The first AI company to cram their product full of ads will get roasted over the coals for it. My guess is they're all playing chicken and waiting to be the second to do it. I'd also guess that they're all already thinking about ways to introduce it that will generate the least backlash.
Google could do it in 2000 because their search was legitimately so much better, and also because their ads were comparatively more relevant and unobtrusive than modern ads. In comparison, LLMs are relatively similar in performance unless you're picky enough that you're probably already paying and thus wouldn't be in the ad-supported tier.
That said, I wonder if ads are even lucrative enough to move the needle relative to how much training costs are increasing with each generation.
I agree that that's what it would take, but compute would need to get very cheap for it to be feasible to keep models running locally. That's an awful lot of memory to have just sitting with the model running in it.
I'm sure Europe would in theory prefer to be unified against Iran (for the reasons you mention, namely Russia), but the way this war was started was just too colossally stupid. It (entirely predictably) jacked up oil prices, so Iran is making more money on their exports, and Russian sanctions are being lifted. The immediate consequences of this war are directly funding our (both the US's and EU's) adversaries. I don't think fear of Iranian (para)military retaliation is much of a factor, but certainly not the main one.
There was no way you go to war with Iran without oil prices rising and the straits closing temporarily. So you had a choice: be permanently deterred or take action and bear the pain. Sure Europe would like to avoid that pain for obvious reasons, but it's going to be a long-term gain in the form of a weakened Iran and a strengthened Europe. If you feel Iran and Russia are strengthened by this you're over-focusing on one key thing: oil revenue, when Iran is weakened by countless other things and Russia is weakened having their entire middle eastern strategic allies including the gulf players they've pandered up to now hostile.
> There was no way you go to war with Iran without oil prices rising and the straits closing temporarily
Agreed, but
> but it's going to be a long-term gain in the form of a weakened Iran and a strengthened Europe
I don't think this is a sure thing at all.
The fact is that the US and Israel kicked a hornets nest that everyone is stuck in the room with, and everyone else in that room is understandably upset. And (to belabor the metaphor) the only ones who those hornets were eyeing had themselves been causing trouble for the past 80 years.
To continue the metaphor, there are some that are comfortable having a hornet's nest in their bedroom and others that will take the initiative to remove it
How is Iran weakened, in what sense? It suffered economic damage and casualties for sure, but I don't think there is anything it cannot recover from. It's just a pure destructive rage from US side without thinking of any long-term strategic results.
They have put all of their resources into military technology over the last 30 years and now much of that is destroyed or degraded. They have lost their deterrence and the lawn will continue to be mowed if they do decide to attempt to rebuild it. Because the people resent the regime it's just a matter of time before things change on the ground and when that does happen assistance and economic opportunities will emerge. But until then Iran will be in this extremely degraded state
This is a silly claim; they're still sending missiles and drones all over the area, and the strait is functionally closed.
We spent twenty years trying to tame Afghanistan and it went right back to the Taliban within days of withdrawal from the area. Iran has a lot more capacity to bounce back than they did.
Before the war, the regime was facing the threat of imminent collapse. But if the war ends without regime change, they may use it as an excuse to eliminate organizers and other key opposition figures. If they have not already done so. If no other options exist, the regime will remain in power, despite the lack of popular support.
As for deterrent, Iran will probably stop being a significant threat to Israel. But cheap drones have changed the situation closer to Iran. The military power required to close the Strait and hobble the economies of the Gulf states is orders of magnitude smaller than the military power needed to stop it.
The US government were surprised that they closed the strait btw. Let’s not rewrite history to make this all sound planned and foreseen when it clearly was not.
Also currently Iran is looking stronger not weaker tbh. The Americans have really fucked it all up.
I have heard numerous people make this assertion when every single wargaming exercise has always predicted the closing of the straight. I don't understand where this is coming from.
When you say Iran is looking stronger I think you mean in some kind of relative expectation game in the media sense rather than a real hard power sense.. I would encourage you to look at the latter instead
Weakened Iran is not a given outcome. It's a possible outcome. As for Gulf players, the feel suckered by Trump now. The saudis are begging for Trump to finish the job exactly because they are afraid he won't.
I had heard that Iranian exports had increased. This [0] is the best source I can find commenting on their output either way, and it says they're exporting about 50% more. That part might be untrue, but the lack of reporting suggests that at worst that their output hasn't decreased. Whatever the change though, the price of oil has increased significantly, which makes them more money. So at present they're making anywhere from 50%-100% more money, depending on whether their exports have increased.
I clicked this link with the thought "I'm curious, but I don't think I really have strong opinions about fonts", and was almost immediately proven wrong with the revulsion I felt at Xanh Mono.
Though it turns out that VS Code default (Droid Sans Mono) is (to my eye) basically identical to my winner (Roboto Mono), so the exercise was mostly academic.
I had the same but I am thinking of updating to see if I can optimize my terminal a bit. Roboto has font weights, and probably has a better emoji pack, although that's just a guess -- maybe google doesn't tack on emojis by default.
I don't think it's winner-takes-all. Google is Google in 2026 because Lycos and AskJeeves were bad in comparison. The average user doesn't care whose LLM they're using because they're all close enough. It's hard to see past the bubble bursting, but I expect most people will use multiple of them depending on context (Copilot via the integration in windows, Gemini via Siri on their phone, etc), likely without paying.
And it's important to note that ICE and CBP don't need additional funding. They were overfunded with the last spending bill by about 10x their actual needs.
That's the reason why ICE and CBP agents are still collecting paychecks while the rest of DHS is not.
It's actually a bit silly that Republicans, the party of limited government, have been holding up funding the TSA and FEMA because an agency they already overspent on won't get additional dollars. Not very DOGE.
As I understand this advancement, this doesn't let you run bigger models, it lets you maintain more chat context. So Anthropic and OpenAI won't need as much hardware running inference to serve their users, but it doesn't do much to make bigger models work on smaller hardware.
Though I'm not an expert, maybe my understanding of the memory allocation is wrong.
Seems to me if the model and the kv cache are competing for the same pool of memory, then massively compressing the cache necessarily means more ram available for (if it fits) a larger model, no?
Yes, but the context is a comparatively smaller part of how much memory is used when running it locally for a single user, vs when running it on a server for public... serving.
My takeaway is almost the opposite. A company that has scaled to the point that they need 200 replicas of JSONata costing 300k/yr must be spending so much on compute that the difference is absolutely peanuts.
It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.
> I asked Claude...
There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research
Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.
Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.
Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.
So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.
I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.
There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.
If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.
And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18
It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years.
The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.
This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
Puberty only lasts a couple of years. First menstruation usually happens between ages 9 and 18 - that's a spread longer than the duration of puberty! Look at any puberty-age high school class and you'll find one kid who has basically finished puberty, while another has barely started.
In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.
I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
I had a brain injury when I was 12 that knocked my testosterone levels way down.
In my 20s this was discovered and I went on testosterone replacement. My hands are still the same size as my mom’s. My feet didn’t get back to the size they were before the accident. I didn’t regain the height I lost. God only knows what it did to my brain.
Maybe if you’re only on them a little bit you’d be fine, but the whole concept is bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.
Your anecdote is a bit of a tangent. Trans kids wouldn't be on blockers as long as your hormone levels were out of balance, and they generally want to avoid the changes which you bemoan the loss of.
But do you even find your life to be significantly harmed by your smallish stature? There are short people who never had brain injuries, and it's generally not such a concern that we feel the need to make them larger. Lots of them even wish they were taller.
And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).
I very much wish I was still (at least) 6 feet tall, yes. Luckily puberty hit me early and I developed "down there" quickly, otherwise that would also really bother me.
The point is that my wife has said she very well might have been confused and thought herself trans (at the time) when she very much is not. She liked to do boy things. She didn't want to be a woman. That's pretty much what the lines are.
Google could do it in 2000 because their search was legitimately so much better, and also because their ads were comparatively more relevant and unobtrusive than modern ads. In comparison, LLMs are relatively similar in performance unless you're picky enough that you're probably already paying and thus wouldn't be in the ad-supported tier.
That said, I wonder if ads are even lucrative enough to move the needle relative to how much training costs are increasing with each generation.
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