But there's fierce competition by new or small players (deepseek, Mistral etc), many even open source. And Icm convinced they'll keep the prices low.

A company like openai can only increase subscriptions x10 when they've locked in enough clients, have a monopoly or oligopoly, or their switching costs are multitudes of that.

So currently the irony seems to be that the larger the AI company, the more loss they're running at. Size seems to have a negative impact on business. But the smaller operators also prevent companies from raising prices to levels at which they make money.

They are in the top of open models, and surpass some closed models.

I've been using devstral, codestral and Le Chat exclusively for three months now. All from misteals hosted versions. Agentic, as completion and for day-to-day stuff. It's not perfect, but neither is any other model or product, so good enough for me. Less anecdotal are the various benchmarks that put them surprisingly high in the rankings

¹https://mistral.ai/news/devstral

My distracted ADHD brain misses event notifications just too often, but with this app, even I my phone is in another room, I get reminded of that meeting, in time.

Where was the instinct that held you back to reply is such a confrontational way?

I think this makes a perfect counter-example. Because this structure is an important reason for YC to exist and what the HN crowd often rallies against.

Such large companies - generally - don't make good products. Large companies rarely make good products in this way. Most, today, just buy companies that built something in the GP's cited vein: a creative process, with pivots, learnings, more pivots, failures or - when successful - most often successful in an entirely different form or area than originally envisioned. Even the large tech monopolies of today originated like that. Zuckerberg never envisioned VR worlds, photo-sharing apps, or chat apps, when he started the campus-fotobook-website. Bezos did not have some 5d-chess blueprint that included the largest internet-infrastructure-for-hire when he started selling books online.

If anything, this only strengthens the point you are arguing against: a business that operates by a "head" "specifying what they want" and having "something" figure out how to build the parts, is historically a very bad and inefficient way to build things.

I remember a large part of the fun was that we couldn't just look something up on the web - it didn't exist in our home in the eighties. Instead we'd pore over BASIC on floppies. Changing a thing, for example GRAVITY=0.1, and finding out the banana now flies almost straight up.

Or meticulously typing over the source code printed in hand-me-down magazines. Evenings of me and friend one typing the other reading out loud. Then way more evenings of finding all the typos and bugs. And then one or two evenings running the game we just "wrote" and get bored immediately. And start changing things.

This is how I learned programming and what has paid my bills for over 25 years now. There were few university careers for programming, but mostly, young-arrogant-me was like "well, I have learned myself programming, so I'd better follow a university program that teaches me stuff I don't already know XD".

The tinkering and creative part has been lost by now for me. I lament that. So I've put aside a fund, finishing off some contracts now and from this summer on, will do unpaid work of "creative coding". Making "art" with software - something I now do in spare time, fulltime. Because that tinkering is what drew me in. Not the scrum-rituals, spagetti-code-wrangling or layers of architectural enterprise abstractions. But the fun of nesting nested loops and seeing my name fly over the screen in weird patterns, or the joy of making the matrix printer play a "song" by letting it print weird ascii strings.

I've been working professionally now for over a decade, but got started long before that as a child. Despite the endless negative things I could say about the modern era, I don't feel like any of it impacts my enjoyment of my work or gets in the way of my creativity.

I think this is because the closest I've ever been to truly being alone with the machine is writing programs for my TI calculators, but even then I still had ticalc.org. Some programs on there were brilliant, but most were awful. It was the perfect balance for people my age at the time. Despite what people believe today, especially with their LLMs, I don't think the landscape has changed much in that regard. There's still a lot of awful code with few brilliant examples. That leaves room for me to work on new interesting stuff or improve what's there without having too much help spoiling it.

Aside from political or social reasons, X is a terrible platform.

More often than not, I get a blank page, something didn't load.

If I get content, it's (randomly) behind a registration-wall.

Or it shows confusing cookie banners that half the time don't even work. (Dev console full of js errors)

So I don't even bother anymore. This service is technically so fragile and unstable, it's not worth the click.

Aside from how it's socially and businesswise broken. Because I have looked into some of the errors and issues and they'll only occur for "anonymous users" and not for twitter users. They're oftencaused by (normal vanilla) adblockers or privacy protection.

So I dare say they're either malicious, deliberate. Or lack of interest/resources for non-registered and/or privacy-aware users

I don’t see any similar attempts to transparently live fact check on any other platform.

I've seen so many right-wingers self-own themselves when asking Grok to either debunk a left-supporting article or back up a right-supporting one. I've seen people refer to Grok as Elon's Little Nazi Bot, but aside from that one afternoon where it referred to itself as "Mecha-Hitler", that label is far from the truth. Grok tends to actually be pretty factual.

How does that not decrease your trust? I can't understand the thought process.

I don't all the time, because that would take forever, but every month or so I'll do a deep dive on the sources of something I'm reading about. Strongly recommend that people periodically do this, especially on topics where you catch yourself having a strong reaction such as anger or immediate validation of your view point.

My concern wouldn't so much be that general information is incorrect, but that anything Musk has opinions on - which seems to be a great number of topics, many of which are completely detached from his companies etc. - has an unacceptable chance of being deliberately manipulated. This is easy to spot when he tries to convince people of his "white genocide", but we don't know what other topics he's "fixed", and you specify that you don't verify all the time.

How do you know you're not being fed another "white genocide" if you don't verify? I wouldn't be as concerned with other AIs because we haven't seen as explicit manipulation as we've seen with Grok, but that seems to be explicitly built to distribute Musks opinions.

I appreciate Community Notes and Grok for the closest thing to a real-time ability to call it out that exists.

My default AI query on any topic or story is, "Please validate the details of this story and compare to other sources to identify any critical information from other publications that was missing from this source. Highlight those differences."

It gives me a validation, a comparison and helps me to identify the bias/context framing that's going on pretty quickly. I haven't seen many AI sources that can fact check things in real time like Grok can, like Maduro news the other day.

That's my point. That's the problem I am addressing.

You present that as a solution. I presented it as a problem.

It's so serious, that you should really back it up with some evidence or at least some foundation. Got any?

In this very thread you can find lots of comments excusing the censorship because it’s being used to censor the “wrong ideas”.

I totally agree these comments contain discussion of controversial cases, but your claim is surprising to the point of being unbelievable without any kind of support.

To give the most optimistic take: Perhaps in your country, one political party is much more pro-censorship than another, so an anti-censorship stance seems aligned against that party? That’s believable; it happens in many countries (probably including mine; it can be hard to tell, since pro-censorship is a very common stance here).

Or hearsay. Or quotes from tinfoilhats or conspiracy nuts even.

Without any of these, you are seriously discrediting people and projects. And without any of these, there's no way for me counter any. Or even authorize any (ie a random russian troll, vs a journalist with reputation to lose)

Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules.

E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone.

The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`.

And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this.

Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.

Right. It's having to profile yourself under the excuse of not letting kids use TikTok or PornHub.

Discussion and images of the protests around migrant hotels were age restricted because they contained adult content (racist content, fighting and burning things).

This age restriction meant that only logged in, age verified, users could see the content. Loads of adults are not age verified.

This is censorship of the news and political speech.

> The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`.

I have no idea why you think that Article 19 goes farther. It does not say that you may speak anywhere, on any platform, or on private property, and it doesn't say that that speech must reach everyone, which is a bizarre requirement anyway. It isn't a demand that all media carry all speech, and hasn't been treated that way by any of its signatories.

Worse, the text doesn't say that all information and ideas can be expressed, and it doesn't put any restrictions on governments in restraining the types of information and ideas that can be expressed.

The only thing it absolutely guarantees is the freedom to silently hold an opinion, a thing which it never had any ability to restrict.

The 1st Amendment is an actual right of free speech against the government. I'm not sure why you think that an actual, binding restriction on the government is weak compared to nothing. It's the only thing that keeps the US from passing the laws on speech and expression (that many people in the US would desire) that Europe passes regularly.

The US has to do stuff like connecting speech to other crimes as an aggravating factor, applying speech restrictions to places where the rights of citizens don't apply and the government is granted a lot of latitude, or applying speech restrictions to government contracting guidelines. And any of these things are liable to be struck down at any moment as unconstitutional by an adverse court decision.

But back to the Declaration, it's important to remember, of course, it has absolutely no legal force. That's reserved for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which basically copies Article 19 but adds:

  The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:

  (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;

  (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

Then, just for kicks, Article 20 in the Covenant is simply two more mandatory restrictions on speech:

  Article 20

  1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

  2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

-----

* Other than what has been called incitement to "imminent violence" which means that you're literally coordinating a violent act between a group of people which will happen right now.

Because I've written my share of javascript-from-scratch in my time - before npm and such. And even if my use-case was limited, in order to get edge-cases and details working - issues long solved by their HTML/CSS counterparts - we needed more and more JS. Many of which handwritten polyfills, agent-detection, etc.

Seriously, things like scrollbars (because the client insisted on them being consistent across user-agents) or dropdowns (because they had to be styled) "visited" state on links, in pure JS are thousands of lines of code. Maybe not today, anymore, IDK, with current APIs like the history API or aria labeling. But back then, just in order to make the dropdown work with screen readers, or the scrollbars react well to touchpads -in the direction the user was used to based on their OS- took us thousands of lines of JS, hacks, workarounds and very hard to follow code - because of the way the "solutions" were spread out over the exact right combination of JS, HTML and CSS. Edit: I now recall we got the web-app back with the comment "When I select "Language" and start typing "Fr" I expect French to be picked and "enter" to then put the language in French". We spent another few days on functions that collect character inputs in memory and then match them with values. All because "flags in front of the names were of crucial importance".

So, maybe this is solved in modern HTML/CSS/JS. But I highly doubt it. I think "some straight-forward ... JavaScript" is either an `import { foo } from foobar` or a pipe-dream in the area of "programmers always underestimate hours"

Now, I think part of the problem is that such elements weren't architectured properly when invented. Like many other HTML elements, they should've had some way to style and/or improve them.

E.g. an H1 Header, I can apply CSS to and change it from the default to something matching the business style. I can add some behaviour to it, so I can bookmark it's id anchor. I can add some behaviour to turn the H1-6 into a nice table-of-contents. Or an image can be improved with some CSS and JS to load progressively. But most form elements, and the dropdown in particular, is hard to improve.

And, yes, I am aware of the can of worms if "any element is allowed inside an <option>". Or the misuse designers will do if we can add CSS to certain <options> or their contents. Though I don't think "webdevs will abuse" was ever the reason not to hand power to them. It was mostly a disconnect between the "designers of the specs" and the "designers/builders of websites".

Because that "abuse" is never worse than what is still done en-masse: where we simply replace the "select" with hundreds of lines of CSS, divsoup, and hundreds or thousands of lines of JS. Where entire component libraries exist and used all over the place, that completely replicate the behaviour of existing (form) elements but with divs/spans, css and js. And despite the thousands of hours of finetuning, still get details wrong in the area of a11y, on mobile platforms, on obscure platforms, with a plugin, with a slow connection and so on.