That would be true for a totalitarian government, where if you give up your rights it belongs to the government, and citizens are little more than government property.

A democratically elected government that is answerable to its people on the other hand. You don't give it rights, you give it permission, because such a government needs the consent of the people in order to function or even exist.

Maybe don't collect data on a billion people of it cannot be done without violating people's privacy.

The problem is that we were on the Team plan which is a flat rate plan.

You raise a valid point but it has no substance. Management confronted us and said "you are doing it wrong!" And I stopped them "no, we aren't. even if we are, we can try to economize on tokens. We can get a 100% improvement, 200%? 500%?

It's still order of magnitude LESS than what we were doing and it's costing us, in dollars, twice what we were paying before.

You see, the problem with the Enterprise plan is that, unlike Team or Pro, it does not include any (subsidized) usage. Every token counts towards the budget. And corporate either did not read the fine print, or they had more than 150 developers (the maximum allowed by Team plan) and they were forced to switch.

They were expecting it would last for the entire month, like the Team plan was.

But it turns out the Pro and Team plans are subsidized and include far more tokens, that reset every week, than the "actual price" that they charge large companies.

For hundreds of years, conservative is the label given to the political wing that desires maintaining social and political and economic hierarchies. It is a faction label given in the past to those who supports monarchy.

I effectively don't have the same level of free speech as the members of the board of directors at iHeartMedia. So I am not terribly sympathetic yhat corporate entities have to operate under restrictions and regulation. They still enjoy a power that us individuals cannot obtain.

The demographics that the media caters to are divided more by income than by political ideology. Poor white trash that thinks that investing in gold through some website they heard on the radio is one demographic. Rich white woman that is looking for an all natural facial scrub that will reverse aging while donating a portion of the profits to the whale. Take your pick how a talk show schedule is built around those ad markets.

Because people kept buying their software.

Making Art in 2026 (alt link)

Indiana is at the far end of a very large (too large) time zone, so the clocks always felt a bit off. I would have had the same problem when I was in western Michigan, but it was cloudy 6 months out of the year so who knew when noon really was. I always just assumed the noon whistle was noon and let the Sun do its own thing.

Great. I wonder how many members of Congress think this means we get more daylight.

I'm more of a Baby Ruth fan, but they renamed it and changes the recipe so it is basically extinct.

What's the point of blaming the previous administration when they can no longer do anything about it? I could blame Nixon for not doing something about climate change, for all the good it would do.

As for AGI and worse, ASI, the risk to human civilization is very real. The rest of us are in peril right now without regulation and an international framework to inspect and confiscate materials for dangerous AI projects. A failure of leadership to lead. A failure of governments to protect its citizenry. Treating AI as just another business is a massive blunder.

Change the laws and tax AI. Perhaps a per token fee, or a flat annual tax based on computational side. All on the assumption that copyright violation is just going to happen. Not unlike how some countries charge a tax on blank media.

Ideally it should be done by treaty and cut through every major economy in the world.

Some of us still cynically hang onto our Cold War experiences. Once we started realizing that border agents can search your phone if you travel within 100 miles of a border, we got a little paranoid about what the government would find in our profiles and on our devices.
With my text messages, there are quite a few conversations that end with "hang on, let's talk voice" or "let's meet up later". I'm not the only person that is distrustful of the power that the federal government has. And of course, anyone with a half a brain distrusts what private corporations are going to do with your data once they get their claws on it.