There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…

Let me introduce you to a little thing called Private Equity.

I know it well, made me quit one job and I will never work for “it” again. Still, when they go after the dogs I get upset.

> There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…

And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.

I agree that we shouldn't treat humans worse than animals but one important factor here is that humans are much better at expressing themselves when their body badly reacts to some food. Animals often lack the ability to tell you that something is wrong and some may even be genetically inclined to actively hide any issues from you as showing weakness would have gotten their ancestors killed in the wild.

As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.

The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.

> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.

For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice.

And if they were trying to offer a different value proposition by reducing the quality in order to lower the price, the honest way to do it would be to introduce a new product with a different name rather than changing what the product is while leaving the name the same.

And that's before you get into whether selling something as food which is low quality enough to make dogs sick is ethical at any price. It's not like only dogs who would otherwise go unfed will end up eating it.

I’m not defending private equity _at all_, they’re brand-sucking vampires, but all it takes to give some dogs digestion issues is to switch ingredients. I have two that are extremely sensitive to chicken, which is in almost all dog foods due to it being really cheap protein. The sensitivity is pretty common in some breeds.

If they added chicken to the food and it didn’t have it before, more dogs with digestion problems is what you’d get for sure.

That's also the argument for payday loans and subprime lending. I have yet to hear of a poor person's life being improved by by access to credit at 20% interest, aside from the circular argument that easy access to credit inflates prices for everyone to the point where if you take the 20% interest loans away poor people actually won't be able to pay in cash and will demand it back because that's easier than demanding higher wages.

At a certain point you're just asking the consumer "how much are you wiling to suffer before you go without? Let's find out."

AI is just another way to not use your brain, I think there’s plenty of consensus around the fact that not using your brain makes you dumber. So actually, yes you can say that definitely.

This explains so much... Never knew, just constantly gets frustrated because even if my thumbs are big, no way I press wrong that often...

Also curious about loopholes, could said company start another company out of state that was the outsourcing entity and then the parent company paid that company. You're theoretically hiring from within the US, because I assume said policy doesn't go all the way to sub-contractors etc?

Remember how GLM 5.3 was going to cause massive hacks, break banks and ruin everything (it was even newsworthy since media picked up how people were working overtime in preparation).

And yet here we are.

LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face

Thank you for this, the hand waving comparisons of AI and anything else is getting out of hand on HN. Your ”like caffeine is to meth” is one of the more succinct and describing sentences I’ve seen describe the difference.

If you use OpenAI or Anthropic trust were never a requirement in the first place.

There’s zero evidence that OpenAI or Anthropic has ever violated their enterprise agreements and trained on data they agreed not to, and that’s what these big companies care about. They don’t care that you hate Sam and Dario.

There’s more to trust than training on data? Most of their products are vibe coded, bug ridden and their uptime is some of the worst in the history of services. How many IT departments let cowork run around freely?

Then why are these companies seeing unprecedented revenue growth? Who is spending these tens of billions of dollars? Maybe it won’t last, but it’s already happening right now, driven largely by corporate America. So yeah, maybe the orgs don’t trust the big labs in some vague sense, and yet they’re shelling out vast sums to them.

Except OpenAI and Anthropic has brought in a lot of money, that with this trajectory will make it some of the worst investments in ”software” ever (if it’s true enterprise clients are actively moving away, I know we are but for other reasons).

It doesn’t even know what day it is unless it’s told. Statelessness is never going to be ”general intelligence” in my book, and the concept of ”memory” in models are laughably bad today. Then again, who cares, AGI means nothing anymore, it’s a term for marketing only and has no technical or scientific meaning.

Humans also don't know what day it is unless they're told