> CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.
Are Hacker News users part of a botnet since they link to sites that when people click they go down due to all of the traffic? Am I part of a botnet if I have HN open as it means HN can execute javascript? I think it's stretching the definition.
Hacker News absolutely would be if it was making those requests to random sites that the user doesn’t know about, and have no reason to be making requests to other than attacking them.
I suppose if all the users go on the site intentionally wanting to take part in a DDoS, then sure it’s not a botnet. But that’s not reality.
If you don't think this is a DDoS with archive.today visitors acting as an unwitting/unwilling botnet, how do you think this normally works? It's not any more sophisticated. There is not much functional difference between someone telling my smart fridge to ping https://gyrovague.com and a website telling my browser to do it.
I don't think it's a botnet. To me that implies that the software that runs on your computer is a service that talks to a C&C server or to other bots P2P, forming the net(work) part of a botnet. In this case it is not a bot downloading a payload from a C&C, but a user intentionally visiting a website which downloads and runs the payload. It does not really work as a botnet since the web browser is not a service that will continually talk with a network of other servers to get a new payload.
Try ignoring what the payload is as it does not really matter in defining what is or isn't a botnet (though botnets typically imply malicious or sketchy payloads).
In regards to it being a DDoS it leans more in the yes direction due to the intent of it, but it also sites sending traffic to other sites is part of the web. You can embed things from other sites like images and then those others sites will fulfill those requests. The web didn't restrict pages to only send requests and load content from the same domain.
I've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss.
We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23:
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STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?"
SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool."
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edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to:
Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting!
The ones that are “pretty darn good” are the ones that use the same underlying AI/ML tech as the average LLM, and would be in violation of this newly-formalized guideline.
The federal government constrains what states are allowed to do, so it has to be decided at the federal government. AZ and HI got legal exceptions long ago.
As I understand it, any state is welcome to keep standard time all year, as AZ and HI do, without dispensation from the federal government.
Changing time zones or keeping permanent daylight time requires a dispensation. It is my firm belief that state legislatures have voted to keep permanent daylight time as a way to not actually change anything while telling constituents that they're doing stuff.
Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
Sure, it hasn’t crashed like the prices of televisions, or like computers did in the 80s and 90s. But it’s still meaningfully cheaper and of course much more capable (the original iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store!).
- no app store
- no video recording at all
- no copy/paste function
- no selfie camera
- no GPS
Just to name a few. I won't even go into things like touch/faceID, wireless charging, iCloud, any form of water resistance etc.
And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
It took about three years to get all the features in your bulleted list. It's been another fifteen and a half years since.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
Yes it was the iPhone 4 and it was $649, or $968 in today's money for 16gb of storage.
That mean's today's cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than this base model you're referring to, as well as being tons better. If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
That's for the 16gb by the way, the next year's 64gb would've constituted a 53% price drop today.
And that's still for a wildly different phone. You're getting way, way more value today. Longevity alone is easily twice as long, meaning the cost-per-use or cost-per-year can be halved, leading to >75% price drops.
The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly. Apple has a long line of phones available for purchase on the secondary market, refurbished market, old-model market, is known to replace batteries 7 years after discontinuing the sale, and can be replaced with non-official batteries as well.
Like you could literally buy an iPhone 12 on the secondary market for $50 and do a $39 battery replacement, or buy it fully refurbished for $150. You can buy a million android phones at any spec level. The idea that Apple should compete at this budget with its own old phones and android phones is a bad idea and the idea Apple entry level phones aren't much cheaper, have more longevity and have wildly better specs than before, is empirically not true.
Is it technically possible for Apple to create a $400 phone that's still much better than the original iPhone? Obviously I agree with you that it is. Does it make sense for Apple to do it? Obviously not.
In this thread you'll have people saying 60 hertz is ridiculous in 2026 on an iPhone 17, and people saying they're completely fine with iPhone 12 specs in 2026 and wanting to get more discounts for fewer specs (ignoring the fact you can indeed simply buy that iPhone 12). The remaining market is so slim it's not worth getting into, but you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones.
> If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
For 15 years of tech product, it's not.
For a tech product to stay the same price in dollars for so long is not great. And remember that the 17 itself is $799. This is the discount model and it's still way over the $500 bar.
> The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly.
It's silly because you took the thing being complained about, the positioning, and made it part of the premise. Anything sounds silly if you do that.
> you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones
5 phones is plenty to cover a big range if they wanted to. Pro and Pro Max isn't needed, and the Air is totally unnecessary with how close it is to a normal model.
Though for market coverage I wouldn't say low end first, I would say new SE model. I bet a 4.3 inch screen would sell a lot better than the Air's thinness.
Alright I guess we simply disagree, it's getting a bit out of hand to argue this case, and to be honest also a bit silly. Apple's best selling phones are the Pro and Max, which you want to scrap, and you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone. I'm not really interested fleshing out why that doesn't make sense if it isn't obvious.
You also think a 50% discount is not much which we just have a disagreement about, no point arguing that further. But to expect an even cheaper lineup with lower specs just doesn't make sense and we've covered the obvious reasons already. For one, Apple has tons of competition at that price/spec level. And secondly, Apple already made hundreds of millions of such phones (they're called years-old models) which anyone can buy with new batteries at the price level you're talking about (<$400). To bring out additional new models that compete with its old models and other brands brings little additional revenue and even smaller margins, the opposite of what drives Apple's market cap. With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice to bring out another iPhone mini flop or low-budget competitor.
Anthropic was already giving them that. It’s not like they need domestic mass surveillance or autonomous kill bots to have a portfolio of possible winners. If the goal is to keep the US competitive in AI, this whole process was actively unhelpful. Honestly more helpful for our adversaries than for us.
I’m not familiar with the Claude Code subscription, but with Codex I’m able to use millions of tokens per day on the $200/mo plan. My rough estimate was that if I were API billing, it would cost about $50/day, or $1200/mo. So either the API has a 6x profit margin on inference, the subscription is a loss leader, or they just rely on most people not to go anywhere near the usage caps.
For small personal projects it’s great value for money. Cheapest subscription was like 3$ during new years, token quota is acceptable to me (my guess it’s about 50-100M tokens per 5h)
Dunno how it would be with big projects, but with “personal project” things it feels to me that GLM-4.7 is 80-90% of Claude Opus 4.5. Just a tiny bit of more hand holding for GLM.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
> CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.
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