Na, it’s the people. Money attracts people who want money. It’s very hard to argue consistently for quality and ethics against these guys without something slipping through, and once that happens it’s impossible to argue to the business that they should forego a revenue source for ethics reasons. They only have to be convincing once, good engineers have to be convincing every time.

> Money attracts people who want money.

Yes.

I think the future lies in organisation's bound by ties other that money

In my home town there is an example: Kai Tahu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C4%81i_Tahu#Trading_enterpr...)

Family based. Start with $170M in the 1990s and now worth billions

The basically aquire and never divest.

In that case, why not allow European farmers to follow the same relaxed farming standards?

Because these pesticides might be harmful for European workers, working on these farms, or the ecosystem surrounding it?

Saying "Look we don't want any of these pesticides in the final product delivered to us" is easier in negotiations than forcing them to accept all EU Regulations regarding farming for Mercosur

Well that's great for the EU consumer, but citizens have interests beyond those of mere consumers, and this doesn't help put their farmers on equal footing.

I don’t know why you are being downvoted, any small business owner would be mightily annoyed if they had to follow standards that free trade imports do not have to follow. European farming has extremely stringent limits and requirements for food production that are expensive to follow, and not shared with the countries that the deal is being done with.

It would have to be significantly better than the competition for me to use a Google product.

Everyone’s all about OpenAI v Google, meanwhile i spend 99% of my day with Claude.

It’s less about it having to be a Google product personally, it just needs to be better, which outside of image editing in Gemini pro 3 image, it is not.

The only thing I'm aware of is that they drastically increased limits between Christmas and new years day. Message might have even said unlimited, I don't recall precisely.

Okay, he says they drastically (though temporarily) increased limits after surprising users with reduced limits that generated a strong reaction. This is the definition of hearsay though.

This is lowest in the past year or so, not the lowest since say ‘08.

Nor January, 1930.

This economy is in a bad and worsening state. But it definitely can get a whole lot worse.

As a long time European I never thought I’d come to see the sense of American ways, but having lived here now for a couple of years, it actually is easier for it to just be straight up 8.5 x 11 rather that a ratio that includes a square root.

It's an interesting tiny trade-off.

Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.

Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.

Many, many people want to double or halve documents.

Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.

I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).

I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.

Sorry, I should have specified "and have it look perfect".

People do that all the time with US letter paper, print two to a sheet, you just end up with slightly wonky margins and usually everything being more like 40-45% the size it would be doubling up A4 paper. That use case isn't really hindered.

You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.

Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.

Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.

That's not a difference between ANSI and ISO paper sizes.

ANSI A (US letter) is a half sheet of ANSI B (ledger/tabloid) is a half sheet of C is a half sheet of D is a half sheet of E. When producing the paper, there is no waste of material or time, its the same process just starting with a slightly differently sized starting sheet (hypothetically; I am assuming that paper production has advanced beyond shaking screens of the largest handleable size by hand).

The difference is that ANSI A, C and E have aspect ratios of 17/22 (0.77) and ANSI B & D have aspect ratios of 11/17 (0.65), while all ISO sizes have aspect ratios of 1/sqrt(2) (0.71).

The waste comes in when scaling between adjacent sizes.

Going from A4 to A3, you can enlarge a document to 141% of the original size, and the margins will match.

Going from US letter to tabloid (ANSI A to B), the width of the paper is 129% larger and the height is 154% larger, so you can only enlarge your document to 129% the original size, and you have larger vertical margins, which is waste.

(But if you double it, from A to C, the problem goes away, because the aspect ratio is the same; so you can produce posters of multiple sizes, just not on every ANSI paper size at once.)

Oh, you're talking about books, not sheets? My reply is probably all wrong, sorry.

So, regarding books, why do you think the methods of printing books varies based on the size of the printing sheets?

Regardless of the size of your printing sheet, you choose a page size that's based on dividing your printing sheet in half N number of times, typeset your document to that page size (which you can't even skip for ISO paper sizes, because you pick your font size independent of the paper sizes), print 2^N pages per printing sheet in a particular pattern, fold and/or cut the sheet up, and bind.

There's no difference in waste or time regardless of your paper size choices, unless you do something silly or artistic, like choosing to print a square book or some shape not derived from halving your paper size.

I've been working with paper sizes a lot for the last year, and I've rarely thought about the square root of two ratio and when I've, it has been just to amuse myself. However, knowing that to get an A5 piece of paper I just need to cut/fold in half an A4, and that I can get to A3 and A2 by adding A4s, has been really useful. If I were in USA, didn't have that, and instead would have to install yet another new size system in my head[^1], I would despair.

[^1]: This is fun! https://papersizes.io/us/

What bothers me mostly about American papersizes (I’m also a European immigrant) is that the ratio is not consistent between sizes. So if I design a poster, but want a couple of letter sized printouts for some reason, I have to create a whole new design, rather then just shrink everything down. Otherwise the margins get all wonky.

One nice thing with Letter size is you can fit 80 columns of 10 dpi text with standard LaserJet margins. With A4 you have to squeeze the characters together slightly to make that fit.

All the more reason to self host some part of your life at least. If there’s a market, someone will figure out how to service it, but if everyone gives up totally then all we’ll have is massive, cold, immovable corporations holding all our data.

It has to be for research purposes or something. They own the whole system of trains and tunnels, so there’s got to be loads of ways they can easily implement to see if a train passes a particular point.

It might not be that hard to make your own version of this, maybe average HSL values for each square or something. How are the available tile colors stored?

If you’re relying on your system prompt for security, then you’re doing it wrong. I don’t really care who sees my system prompts, as I don’t see things like “be professional yet friendly” to be in any way compromising. The whole security issue comes in data access. If a user isn’t logged in then the RAG, MCP etc should not be able to add any additional information to the chat, and if they are logged in they should only be able to add what they are authorized to add.

Seeing a system prompt is like seeing the user instructions and labels on a regular html frame. There’s nothing being leaked. When I see someone focus on it, I think “MBA”, as it’s the kind of understanding of AI you get from “this is my perfect AI prompt” posts from LinkedIn.