Alex Beal 🆎

Software engineering is my passion.

Those new service sector jobs...

24 minute video on this guy's collection to weird green fans. An AI could never.

Classic comic book style in super hero suits. (Yeah that's definitely my physique.)

Asked for Calvin and Hobbes but getting Tintin vibes.

"In the style of pokemon" 😵

It's over, my friends.

Oh yeah, OpenAI has been cooking.

Literally everything supports RSS.

Rumors of RSS's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Look at all these big beautiful feeds. Everything I've tried has worked. Bless the webdevs keeping the dream alive.

Extreme stinkers gang 🥰

Which way western man?

Bsky devouring its children

Noooo this was a joke. I like EAs.

> Procrastination is ok. You just need to harness it to productive ends.

All right smart guy. How do I harness endlessly doom scrolling social media to productive ends?

It's whitepill monday, folks.

Tabarrok: In this post I will argue that the truth of the lab leak hypothesis does matter.

Cowen: In Haiti, I was robbed at gunpoint. Someone tried to steal my car. So I guess it wasn't so dangerous after all. The spicy macaw tripe was the best I've had. In line at the airport, I met Elvis.

Up late rolling out a patch for slop.js again.

This is just like an average Tuesday on the EA forum. Where's the lie?

This vuln was in the code for... years? Then it was reported and it took the nextjs team two weeks to triage it? The nextjs team is not exactly beating the allegations.

Broooo just add the magic http header and skip any nextjs middleware you want. How is web dev such slop. zhero-web-sec.github.io/research-and...

Your frontend dev moments before dropping the spinning AI singularity cone.

You, a normie: I have no idea when to use o3-mini-high or o1.

Me, a connoisseur: the o3-mini-high is really more of a sativa. Very cerebral. Gets those creative juices flowing. o1 is more of a body high. Couch locked, contemplating the universe.

I'm sometimes asked why I don't just add a usage cap. This is equivalent to a pay-for-what-you-use model where I force users to buy an arbitrary number of credits each month and then expire them at the end of the month. That would certainly be better for me, but it would be worse for my users.

I think this model is better for most users, but it seems that most people don't think this way. This is also why I'd personally rather use the OpenAI/Anthropic API directly rather than pay for a chat sub. I assume most of my ChatGPT sub is just subsidizing the minority of super heavy users.

Now, there are some businesses where heavy users don't cost that much more than median users, and an even split can make sense, but Read It is not that service. A user who converts 10 articles a month costs twice as much as a user who converts 5. That's why Read It has a pay-for-what-you-use model.

For example, most people stream a show or two per night. Then there's that one guy on your street who's running a bittorrent data center in his basement.

And the way these distributions often work out is that they're centered around a reasonable number, but there's a looooong tail to the right of a few heavy users that spoil it for everyone else.

It costs some amount of money to run a website. If that cost is evenly divided across the user base (ie, everyone pays the same sub) then necessarily users on the low end of the usage distribution are subsidizing users on the high end.

Read It Use advanced AI text-to-speech to easily turn your newsletters and articles into a podcast feed.

I've been asked on several occasions why ReadIt.bot doesn't have an all-you-can-eat subscription option. It seems like many people don't know that all-you-can-eat subs are often a bad deal. The problem is that it's like a game of "split the check" where everyone sitting at your table is a stranger.