They also have a free tier for the hosted version that is pretty generous (64 sites). I used the free hosted version for years after Reader went away and only upgraded as a way to support software that I use and enjoy regularly.
As a reminder, even Apple didn't hit 1T market cap until late 2018. We didn't get a second in the 4 comma club until mid 2019 with MSFT. Google and Facebook in 2021.
And now we have 4 companies above 3T and 11 in the 4 comma club. Back when the iPhone was released oil companies were at the top and they were barely hitting 500B.
So yeah, I don't think anyone has really been displaced. Nvidia at up, Broadcom at 7, and TSMC at 9 indicate that displacement might occur, but that's also not the displacement people are talking about.
I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.
Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.
My guess? Hype. All the companies at the top have a lot of hype. I don't think that explains everything, but I believe it is an important factor. I also think with tech we've really entered a Lemon Market. It is very difficult to tell the quality of products prior to purchase. This is even more true with the loss of physical retail. I actually really miss stores like Sharper Image. Not because I want to buy the over priced stuff, but because you would go into those stores and try things.
I definitely think the economy has shifted and we can see it in our sector. The old deal used to be that we could make good products and good profits. But now "the customer" is not the person that buys the product, it is the shareholder. Shareholder profits should reflect what the market value of the product being sold to customers, but it doesn't have to. So if we're just trying to maximize profits then I think there is no surprise when these things start to diverge.
The last time I was staffed on a project that had to do this, we were looking at many dozens per day, virtually all of them bogus, many attached to grifters hoping to jawbone the triage person into paying a nominal fee to get them to shut up. It would be weird if new tooling like LLMs didn't accelerate it, but that's all I'd expect it to do.
This just doesn't match with the claims that people are using it as a replacement for Google. If your facts are out of date you're useless as a search engine
Which is why there's so much effort to build RAG workflows so that you can progressively add to the pool of information that the chatbot has access to, beyond what's baked into the underlying model(s).
RAG still needs model training, if the models were to go stale and the context drifts sufficiently, the RAG mechanism collapses.
Sure, those models are cheaper, but we also don’t really know how an ecosystem with a stale LLM and up to date RAG would behave once context drifts sufficiently, because no one is solving that problem at the moment.
all these models just use web search now to stay up to date. knowledge cutoffs arent as important. also fine tuning new data into the base model after the fact is way cheaper than having to retrain the whole thing from scratch
> Slippery slope arguments are not always logical fallacies.
show me a slippery slope that is not a series of deliberate decisions, then.
i've never seen one. every single step down that slope required someone who wanted to go further down the slope and took the action(s) required to go further.
There's a group of people who have reinvented religion because they're afraid of an AI torturing them for eternity if they don't work on AI hard enough. It's very silly but there are many people who actually believe this is a risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
Sure some of them maybe, but given that many concerned people think the chance of extinction is 10% or higher, it's not really low probability enough to be considered a Pascal's Wager.
You are cherry picking the single most absurd event in a history of over 20 years of public discussion of AI catastrophic risk.
Only about .0003 of all public discussion of AI catastrophic risk over those 20 years has invoked or referred to Roko's basilisk in any way.
I don't know of anyone worried about AI who is worried mainly because of the basilisk.
Next you'll mention Pascal's Mugging, which likewise is the main worry of exactly zero of the sane people worried about AI -- and (despite the representations of at least one past comment on this site) was never even a component of any argument for the dangerousness of continued "progress" in AI.
I merely repeated one of the distortions of events from ancient history that was used more than once on this site in recent months to try to smear the Berkeley rationalists. I think it illustrates the lazy ad hominem tactics of those who are made uncomfortable by any talk of catastrophic risks from continued "progress" in this decade's shiniest technology.
I should add by way of explanation that there is a close connection between those who see continued "progress" in AI as very risky and the Berkeley rationalists: in fact, the writings that form the core of the rationalist movement (very analogous to how Paul Graham's writings form the core of HN) were written to try to enable more people
to appreciate the riskiness of AI "progress" -- and those with a strong emotional or ideological attachment to (or financial interest in) continued AI "progress" know about this connection, which is why they like to try to smear the rationalists.
Not even them, simulations of them. They're not even real! Why the hell should I care if some far-future AI tortures simulations of me? Go ahead, spin up a hundred, hell spin up a trillion!
Yeah, the incident rate of this occurring is pretty high for randomness only.
It's easier to expect that your phone is always listening (because it is) and sending that data to apps for advertising than to force app providers to open source their code and prove they aren't collecting data on what the phone mic picks up.
But maybe you have more insight on a single provider's application that has been thus accused than other people in the thread.
>> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.
> This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
Your parent commenter appears to be European. Europe enjoys better city living in many ways than the United States does because the US is relatively underpopulated. (On the other hand, urban Americans have much larger homes.)
I live in Netherland, and here UberEats was a latecomer to what Thuisbezorgd had been doing for ages, but other than that it rings true. Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian. Since Thuisbezorgd we can get any cuisine you can imagine delivered to your door.
But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually), and I think even now that might still be more takeaway than delivery.
> Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian.
> But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually),
Well, those and things like spareribs, burgers, kapsalon, etc., which makes it a rather broad spectrum of takeaways that already had delivery.
In case you didn't know, Takeaway = Thuisbezorgd (or rather, the other way around). And in the 2010s, Thuisbezorgd and Just Eat had a pretty active fight for marketshare, until they decided the most profitable course of action was for Just Eat to operate in the countries where it held a majority marketshare, and Takeaway to do likewise, creating regional monopolies. Later on they merged, which any sane regulatory agency would have blocked.
What is interesting is that UberEats hasn't tried to compete on price at all. They charge similar, semi-extortionate prices. They just offer delivery from more and more upscale places.
reply