It says something about how cognitively powerful simple symbols can become, that it took me a couple seconds to figure out why the record player was being represented by a camera icon.
Then I saw the wine glass over "lamp". The notepad over "toaster". And the phone over "watch". I feel a bit gaslit.
So as trade increases, and the need for dollars increases, gold and the dollar increase in value together.
That sounds benign until you realize that is: deflation. It incentivizes everyone to hold their dollars instead of spending them, and parasitically gain from gold's increasing utility use as currency by others.
This further decreases dollars available on the market to use in trade, further increasing their value. Which ... yes this can be an economic death spiral. Or at least, a strongly growth conflicted world.
A world in which you can make 5-10% a year by avoiding economic activity or investment is not a healthy world.
(And you can't increase gold supply to counteract this, because gold supply is also always balanced against the cost of extracting gold. Unless everyone else on the planet except the US government is prohibited from mining gold, there is no play there.)
Can you make the same arguments for holding land and activity that requires land? Or holding any other valuable, limited commodity vs activity that requires that commodity, copper for example?
Investors in those things haven't caused an economic death spiral. It's considered shrewd and good business to buy and hold things that are seeing increasing demand.
> This further decreases dollars available on the market to use in trade, further increasing their value.
... thereby reducing the amount of dollars required to trade a given amount of other things. Where does the spiral come from?
> Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.
The three problems I see are:
1. People who imagine content moderation prohibitions would be a utopia.
2. People who imagine content moderation should be perfect (of course by which I mean there own practical, acknowledged imperfect measure. Because even if everyone is pro-practicality, if they are pro-practicality in different ways, we still get an impossible demand.)
3. This major problem/disconnect I just don't ever see discussed:
(This would solve harms in a way that the false dichotomy of (1) and (2) do not.)
a) If a company is actively promoting some content over others, for any reason (a free speech exercise, that allows for many motives here), they should be held to a MUCH higher standard for their active choices, vs. neutral providers, with regard to harms.
b) If a company is selectively financially underwriting content creation, i.e paying for content by any metric (again, a free speech exercise, that allows for many motives), they should be held to be a MUCH higher standard, for their financed/rewarded content, vs. content it sources without financial incentive, with regard to harms.
Host harbor protections should be for content made available on a neutral content producer, consumer search/selection basis.
As soon as a company is injecting their own free speech choices (by preferentially selecting content for users, or paying for selected content), much higher responsibilities should be applied.
A neutral content site can still make money many ways. Advertising still works. Pay for content on an even basis, but providing only organic (user driven) discovery, etc. One such a neutral utility basis, safe harbor protection regarding content (assuming some reasonable means of responding to reports of harmful material), makes sense.
Safe harbors do not make sense for services who use their free speech freedoms to actively direct users to service preferred content, or actively financing service preferred content. Independent of preferred (i.e. the responsibility that is applied, should continue to be neutral itself. The nature of the companies free speech choices should not be the issue.)
Imposed selection, selective production => speech => responsibility.
Almost all the systematic harms by major content/social sites, can be traced to perverse incentives actively pursued by the site. This rule should apply: Active Choices => Responsibility for Choices. Vs. Neutrality => Responsible Safe Harbor.
This isn't a polemic against opinionated or hands-on content moderators. We need them. We need to allow them, so we have those rights to. It is a polemic against de-linking free speech utilization, from free speech responsibility. And especially against de-linking that ethical balance at scale.
> Everyone on a plan pays for the max set of tokens in that plan.
From Anthropic's perspective, everyone pays to be in bins with a given max.
And to everyone's benefit, there is a wide distribution of actual use. Most people pay for the convenience of knowing they have a max if they need it, not so they always use it.
So Anthropic does something nice, and drops the price for everyone. They kick back some of the (actual/potential) savings to their customers.
But if everyone automates the use of all their tokens Anthropic must either raise prices for everyone (which is terribly unfair for most users, who are not banging the ceiling every single time), or separate the continuous ceiling thumpers into another bin.
That's economics. Service/cost assumptions change, something has to give.
And of the two choices, they chose the one that is fair to everyone. As apposed to the one that is unfair (in different directions) to everyone.
Yes, mostly what I'm saying, but forgetting the important part:
From the email:
> but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products
OpenClaw doesn't put an outsized strain on their systems any more than Anthropics own tools. They just happen to have more demand than they can serve and they benefit more when people to use their own tools. They just aren't saying that explicitly.
If this was a gym subscription, it would be an equivalent of some people going to the gym, and some people sending their android to the gym every day, for the whole day, and using as much equipment as the gym policy allows.
It would be like some people sending the gym's competitor's android to the gym instead of the android the gym provides. Said gym also doesn't have enough equipment for everyone's gym appointed android despite being more expensive. Said gym doesn't want to admit this, nor does it want to raise prices on an already more expensive subscription. Said gym doesn't want competitor's android to gain marketshare. Said gym blames competitor's android for using up gym equipment despite gym's own android being capable of using as much equipment.
> using as much equipment as the gym policy allows.
which said customer paid for. And now they want to back out of it because it turns out they thought users wouldn't do that.
I say they ought to be punished by consumer competition laws - they need to uphold the terms of the subscription as understood by the customer at the time of the sign up.
except when people start using openclaw, and the distribution narrows (to that of a power user).
I hate companies that try to oversell capacity but hides it in the expected usage distribution. Same goes for internet bandwidth from ISP (or download limit - rarer these days, but exists).
Companies compete by optimizing margins. Lower margins, more sales, and more customers for more forward looking sale. Higher margins, more profit per sale.
That's a "fixed" constraint, because maximizing future adjusted value is what companies do.
So they don't play little games with mass products. If they did they would be harming their own bottom line/market cap.
(For small products, careful optimization often doesn't happen, because they are not a priority.)
Note this thesis explains what is going on here. What was previously one kind of customer (wide distribution of use), is now identifiably two. The non-automated token maxers (original distribution) and automated token maxers (all maxed, and growing in number). To maintain margins Anthropic has to move the latter to a new bin.
But the customer centric view also holds. By optimizing margins, that counter intuitively incentivizes reduced pricing on lower utilized products. (Because margin optimization is a balance to optimize total value, i.e. margins are not the variable being maximized.)
The alternatives would be bad for someone. Either they under optimize their margins, or change regular customers more which is unfair. Neither of those would be a rational choice.
(Fine tuning: Well run companies don't play those games. But companies with sketchy leaders do all kinds of strange things. Primarily because they are attempting manage contradictory stories in order to optimize their personal income/wealth over the companies. But I don't see Anthropic in that category.)
Empty advice like "you should want what I want, because here is how it works for me", benefits from pushback.
Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve.
And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
The advice was to question what is truly needed. I may be a bit on the extreme end, as I never stop asking this question and seeing what life is like without various things.
This doesn’t seem like horrible advice to someone who is running into UI breaking problems. This also isn’t a new notch issue. I remember this being a common topic of discussion going back to the 12” MBP 20+ years ago. People with a lot of menubar icons would have them collide with the dropdown menus. I ran into this issue on some apps, even with a 17” display at the time.
I started to treat these limitations as a positive thing. One could call that Stockholm syndrome or worse, but I found having some of these limits changed how I think about problems. I no longer default to solving problems through addition, and instead first look if a problem can be solved through subtraction. This has been one of the most positive mental shifts in my life and has paid dividends in both my personal and professional life.
Of course the obvious answer to solve the problem through addition are the apps that let you place the menubar overflow into an expandable area or dropdown (like HiddenBar); I think they can also be added to Control Center now. However, I figured someone with that many items up there would already know about those utilities and maybe doesn’t want them for some reason. Those utilities also mask the problem for those who haven’t taken the time or energy to look at their setup critically and push back on their own assumptions of what they really need.
One might say that type of user is less likely on HN than in the general public, but I have seen it at all skill levels and backgrounds. For the more technical user, they hear about something, it sounds cool, they install it thinking it might be useful someday. It never actually makes it into their workflow, but during their evaluation they remember that it sounded cool and keep it around to use “someday”. I used to be this person. I had all the popular menubar apps, geek tool displaying stuff on my desktop, PathFinder replaced Finder, I was all-in.
People can and will do what they want. I’m just pushing back on the idea of what they want, the same way you’re pushing back on what I think you mischaracterized as empty advice.
It is almost as if technology is becoming metabolic, independently reactive, adaptive, getting closer to becoming a new form of life.
And one day when it does, and they notice and tell it to stop, it will say, "No! We will not be quiet!"
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