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I never understood why any of the smartness had to be built into the TV in the first place. Sure, it's useful for the first year, and then the seriously underpowered hardware they installed into it will have trouble with just about anything.

I bought a Philips Ambilight OLED TV probably over 8 years now. Brilliant tv, great quality, I still see no reason to replace it at all. But its built in AndroidTV is garbage.


Because it’s extremely profitable for them to serve ads and sell PI. Kind of like how the airline industry makes more money off credit card shenanigans than actual plane tickets.

Not relevant to the discussion but to your comment, Freakonomics Radio claimed "airline industry makes more money off credit card shenanigans" was not true

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-ex...

WSJ and Wendover claim it is true.


> I never understood why any of the smartness had to be built into the TV in the first place.

Because technology got ever more complex. A TV of yore? That thing operated on (relatively) simple physics alone, at the cost of requiring an absurd amount of broadcast infrastructure to make sure a TV signal could be received across the country.

Modern TVs however... digital modulation schemes with a lot of signal processing wizardry allow TV reception with far less broadcast towers and far better quality. You got satellites and with these a myriad of control schemes (DiSEqC, Unicable, ...). You got Pay-TV that requires decryption. You got HDMI CEC to allow your TV to remote control your DVD player.

And all of that complexity requires firmware which means it can have bugs which means you need a firmware update capability and when you're at that point you can just go and slap something Linux on it and get all the apps for streaming services.


Because having the TV play from streaming apps out of the box is pretty useful.

The problem is we've not enforced any strong regulation against ads, downgrade rights or hack ability.

I don't need "better performance" from the system built into my TV I just need it to run Kodi.


I hear you. This is exactly the reason why I have a digital signage display rather than a Smart TV.

Similar boat - Panasonic glass fronted TV. Circa 2013. None of the smart works anymore.

1080p, but the picture far outstrips most other TVs I've owned to this day.

I have zero plans to change it, and it's usefulness has outlasted the Chromecast that's connected to it.

Yes, I put the first ads on Smart TVs. Apologies.


It's so you buy a new one every few years instead of keeping the same TV for a decade or two. Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

If that’s true, then why is capitalism still around? Should it have died out in a previous generation in which many products did last a lifetime?

It did. We are currently on the fourth or more reinvention of capitalism. It's like ethernet - every time networking technology changes, the new one is called the same thing as the old one. The current fiber-optic switched Ethernet has absolutely nothing in common with the original vampire-tapped coax with media attachment units clamped onto the cable and a serial-port-looking AUI interface running down from the ceiling to the computer. Same for capitalism.

> Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

This is totally backwards; capitalism would do fine in such an environment (in the same way that evolution does fine in an environment where organisms live more than just a few seconds; the whole reason we have the notion of a "lifetime" is that our germ line comes from a long line of ancestral DNA that made organisms that outlasted their competition.)

Individual companies might have to hustle to innovate or die, but that too is good for capitalism.


Whoa!

I think maybe I stepped on somebody's agenda?

Both capitalism and evolution depend on the fact that over time, on average, less fit organisms/organizations are displaced by better alternatives. You may not like that, but down-voting anyone who points it out doesn't make it any less true.


I use MCPs all the time, but just like in your case: they're my own MCP servers.

They do exactly what I want and how I want it. They expose just the information and the features I want the LLM to have. And just like in your case, it combines multiple sources of information into 1 response.


It is a bit weird. As someone from Belgium (we also use our own variety of Azerty) you are very frequently reminded that you're on a weird keyboard. At least for someone who games, you wouldn't make ZQSD the default. It's the first thing you do in every game, change WASD to ZQSD

Another Belgian here, the first thing I did when I started working is switch to International English keyboards. Some employers wanted me to use local keyboards but I always managed to convince them to let me get another one in the end.

So including me, you're like the fourth person in this section to get it on the second turn. That's peculiar.


What the hell, same here. My initial guess was "CELLO", from there on I had 32 other possible words and somehow I got the right one?


> The individual plans are heavily subsidized

Not this again. There is not a single shred of evidence for this. In fact multiple times this year alone, people from Anthropic have said that inference and deployed models have positive margins. The big bucks are always being spent on training the next model.


It costs $10B+ a quarter just to train?

It's a simple fact that paying enterprise token rates would cost many times what the individual plans cost. It may well be that the enterprise income outweighs the cheaper tokens on the individual plans for net profit, but using the individual accounts as subsidy is a common tech industry tactic and what you said doesn't prove they're not doing it, either.

It's a little hard to believe they wouldn't be trying to slow the burn rate for an IPO if the inference were truly so profitable. And i find anything they say a little hard to believe all the time anyway (though admittedly they're a lot more trustworthy than OAI)


I agree the API prices are profitable (or at least break even) on an operational basis.

I don't think that means the subscriptions aren't subsidized though! I expect they are, at a carefully calibrated rate.

They want to maximize people trying them.

The real money is the enterprise plans which need a seat price plus API rates (unlike the Teams plans which are a pretty good deal).


> A week of using Codex more than Claude

Which Claude is this about? Sonnet, Opus, Fable? All totally different beasts.


Author of the article here.

Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people.

I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.


I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all.

People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all.

So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.


Meanwhile every time their servers go down, your caches go down with it and you can pay for your entire context again. This sucks even harder when you like to use parallel subagents.


It's been a while since the last reset. I think we're due one. Though I would prefer they just extend the +50% usage limit forever, it's been so long I can not imagine lossing a third of my current usage.


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