Most gyms sell more subscriptions than they can fit under their roof at one time. If a gym only sells to heavy users, it will either be constantly turning members away or have to buy more equipment. Its equipment will wear off faster. Depending on amenities, it will go through towels, soap, water, et cetera faster, too.
It depends on the gym and their business model! A super-budget gym like Planet Fitness that charges $15/month is going to lose money on heavy users, but they count on most of their members being infrequent gym-goers. A luxury gym like Equinox that charges $300/month can target heavy users without any issues, and they'd actually rather members go more so they stay and spend money on expensive salads and smoothies.
Right now all these AI subscriptions are priced like Planet Fitness, but they're used like Equinox. They're hoping that the new a la carte offerings will move their pricing more in that direction as well.
The other user is right, you are being a pedant. Why do you think planet fitness makes money hand over fist? Because 99% of its users sign up, never go, and then also never cancel because it’s cheap enough to leave running. Gyms absolutely bank on low amounts of power users, meaning the rest of the subscribers are subsidizing those that go frequently.
Members will switch gyms if it's too busy at times they want to visit. "Too busy" includes too much contention for a single piece of equipment.
US gyms might be vast warehouses but in the UK, most only have a couple of benches, couple of cages, one set of db per denomination above 20kg etc. They require working-in and consideration for others.
A couple of unapproachable "heavy users" doing 3 hour sessions across peak hours can ruin the workout for dozens of paying members needing a few min per station for ~5 sets.
It might also be a euphemism for "dickhead" who also tend to be "heavy users". Those that damage, hoard and don't share equipment and repel other customers on many levels besides - threatening, lecherous, loud and smelly.
Doesn't even need malicious intent - can be weirdo bores, forever talking at victims while doing a routine that makes absolutely no sense besides camping on equipment for half a day... 100 sets of incline press 7 days a week... what are you even doing to yourself fella?
Because a large proportion of the money flows out the door. Most of their revenue is pass-through revenue, due to the sports teams and concert promoters (and by extension musicians) they sell tickets for. Ticketing works as a high volume low margin business.
You need to deduct at least 70% (or more) from their topline to get a true picture of the company’s revenue vs revenue that walks straight out the door.
No one. I'm pointing out there are existing AI models that can do this that the author could have tried before investing all the work to build his own.
I don't think you understand why the author did this on a fundamental level. Sometimes it isn't explicitly about getting the outcome directly, it's about putting in the work to understand how you get there.
The article says that the author wanted to have an analysis done, but ruled out the option of a human doing it. He did not rule out using a multimodal LLM. It's possible that he just is unaware that multimodal LLMs are capable of doing an analysis. Considering the approach wasn't mentioned in the article one can guess that the author just didn't know it was possible. But there is no way to know for sure.
If it was written by an actual subject matter expert instead of a "performance marketing and paid social media director" it would probably be valuable, as then one could be assured there was some sort of quality control going on.
If someone had written it. It's well curated slop, but it's still slop. Consider this bit:
> A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and more like a form of bereavement.
I'm certain that section was mostly constructed by an LLM. It reads well, but when you actually focus on what it's saying there's nothing there.
I was not enlightened by reading that. No human sat thinking deeply about the situation, constructed their own mental model of what was happening, then put effort into transferring that mental model into my brain so I could be similarly enlightened. They had Claude (probably) express a conclusion that was attached to nothing more than what would statistically sound "deep".
Hacker News is surprisingly tolerant of slop these days. I expect to be downvoted for this, because comments highlighting slop are usually downvoted. So it goes.
I don't mean to make a personal attack here, but you're one of the names I most associate with being AI positive on this site. In fact that's pretty much the only reason I recognize your name at all. Maybe I've misread your previous posts and the stuff from your blogs that have been posted here, but that's the vibe I've had from you.
That said, slop is going to be a massive, natural, and utterly predictable consequence of AI. I think if you are generally AI positive then you definitely don't get to complain about slop.
I'm actually credited on the Wikipedia page for "slop" for helping spread the term - I wrote about it right as it was emerging https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/ and did some press interviews to push it around then too.
I consider covering AI misuse as part of my "beat" that I write about - there are so many bad ways to apply this stuff, and shining a light on those and explaining why they're bad seems like an important thing to spend time on.
The whole thing is unbelievable slop ! I think the whole article is llm-generated unfortunately (just reading the first paragraph I got an immediate smell).
Your contribution moved the debate forward not one jot. Whining about people whining is even less valuable than the whining. And given Simon was meta-whining as a response to me whining… Well, I just don’t know where that leaves you. But I’ve added even less to the debate, beyond my initial contribution.
However, to your point directly: Simon has a pretty valid argument. There’s a lot of slop posted on jere these days.
Personally I’m reading far less stuff from HN than I used to. That’s a shame because up unto the past six months or so I’ve found it a great place to expand my reading.
Now I increasingly click something open, realise it’s more AI slop and close it.
What I don’t understand is why these people do not realise how utterly, unmistakably, glaringly obvious their awful AI crap is.
I recently said elsewhere on here: I partly work with words. I find AI-“authored” content absolutely and unmistakably obvious.
The fact that people publish crap like this shows that they don’t know what good writing is, or what good expression of ideas is. Because if they did they would proof what their AI had written and realise how awful it is.
And that by extension means that the content is almost certainly worthless, because whoever prompted it read it and said “this is fine! I’m happy to publish it under my own byline!”
And in reality it just makes them look idiotic. No discrimination. No original thought.
So I don’t think my comment, - or Simon’s comment - was moaning about “Things These Days”.
It was a point about the erosion of the community this creates.
And if nothing else that erosion is silly arguments about the value - or otherwise - of AI slop.
I'm not disagreeing about the slop, which is a monumental waste of everybody's time, for exactly the reasons discussed - which is why I quite specifically did not quibble about that aspect. I thought it would be clear that I was obviously referring to the last paragraph only, that being that part that contains as it does one quite specific reference to These Days, and some minor froth about downvotes. But perhaps not.
I don't intentionally use LLMs for anything, but perhaps I should have run my post through one to optimise for clarity.
We are exhorted not to comment on the voting in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - of course, if you're urged not to comment on the voting, would commenting on commenting on the voting be any better? Possibly not.
But, too late: my delete rights have expired. We're stuck with my comment forever now. May this be a lesson to everybody involved.
I partly write words for a living. Claude is really really bad at writing prose that doesn’t make me want to vomit.
I rarely write code, and only once for a living. But I feel like I’m a superhuman and one step away from being a zillionaire when Claude gives me a bunch of code it has written in seconds. I WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!!
And then I remember that Claude can’t write words that don’t make me want to break things and I’m good at writing words but bad at writing code.
So then I delete the code and go back to doing more profitable things than being the next zuckerfuck.
I don’t understand this comment. It might be a pop-culture reference that has gone over my head.
But I think (I think?!) you might have misinterpreted ny comment, because I’m saying “yes, I Dunning-Kruger myself regularly with AI! BUT then I wake up from the psychosis and realise what an idiot I am and go back to my normal life”.
AI makes everyone think they are brilliant. The skill is recognising when you’re just another idiot.
Claude is currently and suddenly obsessed with describing anything a little bit involved as being “inside baseball”.
Last month it was quiet things being said out loud.
When you use the tools all the time it’s fun to watch these things pop up a week or so later as normies copy and paste the slop out on LinkedIn and their newsletters.
Yup, CE is self-declatory. To prove it, you need to actually check the documentation from the manufacturer's web page. Usually there are numbers for individual tests on the product.
'He said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email messages but had reverted to answering some himself. "I had it reply to messages, saying 'this is Sam's AI' and it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people," he said. "We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon."'
And yet Zuckerberg is creating an AI version of himself to interact with his employees... So one of these AI titans is presumably wrong.
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