I was trying to remember which brand it was, but it was so long ago now.

I asked ChatGPT and it found it right away: a Simpson Concorde top loader. Australian brand, actually made in Australia back in the day. Acquired by Electrolux in 2001. I can’t find any close-up photos of the control panel (as expected, there’s not a lot of info about 1990s washing machines online) but I ChatGPT did find a post where someone said their rebalance light was on: https://www.justanswer.com/australia-whitegoods/73wnx-machine-simpson-concorde-741-won-t-go-rebalance-button.html

Not only was Claude not trained on it, but the language is actively trying to be hostile towards it.

It can just be something small! Help a tourist with directions. Help an elderly person cross the road. Give a homeless person some food or water. Things like that.

Support is very widespread so clients that don’t support it are likely using outdated libraries.

Yeah it’s very common for CDNs to transcode images (convert them to a different format) to save bandwidth. Your browser or app tells the server which image formats it supports using the Accept HTTP header, and the server returns the image in the best format it supports. There’s been significant improvements to data compression technology in the last 20+ years, and an AVIF file is usually around 50% the size of a comparable JPEG file of similar quality.

Cloudflare does this (although I’m not sure if it’s only a paid feature or if it’s available on free accounts too), and major services like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc do it too. At those scales, halving the amount of bandwidth used by images is a significant saving.

If an app gets an image format it doesn’t support, it’s likely not setting the Accept header correctly.

Edit: There’s also JPEG XL which is essentially supposed to be like “JPEG 2.0”, but it’s not widely supported yet.

In the 90s, my mum’s washing machine would stop if you needed to rebalance it, and a “rebalance” light would come on to let you know. It doesn’t seem like newer washing machines still do that?

This is interesting because even though they designed the language to be impossible for LLMs to use, Claude still scored nearly 70% on their benchmark.

Help someone in need.

AI is more than just chatbots though, and there’s plenty of use cases where it can be used to help people rather than replace them.

I started the year being very sceptical of AI, but it’s helping me with a bunch of things at work now. For example, at work we have an agent for data analysis that can find the correct tables to use, gather data, and produce a report, along with proof (all the SQL queries it ran plus any ad-hoc code it used for analyzing the data) so that the work is repeatable and we can verify the accuracy of the queries and logic.

I’m a developer and it’s helped a lot with side tasks too. If I’m coding and see an issue in our code (usage of deprecated code, tech debt we need to pay down, etc), I used to file a task or add a todo comment to look into it later, and eventually get to it. A lot of them are small tasks, it’s just that I don’t always have time to look into them while in the middle of a project.

These days, instead of adding it to a todo list, I just spin up an agent and get it to look at it while I’m working on other things. The resulting code doesn’t get submitted for code review until I manually look at it and ensure it’s correct. The codebase I work on has never been cleaner, because AI has helped me clean up so much legacy cruft that’s accumulated over the years, while I still deliver my regular projects on time.

I don’t have data to back this up but I’d say thay the majority of their customers aren’t also selling AI services themselves. It’s customers that use AI for their business processes, software development, etc.

AI is an enterprise product

I think Google and Meta are well-positioned to provide AI services to regular people, since they both already have a large user base, existing cash flow from other non-AI products (meaning they can subsidize AI features for as long as they need to), and can probably outlast any startup. Google especially easily have enough paid users and advertisers to cover costs for free users.

Most of thr other AI companies will probably all end up focusing on / pivoting towards enterprise use cases though, for the higher prices and stability of long-term contracts.

Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is something that’s actually profitable for them. They have a decent margin on token rates. It’s R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are putting them in the red at the moment.

I suspect they’ll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/06/anthropic-claude-subscription-plan-provides-more-value-than-openais-study-says/5301470)

In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they’d lose most of their customers.

legacy tlds (com, net, org) tend to be more affordable

Verisign are trying their best to make .com and .net less affordable. Their contract with ICANN is on a six year cycle, and it lets them increase the price by up to 7% for the last four years. Two years with no increases, then four years with increases. So far, they’ve always increased it the maximum amount.

Wholesale price has gone up from $6 in 2000 to $7.85 in 2020 (before this contract structure), to $10.26 now, and they’re increasing it to $10.97 on November 1.

Having said that, it’s still better than ccTLDs and newTLDs, where the registry can increase it as much as they want.

Why do the back wheels on American shopping carts not swivel like the front ones do? In Australia we have full 360 degree motion whereas US ones feel they have the turning radius of a truck.

The AI bubble bursting will have a huge effect on the US economy though, so who knows if people will even have the money to afford it. The whole economy is being propped up by AI at the moment.

I don’t think they should be assisted in devouring freely-accessible data in their endeavor

How is this assisting them, though? I see it as two different options:

1. They use the open-source code without giving anything back; or
2. They use the open-source code and help improve the project by reporting security issues.

In any case, a fundamental feature of both free and open-source software is that anyone can use it, regardless of if you like them or agree with them or not, without discrimination. You could instead use a license that forbids AI training, but then your code would no longer be free or open-source.

I was thinking more about automated usage. There’s probably a lot of devices that hit it to check for internet connectivity. The linked article says that most of the traffic is automated and they saved bandwidth by putting some content in a JS file (since most of the automated hits don’t download or run the JS).

probably all the posts in the “fediverse” have been taken already

I don’t doubt this, as it’s trivial to do (by design). You don’t even have to scrape anything.

New posts and comments in a Lemmy community (or Mastodon profile or any other ActivityPub-based Fediverse app) get pushed to every server where federation is allowed and at least one person is subscribed to it. You can spin up your own server, subscribe to a bunch of communities, wait a while, and over time your PostgreSQL database will be populated with profiles, posts, comments, etc.

I miss Yahoo! Answers sometimes. A simpler time where dumb things and misinformation online was mostly contained in small niche areas rather than being broadcast to tens of millions of people on TikTok.

I’m very curious about how much bandwidth it consumes. Even with the small amount of content, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over 1Gbps.