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Block is the new name for Square, also of CashApp.

Yeah... Still gonna use my credit card or debit card.

Square is likely the POS terminal you've been using your card on. They pioneered those neat headphone jack adaptors that let small businesses use their iPhone to take payment years before tapping phones together was a thing. Not a bad business, made jack Dorsey rich, now he gets to play around with crypto junk

Square is primarily a payment platform so you probably have used your credit or debit card thousands of times with them already.

Nukes usually don't wipe out entire countries, especially tactical nukes.

I'm far from convinced that using nukes in the Korean War would've been a good move, but equating it with "kill[ing] them all" is completely dishonest. What's your goal in this debate, and is it served by dishonest rhetoric?


My comment is in the context of:

> That USA didn't nuke China in 1950 or 1951. Would have solved a lot of problems for generations of people.

> USA dropping nukes probably would have been the better outcome for humanity.

Both of which I read as an expansive campaign of "nuking China"


There a recent(ish: May 2025) paper about how drip-feeding information is worse than restarting with a revised prompt once you realize details are missing.[0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06120


this has been my casual finding as well. why would i want all that conversational crap in the context window?

Yeah, seems like current models might benefit from a more email-like UI, and this'll be more true as they get longer task time horizons.

Maybe we want a smaller model tuned for back and forth to help clarify the "planning doc" email. Makes sense that having it all in a single chat-like interface would create confusion and misbehavior.


If I'll pay to get a fixed result, sure. I'd expect a Jevons paradox effect: if LLMs got me results twice as fast for the same cost, I'm going to use it more and end up paying more in total.

Maximizing the utility of your product for users is usually the winning strategy.


I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping was maybe 30% as fast.

I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.


A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped me.

You: No one knows anything AI helps with.

Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.


How much astroturfing is happening online? These companies certainly have the funds to do so on a wide scale

The only thing I trust about these right now is my own experience


This is how it is done openly with clearly Grok-edited or written comments:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m

One can only imagine the amount of covert promotion.


From another industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_...

I don't have much proof, but given the incentives and the possibility of doing it I'd be surprised if it wasn't happening everywhere. How much would be enough to pay the top 50 influencers in a market to push something? To hire 100 people to be active full time on all social media sites? To a company with billions they wouldn't even notice the expense

Default to skepticism and double down on your critical thinking skills. More important than ever today


I’m sure it is. Though I can never tell if it is astroturfing or extremely weird AI maximalists just reminding us that they’re in a cult.

Are these "million people" in the room with you now? Or are they just the bot and shill accounts you're reading on "X"?

They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people. ChatGPT and the other big LLMs has hundreds of millions of users.

You might not like using LLMs. You might not find them useful. You might think they're bad and harmful (I do). But to claim that no one finds them useful is a completely different position, and one that's about as disconnected as it's possible to be.


> They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people.

I have all of those. Most don't use AI at all. Some use it on a limited basis but it is unclear if there is any worthwhile gain in productivity. Remaining are two who use it with regularity, including one who's all in. I personally use it for 2 limited use cases. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I'd be done sooner without it.

Conversely, I need to mediate an epidemic of AI foistware and AI UX pollution. 100% of my userbase is subject to overpushy AI offerings and an endless minefield of shifty, unwanted AI elements. These users are clearly more productive when I keep AI out of their way.

On balance, AI is presently a net negative for my clients.


Only if there's no third option other "let others put ads on your platform" and "show ads on your platform yourself".

The Internet has had ads since the advent of the world wide web, arguably longer.

I loved Usenet, but I also appreciated being able to have a personal webpage for free as a kid, and that was ad-supported.


The web precedes commercialization, but many tons of money were pumped into the web post-commercialization, so a lot changed quickly after that.

There were free ways to get on the net, and to host web pages, before 1995. And for many years after that, you could pay for ISP access, which would come with the ability to host pages.

We're still paying for ISP access, we just get fewer services with it. That could change.


Back in the day, I chose to buy the Kindle with ads to save a few dollars. (I think it was $10 cheaper; looks like it's $20 now[0].) I 100% found this a worthwhile trade-off, and so did thousands of other consumers.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/All-new-Amazon-Kindle-Paperwhite-glar...


if you really liked ads you would have paid extra

I like that ads saved me money on a Kindle. They had an upside for me, and a downside, and the upside was worth more to me than the downside.

it sounds like the money was the upside, not the ads!

Sure, in much the same was as lack of food spoilage an upside, not the big metal box I put the food in. But since one is a direct result of the other, we typically treat it as an upside of the thing causing the upside.

somebody had to effectively pay you to look at the ads, and you had to pay someone else for your refrigerator. does that distinction make sense?

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