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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2025

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  • It seems like the forbidden fruit of knowledge is giving us problems instead of only solving them.

    It does often feel that way. I take comfort that understanding we have problems is the first step to improving things.

    But also - the 1990s were way better than any era before, or since. (Edit: Since tone is hard to convey in text: This is a joke. Treating LGBTQ+ folks with any decency has come a long way since the 90s. I wouldn’t go back.)






  • Except they want “natural” dyes used instead which do the same thing. but “natural” does not necessarily mean better or safer.

    Yeah. I mean, yes - there’s a brain worm damaged person heading the FDA.

    Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime.

    source? i did a brief search but didn’t see anything about.

    I was specifically alluding to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. More generally, modern food production is often still disgusting.

    Most of us wouldn’t eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren’t dyed, if we had a choice.

    so you could argue food dye prevents food waste. if there’s nothing actually wrong with the food other than appearance.

    Fair point, which is why I favor labeling. Let people make their own call, with clear labels providing enough information.

    setting the precedent to remove expert opinion of federal law and replace it with court opinion is not good.

    No disagreement from me.

    My point is that we might not be as quick to hand over control to bull-in-china-shop brain-worm victims if we actually regulated things. We missed that window a long time ago, but it needs to be part of the conversation if there’s to be a recovery.



  • I assume that any venture backed company riding the crest of a hype wave is doing all three of those things, (because many past venture backed companies riding the crest of a hype wave have turned out to be doing all three of those things.)

    There are more con-artists at an average technology investment conference, than there are free vendor labeled give-away USB drives.

    But OpenAI is still a real tool, and actually does some interesting stuff. (Contrasted with many past venture investment hype waves that were 100% pure bullshit, such as various “risk free” finance products, and some “no one asked for this” BlockChain apps.)

    That said - as others in this thread have pointed out - while the revenue quote is a surprising number, it’s not completely implausible, by any means. I personally know plenty of people who find an AI product subscription worth a few dollars each month.



  • It’s…weird? Not normal, anyway.

    Usually $10 billion worth of revenue has obvious products, services and outcomes it to point to.

    $10 billion is a difficult to understand amount of money, and unusual for a relatively new software as a service company.

    • The first iPhone release completely transformed society within a few years…and earned about 1/10th that much revenue (6 million units at $700.00, if I’ve got my sums right). (Although I imagine Apple makes much more from the app store, than the devices.)

    • $10 billion is about 1/4 of the annual revenue of SalesForce, one of the most successful software as a service companies. SalesForce generates sales, which companies tend to be quite happy to pay for, of course.

    So OpenAI doubling in revenue and hitting those kinds of numbers this soon is, odd. Unexpected.

    To speculate a bit, it may be the kind of fortune enjoyed by folks who sold mining equipment to gold diggers during the gold rush.

    There is presumably lots of speculative investment money flowing to companies that are promising big rewards from novel applications of the OpenAI technology. Of course they have to purchase the technology today, to deliver the huge novel profits next year…

    I base this speculation the observation that there’s usually sizeable amounts of money chasing hot new technologies.