It wasn’t a horrible OS. It just broke XP’s “it runs on practically anything” before the hardware was really there. And 7 was, as we all know, the most perfect Windows has ever been. Windows 7 Media Center was a magnificent DVR and a great movie-playing box.
I loved windows 8.1. It was fast, lightweight, looked clean and modern. That weird start menu wasn't really a problem for me. Too bad it got dropped by hardware manufacturers like a hot potato as soon as the objectively inferior Windows 10 came out. But maybe that's good because it made me switch to Linux full time and I couldn't be happier with it.
Open source models apply pressures on the low end of the market. The paid models are so much better that they can charge based on value for enterprises.
I wouldn't call Kimi K2.6, GLM5.1, DS4 or newer Qwen models "low end". I prefer GPT5.5, but if it disappeared tomorrow, I'd be perfectly fine with any of these chinese models.
It is frustrating, because I really enjoyed my Valve Index and want a replacement and Meta has some of the best VR tech in the world, but I've waited 6 years for Valve to release their new headset to buy a replacement, simply because Meta can't be trusted.
I stopped trying to use Claude to do anything with 4.7 because it sucks up so many tokens so quickly. I use the 4.6 model still and have switched to Codex for larger tasks. It also works better at more complex coding tasks than Claude for web apps that have python backends and typescript front ends.
I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.
Then I have good news, you can save even more money by cancelling your Claude plan and using GnuCash for free, without having to worry about the inevitability of having your financials hallucinated.
I use GnuCash for my small business. I am not a programmer, but know enough to be dangerous. My use for AI was to have it write a small python script that will take my bank csv and set accounts properly based on how I have categorized them in GnuCash in the past, it spits out a clean csv to import into GnuCash. Now I can see exactly what the matches are, and the whole thing runs on my local computer. No worries about hallucination of new account names.
The python script is basic enough that even I can figure out what it is doing, and I still have to review the import to GnuCash and reconcile with my bank.
It is saving me about an hour of work every week right now.
I think this is my biggest use of AI - making small tools to do the work locally rather than sending things to the cloud to be stolen and messed with.
There's something to be said about first impressions and the GnuCash website's first impression does not give confidence in its ability to handle finances.
Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.
3k is like 1/50th of the penalty you're going to get if you make a mistake on your taxes, trust me I know, and Anthropic isn't going to be covering those penalties.
IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.
Not sure why this is getting down voted. You will get audited 3 years after the offense and they will charge you interest higher than the worst credit card for those three yrs (during which you had no clue you offended). Be fool and replace your CPA with your favorite text autocomplete machine learning model and let me know how that works out for you.
The downvotes are because my post was clear and they did not understand the point. We did not replace our CPA. We replaced the book keeper. The human CPA is the human in the middle reviewing the work of the AI. There is no responsible business owner alive today who would trust an LLM to replace their CPA, IMHO.
The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.
His point was just that many business users can only purchase Google’s solution or Microsoft’s solution, because they’re the only services that will offer interoperability with many other security and compliance services and advanced functionality like SSO, third party email scanning, compliance journaling etc. The email market is essentially a duopoly as soon as you need any functionality beyond basic email.
The simple fact that you believe this is insane to me. Microsoft?Security and compliance? Ahhh, yes the north star of security!
No, you don't need either of these companies if you need a corporate stack for communication and collaboration. And anyone who believes Microsoft or Google is doing anything out of the ordinary to protect their users or data is out of the loop.
It's not about actual security; it's about the appearance of it. It allows CTOs and such to check a box to say "Why yes, our vendor is secure! Look at all their claims! Look at how many other companies use them!" That's it. Safety in numbers for clueless CTOs.
This is just the new "no one gets fired for using IBM".
We need actual liability laws for compute services at this point, and they should pass through every entity between the bits on disk and the end user.
Google disappears someone's realtor's corporate email, and it cost the agent a $100K real estate commission? Google and the employer get to pay $50K, plus damages to the customer.
Or whatever. The point is not that they'd be paying lots of these fines. The point is the cost of non-compliance and insecure setups is 1000x the cost of just doing their jobs. At that point, the bean counters would allocate another 10% to engineering, and all the easily-solved problems would disappear.
That regulatory framework would add a lot of cost to providing online services. There would be far fewer people able to use them because companies would pass that cost to their users/customers.
It’s still the best option for uptime, document analysis (on a cost basis), and Google is less likely to experience a significant cybersecurity breach than a less established company. They’ll be fine as long as they stay in the game even if they never have a Ferrari again plenty of people buy Toyota.
What’s fun for me these days is picking up a project I started with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too complex for the agent to build. But, it’s getting easier and easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being able to say “Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions” and in 15 minutes that app suddenly exists.
> take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits
AI nowadays can't even do this very first step reliably. But since we have accepted AI hallucination collectively as a species, I agree that this future is just around the corner.
Same I purposefully have a number of over ambitious project out of distribution entirely to test so failure mode, mostly games, when one works, well I gained a new game. Can't wait for my 10 player battleship game on a 100x100 grid to be functional.
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