In small but statistically and financially significant numbers, yes, absolutely.

The bigger paradigm shift will be moving corporate users to per-token pricing, and that’s the one that will really kill Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe Oracle) if it doesn’t go how they need, but there are way more actual people spending money on AI than one might think… or hope.

This is what I do, except the jelly is on both sides of a third and toasted piece of bread.

I like listening to Ed Zitron stuff, though admittedly part of it is AI Doomer comfort food, but one of the drums he beats is that the spend is absolutely obscene, and they’re going to have to start dramatically dialing up the prices, and soon, to have any chance at all of converting to profitability.

From what I’ve seen, even people who like AI won’t pay for anywhere near as much as they’re using now while it’s free or flat rate.

When SNW started, I already knew Melanie Scrofano as Mrs. McMurray from Letterkenny. THAT took some time to work through, but kudos to her for making the character work.

“What’s worse than lies but not as bad as statistics?”

“DAMNED LIES, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

Just make sure your beard feels empowered to live their truth, and it’s all good. You do what you have to.

Or did you mean facial hair?

Anyway, I can’t grow a proper beard at all, and my plaid button-downs are generally cotton because I’ve always lived places where it’s hot AF most of the year, but I do very much like my Subaru. Had a '13 Outback for 9 years, and finally replaced it with a '22 Outback Wilderness, as possibly the dullest mid-life-crisis automobile purchase ever… it’s a little bit taller and looks a little cooler and has the turbo! I still have the ethereal butterflies center-console protector because I had to make a deal with my daughter to let me trade in the only car she’d ever seen daddy drive.

TIL. Bad for cholesterol, but maybe good for cancer and nerve issues. Coffee is fuckin’ weird.

I do basically the same thing. I just try to make sure it’s light or medium roast, use brown sugar and a bit of milk, and the second half goes in the fridge to become iced rocket fuel for the next day. Also means I get to alternate making and cleaning.

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

At this point, I think its most lasting cultural impact is everyone’s opinion on how little cultural impact it had.

Modi has not held a traditional solo press conference since taking office in 2014, and has rarely answered questions from journalists on his trips abroad.

If not then, when?

That’s a fair take, but for me it just went past the point of willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t find that meta-narrative compelling. It may well be a reason for me to re-evaluate it though, to decide if I think it’s poorly done versus something where what they wanted to do simply didn’t connect with me.

I recently finished Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Mizu’s increasingly powerful plot armor comes very close to ruining the whole show.

Anyways, I saw TPM 9 times in the first 48 hours.

My friends thought I was nuts for seeing it six times during its first and dollar-theater runs. There was so much interesting stuff to unpack…

…except the plot or acting (barring Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson).

part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.

I tried so hard, but poor Jake Lloyd was never given anything to work with, and Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson and any other actors who were hoping for some competent direction were hung out to dry too. Some of the worst line readings I’ve ever heard from professional actors.

Then there was JarJar… and watto… and the neimoidians… oh, and the utter lack of a compelling story…

Like you, though, I convinced myself that the bones were good, and then also that they were just getting warmed up and episode two would be a banger. Spoiler alert: it was not, though it had a few isolated moments as well.

It was so much worse than that. People had been waiting 16 years to see a proper cinematic continuation of Star Wars. There were some pulp novels, a couple of very weak kids cartoons, a pretty decent tabletop RPG with source materials, a few video games, and that was about it. For a franchise that was still iconic and incredibly popular despite lying fallow like that.

We got a more distilled version of George’s vision, and hoo-boy it just simply wasn’t very good. I still saw that movie six fuckin’ times (the last three at the dollar theater), but while there was plenty to digest and feed my nerdery, the story and acting just never got better.

Surely they were just getting warmed up though, and episode two would be better…

JJ Abrams, but yes. I will give TPM credit for production design and world building and for a few of the veteran actors’ performances.

TFA gave us a cast of characters you could do something with, and apart from sounding a bit too much like a Joss Whedon movie, performances that were at least not delivered by cardboard cutouts. I didn’t completely mind the plot being a rehash, but the contortions they went through to make the state of the galaxy exactly fit a rehash doomed the entire trilogy.