Doesn't 91.3(a) already give the PIC absolute authority to act regardless of whether there's a threat? Why invoke the FBI?
> Turning the plane around and landing is certainly in the realm of "reasonable".
Agreed. But doing it without the FBI threat would also be in the realm of reasonable. Which, it could be argued, means that making the FBI threat was unreasonable, or at least very close to it.
Retired manager, been in my share of tense meetings.
I appreciate it when someone recognizes that they're struggling with conflict and emotion, and lets me know that they know this. It's better to acknowledge the emotion and put it on the table as its own valid topic of discussion, than to tiptoe around it or try the "I'm sensing that you're dealing with some internal conflict" approach that risks embarrassing them or worsening it.
The choice is whether to acknowledge the emotion, not whether to have it.
If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play.
Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma.
If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers.
not sure that works as well when they don't own their API though; how much software is openrouter-only in a way that's not 5min of deepseek to patch the source for, or 15min of opus to patch the binary instead
I agree that technical lock-in wouldn't cause the consolidation. Instead, if it happened, it would be because of the network effects of the two-sided platform.
People could email cat photos and resumes. But Facebook and LinkedIn are where everyone already is, so that's what they use instead.
Everyone (except Anthropic) seems to be settling on the same API, so nobody "owns it" anymore. I expect there to be practically no software that's OpenRouter-only.
That sounds like a corollary of the Diamond Paradox. If there's any cost at all to price-shopping, then once you're at one store that sells the thing you want, it's usually not worth continuing to shop around.
Tangent: people do a lot of stressing out lately about which LLM they should be using for a certain task. I bet this advice applies there, too.
All my childhood Apple II 5 1/4" floppies have been mirrored, so I can visit those files in an emulator any time I want. But I'll miss the crazy amount of control the system had over the physical disk drive. Nibble counting, half tracks, quarter tracks, spiral tracks, tracks 35+, weak bits... it was like an adventure game built directly into the machine.
Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago the law changed to require a sesame-allergen notice on foods that had sesame. Some manufacturers starting adding sesame to foods that didn't need it, because they concluded that including the notice was easier than guaranteeing that their product was sesame-free. The intent of the law was to protect people with sesame allergies, but the result was fewer choices for them.
If a manufacturer is unwilling to guarantee/monitor the lack of sesame in their food, and you having a presumably severe sesame allergy… isn’t it correct not to be eating that food?
Like previously you trusted their lack of sesame based on vibes, which you probably shouldn’t have been doing, and now they’re explicitly telling you not to trust them on this; this seems to me strictly better. You’ve lost a choice that never really existed in the first place
An actually unintended consequence would be if they introduced sesame because they were going to have to put the label on it anyways
Some conformal coatings, which protect PCBs from dust and moisture, can emit ethyl acetate or butyl acetate if they weren't fully cured. The smell is sweet but absolutely revolting.
Some of that is because they want a single factory assembly line to produce one device that works in many locales. They build the rice cooker with the universal socket, then ship the right kind of cord when they package the product for a specific locale.
> Turning the plane around and landing is certainly in the realm of "reasonable".
Agreed. But doing it without the FBI threat would also be in the realm of reasonable. Which, it could be argued, means that making the FBI threat was unreasonable, or at least very close to it.
Beyond a certain point, even a PIC can cry wolf.
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