I don't know about recently, but for many years paypal automatically sided with the customer.
We had many customers that would buy a 1 month sub then chargeback the whole amount after using it heavily for a few days or right before renewal, with a nonsense reason like "item not as described" or "unauthorized charge".
Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.
Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.
I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.
It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.
Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.
This is similar to what I experienced when I tested mimalloc many years ago. If it was faster, it wasn't faster by much, and had pretty bad worst cases.
Agreed mostly. Going from standard library to something like jemalloc or tcmalloc will give you around 5-10% wins which can be significant, but the difference between those generic allocators seem small. I just made a slab allocator recently for a custom data type and got speedups of 100% over malloc.
I've benchmarked them every few years, they never seem to differ by more than a few percent, and jemalloc seems to fragment and leak the least for processes running for months.
Mimalloc made the claim that they were the fastest/best when they released and that didn't hold up to real world testing, so I am not inclined to trust it now.
I've been using jemalloc for over 10 years and don't really see a need for it to be updated. It always holds up in benchmarks against any new flavor of the month malloc that comes out.
Last time I checked mimalloc which was admittedly a while ago, probably 5 years, it was noticebly worse and I saw a lot of people on their github issues agreeing with me so I just never looked at it again.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. For most things, checking if a solution is correct is much easier than implementing it (page looks wrong, can't login etc...)
I think some of it might be genuine. For people that don't code (like management), going from 0 to being able to create a landing page that looks like it came from a big corporation is a miracle.
They are not able to comprehend that for anything more complicated than that, the code might compile, but the logical errors and failure to implement the specs start piling up.
This paper creates a new benchmark comprised of real remote work tasks sourced from the remote working website Upwork. The best commercial LLMs like Opus, GPT, Gemini, and Grok were tested.
Models released a few days ago, Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3, haven't been tested yet, but given the performance on other micro-benchmarks, they will probably not be much different on this benchmark.
You don't need to be a genius or rocket scientist to write code, but llm don't even reach the bar for anything but the most simple things. Take a look at the video I posted earlier for an example.
And specialised models for programming HAVE plateaued.