112 and 911 (US) work on almost every mobile phone anywhere in the world. It's part of the GSM/UMTS standard. 999 is supported with either no SIM card or a UK SIM card. See §7.1 here: https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/file562.pdf
They also don't require a phone to be activated in most countries. I believe there are some exceptions in EU countries, but in the US it just needs to have a working antenna and be in range of a tower.
The great thing about LLMs being more or less commoditized is switching is so easy.
I use Claude Code via the VS Code extension. When I got a couple of 500 errors just now I simply copy pasted my last instructions into Codex and kept going.
It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology!
The switching cost is so low that I find it's easier and better value to have two $20/mo subscription from different providers than a $200/mo subscription with the frontier model of the month. Reliability and model diversity are a bonus.
Which is exactly why these companies are now all focused on building products rather than (or alongside) improving their base models. Claude Code, Cowork, Gemini CLI/Antigravity, Codex - all proprietary and don't allow model swapping (or do with heavy restrictions). As models get more and more commoditized the idea is to enforce lock-in at the app level instead.
FWIW, OpenAI Codex is open source and they help other open source projects like OpenCode to integrate their accounts (not just expensive API), unlike Anthropic who blocked it last month and force people to use their closed source CLI.
I genuinely don't know how any of these companies can make extreme profit for this reason. If a company makes a significantly better model, shouldn't it be able to explain how it's better to any competitor?
Google succeeded because it understood the web better than its competitors. I don't see how any of the players in this space could be so much better that they could take over the market. It seems like these companies will create commodities, which can be profitable, but also incredibly risky for early investors and don't make the profits that would be necessary to justify the evaluations of today.
That's my point. Anything that could exist that's significantly "better" would be able to share more about its creation. And anything that could be significantly better would have to be capable of "understanding" things it wasn't trained on.
That's not true. There are a million ways to be "significantly better" that don't involve knowledge about the model's creation. It can be 10x or 100x or 1000x more accurate at coding, for example, without knowing a single thing more about its own internal training methodology.
Could you share anything about your creation, without having been to school where we taught you what the answers were? Can you deduce the existence of your hippocampus just by thinking really hard?
> It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology!
Look harder. Swapping usb devices (mouse,…) takes even less time. Switching wifi is also easy. Switching browser works the same. I can equally use vim/emacs/vscode/sublime/… for programming.
good point, they are standards, by definition society forced vendors to behave and play nice together. LLMs are not standards yet, and it is just pure bliss that english works fine across different LLMs for now.
Some labs are trying to push their own format and stop it. Specially around reasoning traces, e.g. codex removing reasoning traces between calls and gemini requiring reasoning history. So don't take this for granted.
You would have to buy said USB device and get it to your location.
Switching WiFi is only easy if you mean on a single machine/gateway. Swapping the WiFi network equipment in an office is considerably more involved, depending on the desired configuration.
You make it sound like lock-in doesn't exist. But your examples are cherry picked. And they're all standards anyway, their _purpose_ was for easy switching between implementations.
Most people only have one mouse or Wi-Fi network. If my Wi-Fi goes down, my only other option is to use a mobile hotspot, which is inferior in almost every way.
Except Kimi Agent via website is hard to replace - I tried the same task in Claude Code, Codex, and Kimi Agent - the results for office tasks are incomparable. The versions from Anthropic and OpenAI are far behind.
FSD has been maturing for ~an entire decade now. Their latest stunt with moving the supervisor to chaser cars has made a lot of people understandably angry anew: Musk has to hit his robotaxi milestones to get more billions, so he's forcing the programme ahead with smoke and mirrors to get his stock option grants.
Their profit is decreasing, revenue growth is negative. Their autonomy programme is always "just one more update" away. Humanoid robotics is already full of competition from hundreds of other startups and larger companies (even Amazon, an AI sceptic, has a significant robotics programme).
I wouldn't call them a failure, but they certainly seem to have lost their way, and you have to really drink the kool aid to be able to justify the valuation in any sense.
Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).
That’s why you have service/products that have the sole purpose of taking all these region specific data sources and processing them in to a generic json api.
The government orgs probably do it intentionally so they don’t have ten million devices pinging their servers to update weather widgets.
On one hand, I think it's a valid criticism to say it's security theatre, to a degree. After 9/11, something had to be done, fast!, and we're still living with the after effects of that.
On the other hand: defence in depth. No security screening is perfect. Plastic guns can get through metal detectors but we still use them. Pat downs at nightclubs won't catch a razor blade concealed in someone's bra. We try to catch more common dangerous items with the knowledge that there's a long tail of things that could get through. There's nothing really new there, I don't think?
The post-9/11 freakout is a GREAT example of the syllogism "Something must be done! This is something, so we must do it!" -- IOW, a train of thought that includes absolutely no evaluation of efficacy.
Security expert Bruce Schneier noted, I believe, that the only things that came out of the post-9/11 freakout that mattered were (a) the reinforced cockpit door and (b) ensuring all the checked bags go with an actual passenger.
The ID requirement, for example, was a giveaway to the airlines to prevent folks from selling frequent-flier tickets (which was absolutely a common thing back then). (And wouldn't have mattered on 9/11 anyway, since all the hijackers had valid ID.)
One little know crazier example of how things linger around for decades is how the H1B program actually allowed for renewals of visa stamps within the US.
After 9/11 the only reason people were made to go to another country to do it is because the US State department wanted people 10 printed and face scanned at places that had the equipment to do them: the embassies outside the US.
Now all airlines are basically human cattle-herding boxes at 35K feet for the metaphorical H1B cows.
That something could have been lawmakers going on major media saying, unequivocally, that flying is safe, warning not to give away freedoms lightly and even making a show of flying commercial themselves.
That something didn't have to include trading freedom for surveillance/inconvenience/increased exposure to poorly trained LEO's.
The world we live has been shaped more and more by the funders of certain politicians and major media to make us fearful of boogiemen. The payoff is increased surveillance and more authoritarian governments.
There were plenty at the time insisting it was not needed, that TSA was an overreaction, that it was clearly grift to people connected to the Bush Admin, that we don't need to do anything even. They all pointed out that DHS was clearly an internal anti-dissent force, to be used against american citizens for daring to critique a government of grift and lies and authoritarianism taking away our rights.
They were all decried as "anti-american" or worse epithets.
They were all correct of course.
They are all being decried again right now.
It was literally called "The Patriot Act" FFS. You really think it was about security?
Note that the reason none of the passengers were ever able to regain control of the planes was the exact security measure that actually protects us now: The cockpit door. It literally doesn't matter what happens in the plane cabin, nobody can hijack a plane in the current system.
Again, TSA currently cannot catch someone going through security with plastic explosives, in their own self tests.
Yeah it's great for toy/hobby projects with little complexity or features, but as often is the case with these kinds of platforms, running a substantial app on them is a different proposition
Ugh. Don't make a website like this without verifying the information is correct please!
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