November 2025

In 1995, I wrote down the specs for my "dream machine". Comparing it against the machine I have today: Item19952025IncreaseRAM32 MB64 GB2000GPU RAM16 MB8 GB500HDD4 GB1 TB250HDD speed10 MB/s2 GB/s200Processor150 MHz5.10 GHz34Monitor21"27"1.3Resolution2048x15361920x12000.73 Clearly, RAM has seen the biggest growth. Low cost, high demand.Followed by the hard disk - both on capacity and speed. The processor speed increase, in comparison, is modest. What's surprising is that my monitor today isn't that much bigger than what I wanted. The resolution is actually lower than what I wanted 30 years ago! Clearly, I overestimated how important screen resolution would be. ...

“Humans can be held to account. Not AI.” I hear this often. But it’s not true. Corporations are non-human, but they can enter into contracts and face criminal charges. Ships can be sued directly. Courts can arrest the vessel itself. Deities and temples in India can own property. Forests and rivers in New Zealand, Colombia, Spain, have been granted legal personhood. Medieval Europe has held animal trials (e.g. for “guilty” pigs). ...

It’s incredible how far coding agents have come. They can now solve complete exams. That changes what we should measure. My Tools in Data Science course has a Remote Online Exam. It was so difficult that, in 2023, it sparked threads titled “What is the purpose of an impossible ROE?” Today, despite making the test harder, students solve it easily with Claude, ChatGPT, etc. Here’s today’s score distribution: ...

The OpenAI text-to-speech cost documentation is confusing. As of 2 Nov 2025: GPT-4o mini TTS costs $0.60 / MTok input and $12.00 / MTok audio output according to the model page and the pricing page. They also estimate this to be ~1.5c per minute - both for input and output. It supports up to 2,000 tokens input. TTS-1 costs $15 / MTok speech generated according to the model page but the pricing page says it's $15 / MChars. No estimate per minute is provided. Is supports up to 4,096 characters input. TTS-1 HD is twice as expensive as TTS-1 I wanted to find the approximate total cost for a typical text input measured per character and token. ...