"On Chrome and Safari, OPFS supports very large files, up to 60 % of disk space, which is more than sufficient to avoid the page cache on most typical systems, as even a small disk size of 64 GB would allow us to create a 38.4 GB OPFS file."
I am indeed surprised to learn that a random website can write a file that takes up 60% of my disk. Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers?
Not only that, but they don't even provide any visibility into what's being stored. Firefox developer tools doesn't even have OPFS browser functionality. IIRC I even saw some stuff about going out of the way to make it inaccessible by the user.
There's a whole trend with websites not uploading anything to their servers due to privacy and whatnot, where do you suppose the data is being saved for repeat visits...
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
> I think enough would refuse (clearly illegal) orders
The military executes clearly illegal orders to attack civilians on speedboats in the Pacific a couple of times a week. Not infrequently, they also kill the occupants when they are surrendering.
Worth noting that the period you indicate is a an example of an America largely deploying inventions from the UK (e.g. the steam engine, steam locomotive, etc.).
The latter part of the 20th century and first part of this century is a story more of the US driving invention and deploying those inventions.
The techniques needed to go from lesser power to leading power are different from those needed to advance as a leading power. For Lebron to stay on top, he has to do different things than any of us would need to do to get into the NBA.
Different circumstances & different goals require different strategies.
I read this totally differently. A startup nobody really knows is doing half a percent of Google on a commodity task?!? Google, which puts Gemini on billions of devices by default, without the user asking? Google, which is distributing Gemini to users who are unaware they are even using it?
Versus a startup that does not even have a login button on its homepage?
Unfortunately, the market doesn't generally let you buy Blackwells with "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free [1]". You need that thing we call Capital. But, they may certainly opt to have it written on their gravestone, as Google is (checks notes) continuing to put Gemini on billions of devices and doing quadrillions of tokens per month.
This is a bizarre comment for a couple of reasons.
First, obviously everyone involved understands that someone has to pay to provide a free service. Everyone involved also knows that this sometimes makes sense as a business strategy (I have not paid to ship anything from Amazon for close to two decades).
Second, OpenRouter's business model specifically does not require them to run all (any?) of the models available through the platform. Provider is one of the choices when you choose a model, and each provider can have separate pricing.
The link you posted shows only one provider, Crucible. That may/may not be affiliated with OpenRouter? Even assuming an affiliation, it's opaque who is subsidizing this usage. Is it OpenRouter or Crucible?
All of this is somewhat of a distraction. Even if someone gave search away for free (like Google), it would still be an accomplishment to get to half a percent of Google's volume. Or to sell half a percent of the volume of Android phones. Or whatever.
In the statement "we got half a percent of Google's marketshare with a model we're literally giving away for free" the term "we're" here refers to the conglomeration of "DeepSeek" (for making a model small enough to be capable of being hosted for free) and the model providers who do offer it for free (why they do this is... unknowable). It does not refer to OpenRouter, who are merely middlemen.
My original DeepSeek v4 Flash token counts spanned all providers of that model, both paid and free; I merely pointed out the free provider to substantiate a point that DeepSeek's product may be so bad that they could quite literally give it away and people would still prefer to pay (a lot) to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Why this is the case, I leave as a exercise to the reader; I'm just citing numbers and facts.
Not to mention, week on week more and more tokens are being processed via OpenRouter. [0]. The number keeps going up, with no end in sight in my opinion, if the China models continue offering cheaper inference, whilst tailing behind not too far, the line will keep going up.
OpenRouter is not the only "router" type AI company. More fixed providers like OpenCode and commandcode are offering subscription services on open/china models, likely consuming billions of tokens each. Who know how many tokens are being process directly against Deekseek and Kimi's APIs.
Good correction, thanks. For completeness, that’s dividends on stocks, but not dividends on bonds, which are treated like interest.
In any case, dividends are taxable in the current year, and unrealized stock gains are not.
In case the difference doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider that if you die without selling the stocks, your heirs inherit them at the prevailing price, and no one ever pays tax on the gain they made between when you bought them and when you died.
Rich people who need neither dividend cash or stock sales to pay living expenses prefer not to get dividends so they can pay very little tax.
This enormous loophole for the rich brought to you by your US representatives.
Correct. That's part of the tax efficiency, the whole point for some investors.
Even if you set your dividends to automatically reinvest via a DRIP program, you still pay taxes on dividends in the year in which they are issued. This reduces the effect of compounding.
> plus the stock
The key point in a buyback is that each share of stock becomes worth more because the company is divided into fewer units. So each share is worth more than it would be had the case instead been used to pay dividends.
Let's say we own a company with 10 shares, I own one share, you own 4, and 5 are owned by others. Each share is worth $100 (to make it simple).
The company has $100 "to spare" - they could pay a dividend (give me $10, you $40, $50 for "the others") - but they'd be taxed on the income they made to be able to pay this, and you and I would be taxed receiving the dividend. We'd net out maybe $8, maybe $7 per share.
Or they could buy my share for $100, and retire it. I get the $100 (and pay capital gains tax unless it was in an IRA or otherwise not an issue). You now own 4 shares of a 9 share company, which is worth the same, but your percentage is a big bigger now.
Getting rid of the double taxation of dividends would likely slow down or end most buybacks; the main advantage is that they let the shareholders decide if/when they take the tax hit.
> If it’s gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources?
You might have an easier time with some numbers.
A corporation called Hluska trades at a market cap of $100. Hluska has issued 100 shares. Now, let’s say that Hluska burns ten shares and the market cap stays the same. Now it trades at a market cap of $100 but it has 90 shares outstanding.
Stock holders will only lose stock if they sell stock. In that case, they will be taxed at a capital gains rate which is generally lower than the tax rate on income from dividends. So it’s a way to return capital to shareholders who want out in a tax effective way.
If it doesn’t work, it’s a waste of resources. Let’s go back to our example, that idiot Hluska was trading at $100 with 100 shares outstanding, burned 10 and now trades at a market cap of $80. In that case, yeah, it’s a waste of resources because each individual stock is worth less money post burn. But that doesn’t really happen very often. A better capitalized company than Hluska with its soaring $100 market cap should be able to withstand a burn event without crushing market cap by 20%.
If you look at all the tech companies doing buybacks, usually the shares created for employee RSUs matches or exceeds the shares retired from buybacks.
Not in all cases, but many
Which is why GAAP earnings matter and not free cash flow
I think the analog is the actions around the storage.
DropBox & Box have both moved in this direction, but perhaps not aggressively enough? I'm thinking in particular about e-signing, where DocuSign has a market cap roughly equal to the sum of DropBox & Box. Both have e-sign products; I am fairly certain that I have never encountered either in the wild despite routinely being sent other e-sign links.
AI is perhaps another emerging opportunity. Instead of uploading documents to a dumb pipe, let me have the pipe do things to them. Dumb, simple example would be I can put PDFs in a folder and after a one-time setup, I can share an API link that lets my users extract specified data from those PDFs via secure JSON API. Or simple CMS instead of WordPress. Or analyze documents flowing through a folder for x, y, z anomalies and alert me.
1. Much of US policy toward science is backlash to Covid vaccinations. Being anti-Science is a way of preventing Science from inflicting itself on the populace again in the future.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected.
And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
Do you imply that last 30 years lacked significant science progress? Even if I ignore the tech ones (simpler to associate with the US), there were quite some impressive progress I heard of in other fields (in which US was significantly involved).
They were briefly SOTA on some benchmarks, although there were suggestions there might have been some massaging of the results since real world usage showed lackluster performance compared to the benchmarks.
"On Chrome and Safari, OPFS supports very large files, up to 60 % of disk space, which is more than sufficient to avoid the page cache on most typical systems, as even a small disk size of 64 GB would allow us to create a 38.4 GB OPFS file."
I am indeed surprised to learn that a random website can write a file that takes up 60% of my disk. Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers?
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