I got married at 20, Still married and it’s been over two decades. We had some good times, we’ve had some significant bad times too.

The biggest problem wasn’t “I changed” or “she changed” it was “kids are a massive stressor” in life and having two parents working full time sucks for everyone.

Given the current economic situation in North America, I probably wouldn’t have kids if we were young again now.

I love my kids, but they burn through every single dollar we can earn. Larger house so they can have separate rooms, more money. Daycare (for those ages), Money. Larger vehicle to fit them in, more money. More food, more money. Sports and activities, money. Birthdays and Christmas, Money.

We don’t even have the money to eat out regularly anymore, which is absolutely ridiculous because both my wife and I have significant incomes.

Union employment has dropped off a cliff the last few decades, we won’t be celebrating it much longer.

Americans putting their thanksgiving in November.

WTF is wrong with you guys. It’s 4 weeks to Christmas, you need to spread your food based holidays out better.

Easter, Independence Day, then fucking nothing until bam, Thanksgiving and Christmas back to back.

I don’t want to hear about Labour day being a feast, it’s a day off work to celebrate working. Stupid fucking holiday.

The costs of distribution aren’t so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)

You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That’s 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.

Covering operating costs doesn’t make sense as the threshold for this discussion though.

Operating costs would include things like computing costs for training new models and staffing costs for researchers, both of which would completely disappear in a marginal cost calculation for an existing model.

If we use Deepseek R1 as an example of a large high end model, you can run a 8-bit quantized version of the 600B+ parameter model on Vast.Ai for about $18 per hour, or even on AWS for like $50/hour. Those produce tokens fast enough that you can have quite a few users on it at the same time, or even automated processes running concurrently with users. Most medium sized businesses could likely generate more than $50 in benefit from it per running hour, especially since you can just shut it down at night and not even pay for that time.

You can just look at it from a much smaller perspective too. A small business could buy access to consumer GPU based systems and use them profitably with 30B or 120B parameter open source models for dollars per hour. I know this is possible, because I’m actively doing it.

lemmynsfw.com

You can also somewhat do this with other providers in some cases.

For example, Gmail has the +Alias feature where you can use a plus symbol on your existing username to make things unique. If you go to a website and use myusername+somecompany@gmail.com those messages will still go to your same inbox. You can then use rules to handle them differently. The only problem is that some signup systems won’t accept a + in an e-mail address.

Technically you can also do this with periods as well with Gmail, since:

myusername@gmail.com

my.username@gmail.com

my.user.name@gmail.com

Are all the same and go to one mailbox too. So you can use a particular variation with periods for “spam” signups, then filter those messages out.

The financial argument is pretty difficult to make.

You’re right in one sense, there is a bubble here and some investors/companies are going to lose a lot of money when they get beaten by competitors.

However, you’re also wrong in the sense that the marginal cost to run them is actually quite low, even with the hardware and electricity costs. The benefit doesn’t have to be that high to generate a positive ROI with such low marginal costs.

People are clearly using these tools more and more, even for commercial purposes when you’re paying per token and not some subsidized subscription, just check out the graphs on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings

You say “pro-AI” like there’s a group of random people needing to convince others to use the tools.

The general public tried them, and they’re using them pretty frequently now. Nobody is forcing people to use ChatGPT to figure out their Christmas shopping, but something like 40% of people have already or are planning on using it for that purpose this year. That’s from a recent poll by Leger.

If they weren’t at the very least perceived as adding value, people wouldn’t be using them.

I can say with 100% certainty that there are things I have used AI for that have saved me time and money.

The Anti-AI crowd may as well be the same people that were Anti-Internet 25 years ago.

Very common.

Who you know is often far more important than what you know.

Not common, he’s out of touch.

There are definitely people who have cabins at the lake or mountains, but even that is more wealthy people.

Budgeting and more probabilities/statistics are where I think it should be.

Both of those directly relate to improving your life.

This is one of those situations where nobody wins. They tried to do something nice, you didn’t like it, and both people ended up unhappy. Neither was being unreasonable.

Buying someone a gift of a new thing isn’t unreasonable. Even if you tend to like older/used things it’s still not an unreasonable concept to buy someone an upgrade.

Not liking a gift because the old one is fine is also not unreasonable. Especially if you have established this as a preference before.

The best option here is for the partner to realize that the goal of the gift is to make the other person happy, and if that didn’t work, figure out the path forward that does make them happy. (in this case returning the gift, and finding something else)

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work that way in reality. While the criminal laws are all public, there’s other rules and regulations that may not be.

At least where I’m from as an example, the building code is a paid product you have to purchase from the government. Yet if you build a home and don’t follow it, they will not allow you to live in it.

That one really bugs me. Anything the government produces in terms of rules or regulations should be available to the public for free.

When Gord Downie the lead singer of the Tragically Hip got terminal cancer, he went on tour. His final stop was Ontario, and they streamed it live on CBC (our national news network) to approximately 12 million viewers (Canada had a population of about 38 million)

He died less than a month later. Our prime minister released a tribute statement, and held a press conference over it. Our House of Commons observed a moment of silence. The Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL Hockey Team) brought down one of the retired numbers from the rafters during their next game, because Gord had mentioned him in 50-mission cap. Almost every radio station that plays music switched to Hip songs for the day. The Canadian press gave him newsmaker of the year for 2016, then again for 2017 because of how significant the reaction to his death was.

Dude was a legend both musically, and also in terms of the causes he championed. Especially the Indigenous reconciliation stuff.

Canada surprisingly has music that Americans rarely know about but are quite famous up here:

Kim Mitchell - Patio Lanterns

The Tragically Hip - Pretty much any of their songs, but Ahead by a Century and 50 Mission Cap are my favorites

54-40 - One Day In Your Life

The same answer people blame others all the time for almost everything. It’s far easier than taking accountability for your own actions.

Just a reminder that

https://www.wiktionary.org/

Exists, and is part of the Wikimedia foundation

That ain’t going to work out for them.

So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.