Software engineer, Traveller, Entrepreneur, Science enthusiast, currently @block leading the Goose Open Source Team
Miami
Joined July 2007
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- Following330
- Followers1.7K
- Likes1.1K
The Pony Express charged 5 dollars per package of half an ounce in 1860. That's 14 000 USD per kilogram. Or about twice as expensive as what @SpaceX charges to shoot something into space.
Yeah that. Open models are the way to go
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗
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In 2018 I took an Uberpool across Manhattan for $1.78, less than the subway. Today the same ride is $20 and nobody is surprised. Todays equivalent is @claudeai 's 200 dollar per month plan. 3 reasons the end of free tokens is near & what to do about it: douwe.com/blog/2026/0518/
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Yup. Almost all commercial products have an open source version equivalent that is technically great but has a terrible UI. A question is of course, do you need PhotoGIMP or will an agent native GIMP be better anyway
Un youtuber brasileño le acaba de clavar un puñal a la suscripción de Photoshop.
Se llama PhotoGIMP: un parche gratuito (GPL-3.0) que convierte GIMP en una copia casi idéntica de Photoshop.
Misma interfaz, mismos paneles, mismos atajos de teclado y muchísimo más espacio para tu lienzo. Tus manos ya saben usarlo sin aprender nada nuevo.
¿Por qué está explotando?
- $0 en vez de $276 al año
- Sin cuenta Adobe ni login
- Todo se guarda en tu PC (nada en la nube)
- Compatible con Windows, Mac y Linux
- Se desinstala borrando una carpeta (sin rastro)
Instalación ridículamente fácil: copias 9 archivos y listo. +8.8k estrellas en GitHub y traducciones de la comunidad.
Uso personal y comercial 100% permitido.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
PhotoGIMP is not new and has been around since 2020: github.com/Diolinux/Photo…
This account and multiple others have been using similar posts to engagement farm over the last few weeks:
x.com/heynavtoor/sta…
x.com/AiwithZoaina/s…
This post from 3rd May was even community noted as such:
x.com/HowToAI_/statu…
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PVV got 17% of the Dutch vote. Through first-past-the-post, they win 158 of 343 districts. Through ranked-choice, 39. Under a median-voter rule, 1. Same ballots, very different countries. Democracy by another word. douwe.com/blog/2026/0516/
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2.6B open source model generating up to a minute high quality video from one frame? That's insane! Maybe there is something to these world models after all. Can't wait to get my hands on the actual model
nvlabs.github.io/Sana/WM/
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well, I'm off google maps API now: theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/0… -- it seems so weird to me that the default is that a maps API key can also be used for expensive inference and that
@Google
doesn't allow keys without billing and no budget
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I wrote a post: blog.douwe.com/2026/05/the-w…
Every LLM contains a wildly lossy “compression” of the web. Even for URLs that never existed.
I built a browser for it: the Web of Babel.
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The three most valuable companies today ($NVDA, $AAPL, $GOOG) raised around 50M together. Now Anthropic raises 10x that and it barely makes the news. Interesting times. techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/an… /cc @Julie188
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I'm going to be in SF from Wednesday on - come and hangout at luma.com/75auv0v7 - I'll talk a bit about some of the new ideas about automatic wiki writing
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goose moved! we're now part of the linux foundation: github.com/aaif-goose/goose
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Oh, yeah, also to update you, @NeptyneHQ got acquired by @blocks and I now am leading the Open Source Goose team (github.com/block/goose)
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In 1955 it would have cost 1.5M dollars to buy solar cells to power your home in Palo Alto. Now that is 8 000 dollars. Of course now the home costs 1.5M dollars and in 1955 it was ... 8 000 dollars.
This seems like a crazy story: sherwood.news/power/who-died…
But then again, if you leave your money to a charity, are you really sure they do a better job doing something useful with it than the government? And if that is so, shouldn't the government funnel more money to charities?
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