their pricing page is here.
I’m paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there’s also a 5 USD/month tier but I’m sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.
so it’s not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I’m happy to pay it because it’s a business model that I would like to see succeed.
I’ve been using Kagi for ~2 months, after a friend gave me a similar invite code. this news from Google affirmed my decision to pay for Kagi once the 3-month trial is over, instead of going back to Google.
Tay any% speedrun
although I suppose “only one day after launch” doesn’t break the record:
It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
but it’s great that the billionaire owner of the LA Times is trying. this sort of innovation is why billionaires like him are so important.
someone with Photoshop skills, please take that “see someone shoplifting food? no you didn’t” meme and update it for 2025
a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax
to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:
you’re paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.
and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn’t cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.
even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.
at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin’s current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.
In addition to the sexual harassment finding that led to his resignation
yet another data point that “cancel culture” doesn’t really exist. people who are “canceled” simply spend a few years out of the public eye, and then return as if nothing ever happened.
the allegations are so numerous that Cuomo’s main wikipedia page can’t cover them all, it links to a separate Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment allegations page:
The entire New York congressional delegation, including New York’s two United States Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and over 120 New York State legislators called for Cuomo’s resignation, as did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President and Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City. President Joe Biden stated his support for Attorney General James’s independent investigation; he later called on Cuomo to resign after the investigatory report was released. On August 10, Cuomo announced that he would step down from office in 14 days, making his resignation effective on August 24.
On January 4, 2022, Albany County District Attorney David Soares dropped a criminal complaint against Cuomo and also announced that Cuomo would not face any other charges related to other groping allegations, citing lack of evidence. Three days later, a judge dropped the criminal charge against Cuomo. On January 31, 2022, the last of five criminal cases that had been pursued against Cuomo were dismissed.
a lesson that I would really like the legal system to learn (including DAs like David Soares who is supposedly a Democrat) is that if an elected official commits crimes, and then as a result of those crimes is forced to resign, or loses re-election, or is impeached and removed from office, that is not an excuse to say “well, surely he’s suffered enough, it would be kicking him while he’s down to continue prosecuting him for the crimes he committed”
(see also: Ford pardoning Nixon, Donald Trump, the former mayor here in Seattle, and so on)
here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant
judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:
Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line
Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value
Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws
here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.
right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.
around 15 minutes in, the host asks:
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?
Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?
and Nadella responds:
Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?
I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.
When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.
that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.
also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:
A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Through Scale’s data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.
As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE’s research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity’s Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems’ expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE’s data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.
did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?
One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles
Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles
…
About 3 out of 100 people who get two doses of MMR vaccine will get measles if exposed to the virus. However, they are more likely to have a milder illness, and are also less likely to spread the disease to other people.
if you have your vaccination records, it’d be good to double-check to make sure that you got both doses. if you missed the 2nd dose, or are missing the records and unsure, you can get a booster at any pharmacy, usually without an appointment, and covered 100% by insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
the vaccine being “only” 97% effective is one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, especially with a virus like measles that is extremely infectious (R_0 of 12-18 - meaning without any vaccines, 1 infected person would on average spread it to more than a dozen other people)
Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.
congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.
but also:
HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.
this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)
definitely good news, although there’s a terrifying aspect of it.
from the article, about Kim Davis’s attorney:
SCOTUS can’t just randomly issue a press release that says “oh btw Obergefell v. Hodges is overturned”. they need a case to be teed up for them in order to do that. with the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade for example, the Supreme Court decision came down in 2022, but it was regarding a Mississippi law that was passed in 2018. that law was a 15-week abortion ban, which clearly violated Roe. the Mississippi legislature had zero reason to pass it other than to provide a case that could work its way up to the Supreme Court and give them an excuse to ban abortion.
Staver is the founder of a group of shitbags who call themselves the “Liberty Counsel”. the writing is on the wall that the Christofascists are gunning for marriage equality, and this case is one of several that give them a possible avenue with which to do it.