IIRC Amazon chose to reinvest early revenue to grow AWS intentionally, and the revenue curve eventually evened out and obviously surpassed expenses. The problem with the AI buildout is that there's not a ton of evidence that these companies are approaching profitability, we can't even know because they're private.

Amazon's incubation of AWS was methodical and transparent. OpenAI is saying that they don't expect to be profitable until at least 2030, with over a trillion dollars in committed spend before that point. It's the largest "trust me bro" play in human history.

There's quite a bit of research out there showing that application performance has a material impact on checkout conversion rate, so a single platform optimization potentially improves checkout for millions(?) of storefronts.

And the Ultra series have been marginally incremental, emphasis on marginally. They announced that Ultra series 1 software support is ending this year, but I just cannot justify buying another one of these at $800.

IANAL but my guess is that they're leaning heavily into the fact that the feature just generates transcripts and does not persist any audio recordings.

While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.

I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.

I agree that Rails team embracing either ViewComponent or Phlex would be a good thing for the framework, but I don't think that why the framework has dropped off the way it has. The industry was convinced long ago that JS and React were the future, and that's where all of the YouTubers/TikTok programming influencers went. How do you fight an echo chamber with orders of magnitude more influence and reach, regardless of what they say?

I still believe Ruby and Rails are great tools for small to medium sized teams in 2026, and the shift back to SSR and framework conventions (looking at you "Rules of React") very much validates what Rails has been doing all along. But it's not sexy, and sex sells in this industry just like any other.

A major hurricane hit my community in the US not too long ago, hundreds dead, a tremendous amount of the community destroyed. We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.

In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting.

It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture".

I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.

Absolutely reliably the best way to increase your chance of survival in a situation like this is to have good relations with your neighbours in a good community with high trust.

A large number of people working together will be much more likely to find solutions than a few isolated individuals. The isolated individuals may have disproportionately large survival resources, but probably not for long. If you are in the caring-is-sharing group you will have a much better chance than being in the me-me-bang-oh-shit group.

But there are a lot of people who fear community solidarity because it might lead to people asking questions about private jets and beach condos.

> We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.

Amateur ("ham") radio can be handy. If you don't want to go to the effort to get a radio, a receive-only AM/FM crank/solar radio can be handy to get news.

I don't see this being a blip, for multiple reasons.

A) the uptime matrix between Github, OpenAI, and Anthropic means that we've faced multiple entire days of not being able to ship org-wide due to our reliance on automated code review and other tooling. Every cloud service baked into our CI pipeline becomes a point of failure. We can't live without AI anymore, but it too often either directly or indirectly gets interferes with our ability to ship, and I don't see this improving any time soon.

B) Locally hosted AI has serious advantages with regard to PII/sensitive data management, and there's not much the frontier models can do to overcome this. There are so many things I want to build and let loose in a sensitive data environment but can't due to data governance around frontier models.

C) Anthropic and OpenAI cannot keep prices low forever. They're still burning insane amounts of cash and at some point, they're going to have to transition from growth mode to profit mode. They're already juicing their sales pipelines to the max with introductory pricing and other things to get people in the door. But those are all short-term online marketing plays.

Totally hear you on point a/b!

I think ultimately the folks with the purses won’t care enough about a for it to be taken seriously, even if it’s an engineering bottleneck.

B definitely has scope but still smaller than I’d expect. When I was an intern at yelp, I was migrating us off internal credit card management to Braintree/stripe. No one would have imagined outsourcing that in early 2000s. There’s a long tail of stuff that you can’t sent to a 3rd party; but for most use cases it’ll suffice.

For c, true; but this is expensive for everyone, including the Chinese model companies that are trying to undercut Open Ai / anthropic. In the nth degree, i think the field will bring the cost down to the place where it’s manageable (see the existence of the cheap Chinese models). The real question is the $$ spent on pushing the research forward at scale.

I first read this as "Girth is live" and thought that was a bold choice for a product name.