I agree that OpenRouter kinda sucks, but it took about 15 seconds to see that a few sentences got reverse-compressed into what is now this article, and it's slop.
The [content-based] trust layer of the internet is what we have deferred to this point, and what needs to be created (which is easier said than done, of course).
Personally I think a web-of-trust Keybase-style solution could work... But buy-in is difficult... you'd need some sort of "seed" strategy to make the app useful alack of 100 (a huge number) trusted friends.
Saying "more" seems generous. I don't trust Pangram at all, and I also don't trust the author at all. Both can be trustless charletans simultaneously, and I feel this speaks volumes about the state of digital media today.
Whether that chess repo is genuine or not genuine, legal or illegal, tasteful or tasteless, vibed or not vibed, stolen or copied, the signal to open source maintainers is clear: get off GitHub.
I admit that I read this stuff for self-soothing, although the self-sooth is not about AI going away, just that SotA will become expensive enough that everyone stops shilling digital garbage everywhere all the time.
If SotA does not go up in price (ala open weights), then everyone will continue to shill digital garbage AND the stock market will presumably get ravaged. So I'm really crossing my fingers about cost increase and- full circle- this hope is why I like to self-soothe with these articles (i.e. I cannot attest the articles' veracity but it makes me feel good that a human writer is speculating convincingly about instability).
That said, I sense that the ravaging is a forgone conclusion, unless someone pulls a(nother) rabbit out of a hat. I'd qualify agentic coding was a rabbit, so it could happen again I suppose.
I think the big picture is whether the big two can mask the real cost of tokens (inference and training) long enough to survive; that OpenAI is seeking government investment suggests that they can't.
Ed Zitron helps you see the broad absurdities in this situation and more importantly helps you understand that at various levels there is chicanery: they need more money constantly so they make weird unprovable claims to people who lack the skills to critique them, they exploit not jusT FOMO but actually fear of their own products to market them, their suppliers are making such ruthless use of SPVs as to conjure a possible apparently entirely legal Enron-scale disaster, they are attempting to scare the US government into backing them, and they have tried to get the index funds to back them before they have any hope of profit. None of it is normal; much of it is operating in the face of whatever still passes for principle in the US tech and finance industries. The broad picture is obscured by smoke.
But as fascinating as it is, it's only background information and it only broadly supports one's instincts; anything can still happen. For me, the main instinct it provides some support for is that the market is so terrifyingly lacking in verifiable fundamentals and stable predictable pricing that ultimately people will be driven to open weights and local models to keep control of their businesses; anything else is not a sane bet. So it broadly supports my instincts about my local-first approach, to find sustainable value.
The thing about pulling rabbits from hats is that the rabbit was always there; it's not a new rabbit. With a bit of understanding about how GPTs and LLMs work it is clear that code analysis and generation is not just a good application, it is the utmost practical and profitable one, because nowhere else in broad human effort do we communicate only in context-free grammars. Nothing else is actually going to prove to be more valuable financially).
(Formal pure maths is the "purest" one which is why we see its value in chugging through maths puzzles. But is there as much money to be found there?)
They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did.
Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."
I actually had a great session with Gemini pushing back on the "Max 401k" advice. Summarized in my own words:
- Why would I contribute tons more to my already decent 401k? If anything, I want to pull from it. I refuse to diminish the peak years of me and my family's life together just to be wealthy when I'm old and alone.
- that's a good point, but know you'll pay tax on top of 10%
- well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it, and 401k turned out to be more lucrative anyway. So the penalty is only 10% when tax is unavoidable timewise, paltry
- true, but you yourself just mentioned how lucrative the 401k is over time. That money will not manifest over time if you pull it now
- why would I even want to be rich when I'm old and boring anyway, life is happening for me right now
- well that depends on what you consider old, you could retire early, use SEPP to access penalty free, say at 50
- I actually wasn't aware of that as an option... The difference between my age an 50 isn't that large, at least not compared to 55/60. Very good then, perhaps I'll keep things as they are.
As is typical with AI, I can't attest to whether this is accurate, whether it's good advice, or whether I myself am financially illiterate (probably), but it did raise my confidence a bit, and legitimately talked me out of a hypothetical of using some 401k money to buy a better house.
The problem of money mattering more when you are younger is something that often appears in personal finance discussions.
One thing is consumption but another are opportunities to invest in yourself.
There is case for not saving at all when you are young (because there are always good way the money can be spent).
Here is some good discussion that touches on it (and other FIRE related topics):
>> well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it
The point is that as long as your money is in the IRA you can earn interest or buy stocks, sell for a profit, over and over and not pay any taxes on your gains in between.
Imagine you have $100k in a normal trading account and $100k in an IRA. You make the same trades in both and both are up $20k at the end of the year. Let's say then you want to trade out and take profit. The normal account triggers taxes on $20k worth of capital gains, so maybe it now has $115k in it. The IRA doesn't, so it still has $120k in it. Go ten years like that. At the end when you withdraw from the IRA, yes you have to pay taxes on the total gains (if it's not a Roth) BUT you had the use of that extra $5k every year you didn't pay taxes on! The whole time, all that tax money you didn't pay compounds to let you make more money with it. That's the concept. You're allowed to keep using the money that you would've otherwise had to give to the government, to make more money along the way. The final 20% you pay when you cash out is less than how much you made by compounding the tax savings and plowing them back into investments.
I think you're missing the point of IRAs too. The primary point of IRAs is that you can defer taxes from a time when you have high taxes (your working years), to a period of when you can have low taxes (retirement). That's it. Being able to trade stocks within an IRA is a side benefit. Another side benefit is no taxes on things like dividends inside your IRA. Those are not the primary benefit.
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