a rolling annual subscription that I know I'll get value out of so I just leave it running and rarely bother to check. But now? A year's subscription costs too much for what's on offer.

Fact is, even without the subscription, I don't actually spend much on delivery costs with Amazon anyway. Certainly less than the subscription, because I don't care when most of it arrives so I select the slow option that's almost always free or very cheap.

I love Amazon. It's the Acme Products Inc. of the real world. It's great. I love browsing it and just being able to press a button and buy almost anything. But Amazon need to realise that to be a subscription, I have to get value out of it that I can't get elsewhere for cheaper. The video simply can't do that. The delivery costs? Maybe. In certain instances. Sometimes. But they keep giving me deals anyway.