I'm an academic in the humanities with kids, currently in my late 30s. While having children certainly reduces the time and mental bandwidth available for purely intellectual pursuits, I’ve found it forces me to focus more sharply on what truly matters—both in life and in research.
Paradoxically, I feel more intellectually alive now than before. The recent advances in AI are transformative, and they’ve opened up unprecedented possibilities even for resource-constrained researchers like myself. This moment in time feels uniquely energizing and urgent, especially for the humanities.
Of course, having kids is a major responsibility, and in academia—where short-term contracts and financial insecurity are common—it can be daunting. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do both: raise a family and engage deeply with my field. But this is very personal terrain, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
To add something to conversation. For me, this mainly shows a strategy to keep users longer in chat conversations: linguistic design as an engagement device.
Why would OpenAI want users to be in longer conversations? It's not like they're showing ads. Users are either free or paying a fixed monthly fee. Having longer conversations just increases costs for OpenAI and reduces their profit. Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).
Amazon is primarily a logistics company, their website interface isn’t critical. Amazon already does referral deals and would likely be very happy to do something like that with OpenAI.
The “buy this” button would likely be more of a direct threat to businesses like Expedia or Skyscanner.
At the moment they're in the "get people used to us" phase still, reasonable rates, people get more than their money's worth out of the service, and as another commenter pointed out, ChatGPT is a household name unlike Grok or Gemini or the other competition thanks to being the first mover.
However, just like all the other disruptive services in the past years - I'm thinking of Netflix, Uber, etc - it's not a sustainable business yet. Once they've tweaked a few more things and the competition has run out of steam, they'll start updating their pricing, probably starting with rate limits and different plans depending on usage.
That said, I'm no economist or anything; Microsoft is also pushing their AI solution hard, and they have their tentacles in a lot of different things already, from consumer operating systems to Office to corporate email, and they're pushing AI in there hard. As is Google. And unlike OpenAI, both Microsoft and Google get the majority of their money from other sources, or if they're really running low, they can easily get billions from investors.
That is, while OpenAI has the first mover advantage, ther competitions have a longer financial breath.
(I don't actually know whether MS and Google use / licensed / pay OpenAI though)
> Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).
When the models reach a clear plateau where more training data doesn't improve it, yes, that would be the business model.
Right now, where training data is the most sought after asset for LLMs after they've exhausted ingesting the whole of the internet, books, videos, etc., the best model for them is to get people to supply the training data, give their thumbs up/down, and keep the data proprietary in their walled garden. No other LLM company will have this data, it's not publicly available, it's OpenAI's best chance on a moat (if that will ever exist for LLMs).
It could be as simple as something like, someone previously at Instagram decided to join OpenAI and turns out nobody stopped him. Or even, Sam liked the idea.
I ask it a question and it starts prompting me, trying to keep the convo going. At first my politeness tried to keep things going but now I just ignore it.
I didn't realize that it was proprietary, but that still doesn't really explain bundling an entire terminal emulator for something this simple...
(license.md should include the licenses for Ghostty and fzy - both MIT. Not sure that bundling their licenses in a file within Contents/Resources/ is sufficient.)
> explain bundling an entire terminal emulator for something this simple.
- The app takes 40MB disk space, and around 80MB RAM. So quite light.
- Ghostty is fast, and is needed to render the search result list quickly. It is much lighter than a whole browser engine (Electron apps).
- I wanted a single "drag and drop" install method for all skill levels.
- The app needs its own windows and bundle ID so that the global keyboard shortcut can focus the Hot Notes window without interacting with your other terminal windows.
> Not sure that bundling their licenses in a file within Contents/Resources/ is sufficient
You can also view the MIT and other licenses in the About menu.
Alfred, which lets me fuzzy search pretty much anything on my computer, comes in at a whopping 17.1 MB. 80 MB is OK, but standards have definitely been changed due to Electron.
I find the writer‘s glowing admiration for Spengler disturbing. He was an antidemocratic thinker, whose books
are pure speculative fiction. What the author calls „unorthodox“ methods, used to get a „holistic“ picture of historical developments, are (scientifically speaking) plain rubbish. Spengler wanted a dictator. He did not like Hitler, but was a Mussolini fanboy.
Yeah he never pretended otherwise. I'm not sure what your point is here - that there shouldn't be any antidemocratic thinkers? There should only exist people who like democracy?
I do not consider that disqualifying by itself. Plato and Socrates viewed democracy critically, too. I do agree, howeve, that the author paints an awfully one-sided picture of Spengler.
Switzerland comes to mind. Switzerland is not a direct democracy in its entirety but has many direct democracy elements, to such a degree that it is not a representative democracy either.
The original was destroyed by fire, but Mercedes-Benz made functional replicas. Here is a photo gallery with an engineer riding this thing (without a helmet, of course):
Because the article does not reflect the latest status of this story, here is an update: The bank has now successfully filed a complaint against the withdrawal of the license and is now again a bank, although under supervision:
"In the first instance, the Administrative Court temporarily suspended the immediate effectiveness of the European Central Bank's (ECB's) withdrawal of the former Meinl Bank's licence until a final decision has been reached [...]. The parent company of the bank, Far East, had lodged a complaint, according to the court ruling." Source: https://wien.orf.at/stories/3022615/ (Own translation, article is in German)
An additional data point: apparently, AAB (formerly Meinl) was in the process of returning their banking license anyway, as they have had massive compliance issues over the past decade, and just giving up on that part of the business (and instead just focusing on asset management) would be a reasonable thing to do.
I'm somewhat surprised the ECB didn't wait for this to happen. I guess they wanted to send a message, or something.
I'm an academic in the humanities with kids, currently in my late 30s. While having children certainly reduces the time and mental bandwidth available for purely intellectual pursuits, I’ve found it forces me to focus more sharply on what truly matters—both in life and in research.
Paradoxically, I feel more intellectually alive now than before. The recent advances in AI are transformative, and they’ve opened up unprecedented possibilities even for resource-constrained researchers like myself. This moment in time feels uniquely energizing and urgent, especially for the humanities.
Of course, having kids is a major responsibility, and in academia—where short-term contracts and financial insecurity are common—it can be daunting. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do both: raise a family and engage deeply with my field. But this is very personal terrain, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.