It's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
This is similar to how Google has convinced Android users to refer to installing apps from stores other than the Play Store as "side-loading". It's a distraction.
Make no mistake -- Flock cameras are mass-surveillance tools with the ancillary use case of automatic license plate reading. I encourage anyone discussing these products not to refer to them as ALPRs, unless specifically discussing their license plate reading functionality.
I may be imagining this, but I'm nearly certain I was running dillo on a PDA (I want to say Palm Treo) around 2001. I remember it feeling revolutionary to open up a webpage on something other than my linux desktop computer at the time. Over Wifi!
As dumb and useless as I think Grok is, I think you've identified what actually happened, which is significantly more benign than asking a 10 year old for nudes.
Sometimes it's used in the expected way, but (more?) often, "international community" euphemistically refers to whomever is currently one of, or an ally of the above mentioned countries.
Tokens are an implementation detail that have no business being part of product pricing.
It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value".
When the value customers receive from tokens slips, they pay the same price for the service. But generative AI companies are under no obligation to refund anything, because the customer paid for tokens, and they got tokens in return. Customers have to trust that they're being given the highest quality tokens the provider can generate. I don't have that trust.
Additionally, they have to trust that generative AI companies aren't padding results with superfluous tokens to hit revenue targets. We've all seen how much fluff is in default LLM responses.
Pinky promises don't make for healthy business relationships.
Tokens aren't that much more opaque than RAM GB/s for functions or whatever. You'd have to know the entire infra stack to really understand it. I don't really have a suggestion for a better unit for that kind of stuff.
Doesn’t prompt pricing obfuscate token costs by definition? I guess the alternative is everyone pays $500/mo. (And you’d still get more value than that.)
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
Still though, bad bet. The other guy can easily keep arguing that it's still just a few more years from being repealed, until one of you dies of old age.
Unless your bet was that "it will be strengthened before it is repealed" and then his position was that "it would be repealed without ever being strengthened." Still possible for neither to happen indefinitely though, leaving the bet pending.
