Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them.
They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers.
When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you.
If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
And substack is free because they use YOU as their growth engine. Your newsletter is plastered with their branding and links to their app, not yours. If someone subscribes to pay for your publication via their app, they own the subscription, not you.
Ultimately, even if you own the email list, you’re sharecropping on their land.
They will email your list with their own promotional offers and marketing whenever they feel like it.
If we’ve proved anything in tech, it’s that consumers will fall for the trap of “free” every single time.
To be honest I like the idea of forcing merchants to accept credit cards in addition to this.
Regardless of how much I like the idea of a payments layer without Visa/Mastercard fees, I think the rich engineers of hackernews and 10,000 overpaid consultants who worked on this massively underestimate how valuable an interest-free 30 day bridge loan is to average people (and businesses) on monthly payroll.
Combine this with the consumer protections and threat of a dispute (which almost always sides with the buyer) and it generally tilts power to the consumer in most credit card transactions, if the consumer has autopay setup (huge caveat of course).
This new layer is totally neutral, and removes the detriment to the merchant in terms of fees/risk, but not sure it’s actually as good for the market as claimed here. For me it’s a net loss, and harming consumers ultimately harms the merchant in terms of willingness to buy things. If it becomes trendy for merchants to start refusing credit cards to use this instead, I will be WAY less likely to take a risk on a purchase I’m not 100% confident about.
Im not willing to try new products from most startups for example if I can’t buy on a credit card.
This applies more to the USA than to Europe, where "credit cards" are in fact mostly debit cards (cursory research says 71% vs 26% in America), and ordinary people tend not to be up to their necks in consumer debt. Anecdotally, I've never used an actual credit card in my life.
The US used to be an outlier in this regard if you look back to 2000, but over the past 25+ years American households have stayed pretty much the same while their European counterparts have grown debt substantially.
Not the most productive asset to be leveraging, especially in rapidly declining birth rate countries, no?
Meanwhile, while headline credit card interest rates in the US look insane (like 20%+), in reality loss-adjusted yield actually realized by lenders and paid by consumers (after renegotiated settlements, bankruptcies, payment plans, etc) is less than half that.
You can look at the realized return on personal credit lending on companies balance sheets, its basically like 3.7%. Maybe a few percent more return than what a 30 year mortgage lender can expect going forward (now that we're returning to post-GFC 'normalized' interest rates).
Over 10% of interest is still a lot... And the fact that you get to that rate through settlements and bankruptcies is a good indicator of how much of a stranglehold debt has over a typical American household.
And it's fine if you don't think a home is a bad investment. I think most people do and so far that has worked out almost perfectly. That doesn't mean anything for the future, but there are no guarantees in investing. In a lot of places a mortgage gets you tax breaks too, as opposed to other credit.
I see these conspiratorial arguments all the time and I think people massively overestimate the value of the average users tokens.
The problems with frontier models (design taste, ability to solve novel/difficult problems, etc) cannot be solved by throwing more slop from the average user at it.
Actually, most of the main deficiencies in current models stem from the fact that their data sets aren’t curated and specialized enough.
I don't think the goal of this data is necessarily model improvement.
I think it's marketing, advertising, and product refinement.
Ex: all the things Google wants your search data for.
It's somewhat silly to think the value of that data has changed much. Advertisers want to know what's popular and getting clicks and attention. Competitors want to know what features are getting used in their markets.
In the simplest case, think of this data as improving the harness, not the model.
I wonder how much less useful it is if I use those models for open code or similar.
What are you really learning about me, other than the fact that I am a technical person, which you could know by the fact that I signed up for open router to start with.
Do you run your coding harness in a completely segregated sandbox? Even folder names of what projects you have, what projects you actually work on, etc are very useful for targeted advertising.
Actually, for me, being llm generated makes this more impressive because it marks the first real world example of a genuine new product built with ai that I have ever seen.
For 6 years I’ve been reading hype about amazing productivity boosts from this stuff, but until now the expected flood of cool new products never arrived. Just lots of tools and harnesses and swarm coordination stuff to help companies spend more money on the hype cycle.
But finally somebody actually built an app and released it. I call that a milestone.
Because they didn't write all the code by hand? Seems like an odd measurement for determining if a project is ambitious or impressive. Clearly this one is based on the replies here.
Because markets in the short term are almost a random walk and making the blanket statement that “Walmart stock is down today because Deepseek” was an easy narrative to repeat for media people who cover the stock market.
In reality the world is a highly complex, chaotic, reflexive system, and saying “the entire market moved today because of 12,000,000 factors that randomly aligned” isn’t satisfying enough for people to follow your media channel so they can monetize your eyeballs.
We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control.
We're arguing about whether governments executing censorship regimes via ISPs (like the Chinese Communist Party) without any balanced legal proceedings is a good thing.
Is it the norm in France for the regulator to block gambling sites without a court process? Polymarket is obviously a gambling site, so if so, this is no surprise. Polymarket can probably challenge the decision in a court process.
Sorry if I come across as being pedantic but it's actually the Communist Party of China - the CPC, even though many, esp. in the US, use the wrong abbreviation - CCP.
It is pedantic. Saying that people should say CPC instead of CCP adds nothing to the conversation. If it grinds your gears then maybe starting with organizations like the Encyclopedia Britannica[0] rather than random Hacker News commenters might prove more effective.
Yes, it’s an argument but there’s zero data to support it, in fact the opposite.
If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.
Why would general pornography lead to rape? Most pornography is not rape pornography. Would people watching a bunch of rape pornography lead to more rapes? I don't know, but that seems more likely than general pornography leading to rapes.
60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29
I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.
> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life
Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.
That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.
Does it need to be said that by making all pornography easier to access the internet obviously makes rape pornography more prevalent and easier to access as well?
Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.
It would be easily visible or not visible in the rape statistics if the world had a single variable. In any case, even if the world was extremely simple, 'rape porn' could increase rapes, and we could still observe a decrease in rapes if 'general porn' decreased the odds of rape to a larger degree than rape porn increased them relative to the population that consumed each.
Yes exactly my point...so it sounds like you're admitting this "availability of porn leading to action" theory isn't a very good one? And that in fact it leads to less action given it satisfies urges at much lower cost.
I’m a huge fan of Apple but this kind of thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Regardless of whether OpenAI poached some of their talent or is the one in the wrong, Apple has such a massively dominant hardware business (some might say monopoly level in some areas) that for them to be publicly acknowledging how scared they are of OpenAI…it’s just…pathetic.
They’re a $5T company and can’t muster up the motivation to get in the game and compete in the next computing frontier.
Apple fanboys will invent some narrative about them swooping in with the best product as a laggard and claim it’s always their strategy, but I see zero evidence they have the capacity to do that anymore.
The Siri situation is just absolutely pathetic and no amount of bad press about OpenAI is going to change the fact that Apple neglecting Siri for a decade now has been a big F-U to their customers.
You may want to read the related articles first. I'm personally quite anti-Apple on several fronts, but the evidence so far seems damning if it holds up in court.
Which goes beyond a civil lawsuit as well, if true, these employees are going to face real, serious criminal charges and possibly jail time. Up to 10 years in federal prison, and Apple has a history of pressing criminal charges.
If Liu actually did exploit a vulnerability to bypass Apple's network security, they may also see federal charges for CFAA as well.
This isn't just them being scared of a competitor because they're able to outperform Apple, according to Apple they have proof of an active plan not just to poach talent, but to get that talent to syphon out information as they leave, as well as former employees keeping Apple hardware and using it to access confidential information. If what Apple claims is true, this is straightforwardly illegal. Could Apple be lying? Maybe, but that's a very risky move.
It totally could be illegal, and I don’t care. Those laws exist to entrench dominant incumbents, and make our economy less dynamic.
The history of Silicon Valley and most of its innovation come from this kind of thing, and we eliminated non-competes in California for exactly this reason.
Apple having a serious competitor in hardware would be a good thing for consumers all over the world.
Apple’s overzealous secrecy culture starts to become insidious once you become such a dominant force in the marketplace.
At what point do we allow their innovations to bleed into the rest of humanity and lower their margins so humanity doesn’t pay out a 60% tax to them anymore. I think they’ve made enough profits for investors at this point. Id be happy if my Apple stock went nowhere if it meant 20 other companies could grow and innovate new products off the back of it.
Also, I’ve observed a rhetorical trend among the “anti-bigness” crowd towards defining “monopoly” down:
“You may think a monopoly is an overwhelmingly dominant position as a supplier of a good or service, but that’s just naive popular economics! Acshually, according to the latest economic theories (by economists who share our politics), a monopoly is any firm that is big enough to have market power—like pricing power—to do things that can harm a competitor unfairly.”
While the misuse of the term monopoly is annoying, that's quite the misleading comment. You're allowed to disagree with what policy is a good idea, but laws like the linked do exist, and they were seen as pro-competitive in their time.
Today you can consider that "just business", and therefore "part of competing", but the were laws with the intention of allowing/disallowing types of tactics. E.g., you can't compete by leveraging your volume (see attached link), so you have to focus on making your service good.
The assumption made by a these people is that if there are so majy companies getting that big, there must be general disrespect of these laws. And correlating with the undisputed fact that antitrust enforcement did change.
What does Robinson-Patman enforcement have to do with the economic definition of a monopoly?
Robinson-Patman applies to every supplier and every retailer, not just monopolies, which is what makes it so difficult to equitably enforce. So it hasn’t been.
Yes, if the US was modeled like the USSR they could extract 100% of everyone’s private assets and the politburo could spend them on whatever moonshot projects they wanted to, unchecked by silly democratic votes.
But…the USSR and that entire model failed spectacularly? So not sure what you’re getting at here. Is there some fantasy economic model you believe you’ve innovated that will lead to utopia and the end of resource scarcity?
They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers.
When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you.
If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
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