Sure have been quite a few heartwarming submarine stories lately trying to talk up all the good Palantir does for the world.

The underlying data sources are not free, weather data providers charge per API request. Stock weather apps built into the OS eat this cost for you, but third-party apps can't do that, they either have to show ads (ugh) or have a subscription.

Of the $2.08/month this works out to, I don't know how much the devs have left for themselves after the weather API and Apple's 30% cut, but I can't imagine it's much. I don't think you're getting ripped off here.

Google says they’ll spend $180 billion on capex in 2026, and I assume it will only increase annually from there. Seems like OpenAI is starting to lose momentum against the competition, especially since Google is still profitable and doesn’t need outside investment to keep the spending going.

You’re supposed to renew your cert way in advance of the expiration time. For 47-day certs the general expectation is that you renew them monthly, so in the worst case you’d need more than two weeks of CA outage before anything went wrong.

Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?

I've seen plenty of stuff from google and meta datacenters on the market.

Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago.

Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things.

Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.

Non-standard racks (Meta?) started showing up on the aftermarket around the time that Meta and a few other folks were the only ones using them.

Forget the details, as it's been a decade+, but everything gets junked at some point.

They're almost always stripped down, then sold as board+chassis only.

A priori I am very suspicious of any magic diet claims that bring up “inflammation”. I know that chronic inflammation seems to be a major problem among western diets, but that’s exactly why it has become this unfalsifiable catch-all explanation for anyone who wants to sell you something. The seed oil people also smoothly switched to “inflammation” once it became clear there was no correlation between seed oil intake and obesity rates.

If you’re using the AI answers on the top of Google search results to judge Gemini, you’re as ignorant as the journalists and researchers using ChatGPT-3.5 to make sweeping statements about “LLMs can never [X]” when X is currently being done in production just fine. The search results page uses a tiny flash model (it has to, at the scale it’s being used at) and has nothing to do with the capabilities of Gemini 3 Pro.

I’ve actively used Gemini Pro for two months for personal use, and Gemini is the choice of LLM provider at work for more than a year.

Their flagship product is child porn MechaHitler, it’s not exactly a surprise that safety is not a priority.

That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.

Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.

Not in practice.

This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?

Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them

Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.

Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?

Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?

Questions posed in bad faith can only be answered by the author.

Someone asked why the backlog doesn’t get finished. You answered that it does but the backlog just refills. So I asked where is the backlog evidence that the original backlog was completed.

I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.

I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.

Sounds more like busy work rather than something that makes money