There's no need to make it illegal: it doesn't happen because the companies with the RAM to sell are motivated by profit. The problem is that OpenAI has plenty of money to buy RAM. They raised $40 billion in April.
Emacs, and as soon as I spawn it, I send the shell process EOF, which is my way of saying, "I'm interested in seeing what you write on your stdout, but have no interest in conducting a dialog with you".
>the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.
Stanford can make the student pay any costs of the accommodation if Stanford wants to push back on the student. E.g., if the student requests extra time on tests, Stanford can estimate the total cost of employing the proctor and bill that (amortized of course over the amount of extra time).
But yeah, it is kind of excessive how much special treatment a person can get in US society just by being rich enough to afford a doctor who will sign whatever letters the person needs (and being shameless enough to request the letters). Another example is apartment buildings with a strict policy of no dogs. With a doctor's letter, the pet dog becomes a medically-necessary emotional-support animal, which the landlord must allow per the same ADA discussed in the OP.
I don’t think the ADA allows charging people with disabilities extra. For example, if you claim you have a service dog, then you are legally not allowed to be charged pet fees.
Most students going to Stanford have all the resources in the world necessary to get probably-mostly-correct diagnoses of conditions that the university chooses to label as a disability. Not all of those disabilities mean extra time on tests or whatever you think is so bad. Most of the students probably don’t need or use those accommodations.
But the question here is, why are these articles being written? This isn’t a crisis. These minor accommodations (which again, most eligible students do not actually pursue) are not crippling the youth of this nation. Reactionary attention-seekers who are looking for clicks write this trash to rile people up for no reason. They don’t explain what’s really going on, it instead they dig up some number that will SHOCK you, and pretend that it means something.
There’s lots to complain about US higher ed. Disagreements over what accommodations to offer to students with ADHD or whatever should not make anyone’s top ten list.
Not enough to live on. In 2022, the payment was $3,284 per eligible resident, and the 2023 payment was $1,312. I could not easily find the 2024 figure. This is is paid once a year, not monthly.
Also - importantly - it is not an income tax revenue funded payment. It is a distribution of proceeds from a productive business.
Think of it this way: the entire world pays Alaska residents for the use of their oil, as a sort of tax that is worked into every energy intensive step of industry or petroleum-derived material.
Alaska's oil is only ~1% of world oil production, but its population is approximately 0.01% of world population, so Alaska residents get approximately 100x what the global per capita oil dividend would be. Oil industry is approximately 2.5% of global GDP. Stack all these multipliers together and we could expect a global per-capita total-GDP dividend of between $525 - $1325 per person per year. Exceeding this (as we did with PPP "loans" during COVID) would have compounding economic effects that lead to hyperinflation.
This is napkin math with spherical cow assumptions. Other factors would further limit UBI dividends to be less than this. But it shows that with existing national dividend systems as model, we can't even get within an order of magnitude of the low end of what UBI proponents are advocating.
I'm familiar with it. My point is that one needn't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good: a UBI does not have to offer a full living income to be worth doing.
You could say the same thing about all Microsoft products then. How many full time developers does it take to support Windows 11 when Linux is available, SqlServer when Postgres is available, Office when LibreOffice exists?
And so on all under licenses that allows Microsoft do whatever it wants with?
They should be embarrassed to do better, not spin it into a “wise business move” aka transfer that money into executive bonuses.
Microsoft gets a lot of its revenue from the sale of licenses and subscriptions for Windows and Office. An unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions tells me that the segments responsible for those two softwares have revenue of about $13 and about 20 billion per quarter respectively.
In contrast, basically no one derives any significant revenue from the sale of licenses or subscriptions for web browsers. As long as Microsoft can modify Chromium to have Microsoft's branding, to nag the user into using Microsoft Copilot and to direct search queries to Bing instead of Google Search, why should Microsoft care about web browsers?
It gets worse. Any browser Microsoft offers needs to work well on almost any web site. These web sites (of which there are 100s of 1000s) in turn are maintained by developers (hi, web devs!) that tend to be eager to embrace any new technology Google puts into Chrome, with the result that Microsoft must responding by putting the same technological capabilities into its own web browser. Note that the same does not hold for Windows: there is no competitor to Microsoft offering a competitor to Windows that is constantly inducing the maintainers of Windows applications to embrace new technologies, requiring Microsoft to incur the expense of applying engineering pressure to Windows to keep up. This suggests to me that maintaining Windows is actually significantly cheaper than it would be to maintain an independent mainstream browser. An independent mainstream browser is probably the most expensive category of software to create and to maintain excepting only foundational AI models.
"Independent" here means "not a fork of Chromium or Firefox". "Mainstream" means "capable of correctly rendering the vast majority of web sites a typical person might want to visit".
They did incur that cost… for decades. They were in a position where their customers were literally forced to use their product and they still couldn’t create something people wanted to use.
It is very misleading or outright perverse to write "they were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days" when there was no public network that could be used to the deliver the service. (There were wide-area networks, but each one was used by a single organization and possibly a few of its most important customers and suppliers, hence the qualifier "public" above.)
But anyways, my question to you is, was there any software that IBM charged money for as opposed to providing the software at no additional cost with the purchase or rental of a computer?
I do know that no one sold software software (i.e., commercial off-the-shelf software) in the 1960s: the legal framework that allowed software owners to bring lawsuits for copyright violations appeared in the early 1980s.
There was an organization named SHARE composed of customers of IBM whereby one customer could obtain software written by other other customers (much like the open-source ecosystem) but I don't recall money ever changing hands for any of this software except a very minimal fee (orders of magnitude lower than the rental or purchase price of a System/360, which started at about $660,000 in 2025 dollars).
Also, IIUC most owners or renters of a System/360 had to employ programmers to adapt the software IBM provided. There is software with that quality these days, too (.e.g, ERP software for large enterprises) but no one calls that a software as a service.
The leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind all hope to create models that are much more powerful than the ones they have now.
A large portion of the many tens of billions of dollars they have at their disposal (OpenAI alone raised 40 billion in April) is probably going toward this ambition—basically a huge science experiment. For example, when an AI lab offers an individual researcher a $250 million pay package, it can only be because they hope that the researcher can help them with something very ambitious: there's no need to pay that much for a single employee to help them reduce the costs of serving the paying customers they have now.
The point is that you can be right that Anthropic is making money on the marginal new user of Claude, but Anthropic's investors might still get soaked if the huge science experiment does not bear fruit.
> their investors might still take a bath if the very-ambitious aspect of their operations do not bear fruit
Not really. If the technology stalls where it is, AI still have a sizable chunk of the dollars previously paid to coders, transcribers, translators and the like.
Box fans are a fire hazard when used continuously to pull air through filtration media. They are not designed for that.
Computer cooling fans also might not have been designed to handle that much "load", but in the case of the box fan, we have an actual report of someone who almost burned down the house:
Yeah, it's just as likely they had it plugged in improperly or the wires were fraying or something. Might as well say it was spontaneous combustion.
I had a dishwasher catch fire because the installers didn't properly connect the power cable. That doesn't mean dishwashers are inherently a fire hazard.
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