I was dumb enough when I was 11 to sign up for Adsense under my Mom’s name and put it on a php-based meme sharing site I made that my fellow 5th graders used.
Anyway, I noticed I could make a couple dollars a week. So I had my friends sit there and spam load the site. Made about 80$ until Google banned me (my mom) for life from Adsense
I have a VERY similar story about me adding AdSense to a Club Penguin hacks, tips, and tricks blog.
But I think I need to correct you -- what you and I did wasn't dumb at all. It was quite innovative for our pre-teen brains. This was my first exposure to running a business and setting up a team and thinking like an entrepreneur. Just imagine all the ice cream and Pokémon cards we could have bought if it had worked...
>But he has since been wrong about a great many things.
Basically summarizes any billionaire. Society still seems to drink the kool-aid of billionaires. People think a guy has a billion dollars because he’s a genius. In all cases it was some small amount of intelligence with a whole lot of luck.
My hope is in the decades to come we wake up to the fact these guys are lucky wealth-hoarders and they get too much time on every podcast you can think of.
Had a buddy who works at a prestigious university teaching film history tell me their big boss is basically forcing all classes including his ones on film history to incorporate AI education in some way. So silly.
This assumes that these companies aren't going to use smaller providers or hosting models themselves. THAT is the great big assumption going into all the Big AI funding.
I think it's a very, very bad assumption. After trying GLM-5 and Qwen3 on Ollama Cloud, not only were they faster than OpenAI's offerings (by a huge amount) it was just as good if not better at doing what I asked of it.
Claude Code is still superior to anything else but GLM-5 and Qwen3 are easily just as good as GPT-5.X (for coding).
Oh, I read it as the number of subscribers would triple, but you're suggesting the price will?
That makes a little more sense, because the number of subscribers are so low that tripling won't really make much difference in terms of turning a profit.
Its simply not going to happen. People like Nadella call it 'tacit knowledge' - the reality is the work people do is much broader than what is producible by LLMs alone. Without the human, there is no work done. Unlike classic machinery, LLMs are not comparable in that you cant simply reduce labour input by X and be fine. Sure in the short term the consequences will not show up, but in the long term they will.
Altman and co. get down on their knees and pray that proposition is only transitory in the short run.
LLMs wont disappear, but they wont be large profit generators either. Especially not so whilst there is fierce competition and every dollar of profit is re-invested. The value of an asset is derived upon its potential cash return, net of reinvestment, taxes et al.
Altman is hoping to survive long enough to finance R&D to figure out how to encode the entirety of what humans do, to be able to come good on the asinine aspirations he has put forth that justify its valuation. But it will end in disaster.
You haven't put forward a compelling argument besides fluff.
This is so surface level and boring.
Most of you aren't really clued up on subject areas like Finance to talk about this stuff frankly. As long as a firm is beating its cost of capital, it will reinvest money to generate more growth. What does that mean? Oh. Hiring more people.
> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives.
This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products.
Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.
God forbid people have a sense of their potential compensation before spending hours applying to a job! Good for Colorado passing that law. Shame on Digital Ocean for skirting around it.
I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?
It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.
Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.
>Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
Explain this more? Let's assume you're Nate Silver and predict the 50 state outcome perfectly - you have a 50% in the class, so failing? Then the only way to "win" is to wager 50 points on the stock market (doesn't matter which way it goes). Wagering less makes no sense, because you start at 50 and so going "up" 25 to 75% protects nothing as the downside is still way below failing.
It sounds like a game theory question - you should be able to get 40 points on the states easy enough even if you get the toss-up ones wrong, and then gamble the full total on the stock market (which in general should go up, the market loves certainty and hates uncertainty).
It was exactly a game theory question, and a perfect exercise in real world betting markets. You’ll never have the most information and you’ll never be the biggest fish.
I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.
Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.
Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.
Other things we learned:
- The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today.
- Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008.
- Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.
My friend's idiot loser husband got addicted to sports betting and day trading and lost their life savings and even spent kids college funds. She found out because he had started to apply for a home equity loan to catch up on some of his debts and they called her to verify some paperwork.
The only reason I found out was because she had a HUGE obnoxious gorgeous flower arrangement delivered to her at work and I asked her what they were for and she started crying and then told me they were his apology flowers - that he put on her credit card!
She doesn't want to divorce because their kids but I'm encouraging her to think about protecting herself and I sent her some attorney recommendation links. He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik. Sad situation.
> He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik
It is totally favorable, because he is going to make more debt. And if she does not divorce, she will be responsible for that debt. Moreover, money she earns after divorce are her except for the part of debt she is already responsible for. Right now, they are theirs, he has equal access to them and she is half responsible for his current and future debts.
> the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.
I was in college at the time and doing some odd freelance jobs to make some money. Unbeknownst to my clients I was writing their website backends in swift, using build packs on heroku to get them hosted.
It was a fun time for me and I love swift but I will admit last year I went ahead and rewrote an entire one of those sites in good ol typescript. I love swift but anything outside of the Apple ecosystem with it just seems like it hasn’t hit critical mass yet.
Anyway, I noticed I could make a couple dollars a week. So I had my friends sit there and spam load the site. Made about 80$ until Google banned me (my mom) for life from Adsense
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